In the article we covered the discussion was centered on the difference between the core values of tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. Essentially the article seemed to have been devoted to the origin of technopolies and how the view it imposes on us differs from tool using cultures and technocracy, which explains the title of the article. Tool using cultures, according to the article, kind of have a system of beliefs to allow the people to view life in an acceptable fashion and not let their lot in life get them, technopolies have a core of values where the quest for improving technology and efficiency is the reason for humans existing, while in a technocracy ‘two opposing world views-the technological and the traditional-[coexist] in uneasy tension’ (Postman 48). Technocracies are the link between a non-mechanical culture and a technopoly, humans work too produce more and better technology, but still are viewed as being human beings with souls and not as drones whose sole purpose is to improve technology. Frederick Winslow Taylor fits into the article since his ‘book The Principals of Scientific Management, published in 1911, contains the first explicit and formal outline of the assumptions of the thought-world of Technopoly’ (Postman 51). The article explains and cites the Brave New World as an example of a technopoly since the society extols efficiency and the whole point of the citizens’ existence is based off of being another wheel in the ‘social machine’ to have their society chug along the road to progress. In Brave New World ‘Huxley himself identified the emergence of Henry Ford’s empire as the decisive moment in the shift from technocracy to Technopoly,’ (Postman 49) leading to Ford being the reason why the values of society, according to the book, switched from being based on family, on religion, on morals, to being based on the central value of increasing efficiency to aid the economy and causing the world in the novel to become a global technopoly.
