Technology to most people these days means something with a screen, or maybe anything electronic. Or if someone has a little historical sense, maybe they also take into consideration internal combustion, or even that ancient artifact, the steam engine.
Then again, these days, we’re not very good at thinking about technology, and why should we be, when most of the discourse about technology is driven by the people who sell it to us?
Think about it. If you asked the average person to name the great technological minds of our lifetime, you’d likely hear names like Jobs, Gates, Page and Brin, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and maybe Musk (if one of the people you asked was Musk)–a veritable, self-proclaimed, self-promoted, venture-capitalist-funded Mount Rushmore of the Digital Age.
But there’s a man who towers over them all, and hardly any of Facebook’s 2.38 billion users have ever heard of him.
Neil Postman (1931-2003) was a prominent cultural critic and media theorist probably best known for his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman’s voice offered a powerful and incisive critique of some of the predominant cultural trends of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. Whether or not anyone remembers anything he said who didn’t already agree with the things he was saying when he first said them is an open question, but he did get some posthumous press with the election of Donald Trump, which, loosely speaking, he predicted.
Neil Postman’s perspective is one that the Twenty-First Century sorely needs.
No, he never dropped out of college or started a tech company in his garage. He was just a guy from Queens with a brain, a faculty appointment at NYU, and a razor sharp pen, who understood and cared about the underlying principles of technological advancement in ways that Silicon Valley doesn’t much care about (or care for) and which today’s average tech user doesn’t much think about.
In 1998, professor Postman spoke about “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change” to the New Tech ’98 conference, a gathering of Catholic leaders interested in the implications of the digital revolution. The fact that Postman was a humanist addressing pastors and theologians sets his talk in stark contrast to the today’s typical technologist-to-technologist lovefests.
If you read Postman’s talk (which you should), it might be tempting to pigeonhole him as a Luddite, but I think that temptation is more a reaction to his strangeness than an accurate description of what he says. You see, Postman thinks critically about technology–something that feels strange because our technological culture seldom encourages us to do it.
Postman’s talk humbly presents five “Ideas” about technology, but I’d say it’s fair at this point to call them Laws: they’re principles that every citizen of the Twenty-First Century should know, and they describe equally well the effects of every technology from the alphabet to the text message, and will continue to do so until humankind buries itself under its electronic waste, or until the Singularity occurs, whichever comes first.
I encourage you to read the entire piece for yourself (linked above, or here in a pdf with a slightly abbreviated intro), or for an even fuller treatment of 2019’s technological problems, you can check out Postman’s 1993(!) book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
In the meantime, here’s a brief overview of the five things Postman says we ought to know about technological change. I thought it would be nice to break out of the “technology as screens” fallacy, so I’d like to go waaaaay back to a much earlier technological innovation: agriculture. (We might even consider it a disruptive innovation!) Helping me illustrate Postman’s principles will be Neolithic Ned, a hunter-gatherer who’s just taken up the newfangled technology of farming. (He’s a simple guy, so I hope you’ll forgive any oversimplifications. And any ridiculousness that follows is of course my own; Postman’s examples are not quite so silly).
Postman’s First Law
“All technological change is a trade-off.”
Neolithic Ned used to live a nomadic life, following herds and moving from place to place based on seasonally available foodstuffs. He had a widely varied diet, and some great calf muscles.
With the technological advent of farming, Ned can now settle down in one place. Neighbors spring up and they form a community. Ned can put his feet up once in a while, and if that means his calf muscles aren’t what they used to be, at least he can think about things besides hunting. His diet grows a little less varied and nutritious because he relies on just a few crops, but he can also produce a surplus that can be stored, which means there’s plenty to eat for everyone. Families grow, the community grows, and so begins the Malthusian trap. They need more land and more food to support their growing population, and if there’s an ill-timed drought or flood that ruins the crops, they’d better hope that there was enough left over from the last harvest. You see, Ned and his people are fixed to one place now, and it’s not as easy as it used to be to up and leave and follow the food.
Technology gives, technology takes. The benefits might outweigh the costs–I’d say the birth of civilization in this case counts as a win–but even when it comes out ahead, as Postman says, “culture always pays a price for technology.”
Postman’s Second Law
“The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population.”
Some land is great for farming, some land isn’t. Neolithic Ned and his people have settled down in a spot with good soil. A day’s walk away, the land is not so great, and the people there struggle to grow enough food.
Ned builds some walls and weapons of war to protect what he has. Meanwhile, he’s tired of working the land himself, and to support the growing population, he needs more laborers to work more land. When Ned’s hungry neighbors start raiding his borders, Ned’s people capture them, enslave them, and put them to work.
“There are always winners and losers” when it comes to technological change.
Postman’s Third Law
“Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea.”
Just like his ancestors for countless generations, Neolithic Ned and his people used to wander far and wide.
Now Ned lives in one place. It’s where he raises his children, and it’s where his children raise their children. They grow to know and love the land that supports them. They call it “home.”
Here’s Postman at his best: “[E]very technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.” It is no coincidence that the words culture and a agriculture are etymologically related. Or look at the origin of the word “home.” (Really, look at it. Etymology is fascinating.)
Postman’s Fourth Law
“Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.”
Postman’s analogy explains it best: “What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean by ecological change.”
For Neolithic Ned, the technology of agriculture is quite literally an ecological change.
Postman’s Fifth Law
“Technology tends to become mythic.”
By “myths” here, Postman, channeling Roland Barthes, means “as if they were a part of the natural order of things.” New technologies over time grow invisible as people forget that they ever had to be invented. The clock, the calendar, and the alphabet are great examples of such technologies.
So is agriculture. By the time Neolithic Ned’s grandchildren are grown up and cultivating the land he settled on, they have a hard time remembering what life was like before.
Certainly it’s not often we think about ourselves before the rise of agriculture, unless it’s in the form of a cartoon caveman or a Geico commercial. Yet by any measure, behaviorally modern humans existed for tens of thousands of years before a human hand ever tilled the earth–in other words, most of humankind’s existence predates what we consider the beginning of history and the invention of agriculture. It’s not even close.
That “technology tends to become mythic” should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever wondered aloud about what we did before cell phones, let alone how we ate before grocery stores or Grubhub.
A fish out of water…
Anyone who knows me and knows my fondness for the Inklings also knows one of my favorite quotes: “The fish out of water is the only fish with an inkling of water.”
Well, there’s something fishy about the way we think–or don’t–about our smart phones, social media, search engines, and silicon chips. Neil Postman’s work on technology in the age of Technopoly is the breath of fresh air we need.
