Today, technology seems to be everywhere: our homes, schools, our workplaces. According to Neil Postman's Technopoly, there was once a time in which technology merely aided humans to make our lives easier and more efficient. "Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms," and "speeded up the world." A "technopoly" is a society in which technology rules human methods of though. According to Postman, technopolies "include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency..." (51). Where humans were once inventing for the idea of freedom and better lives, technology makes the existence of the human mind unnecessary. Computers are relatively free of error in calculations, but human error makes our lives inefficient. So, we looks to technology to maintain the quality of our lives, and customs such as religion and reading become seemingly irrelevant.
In relation to Brave New World, the members of the World State have given up traditional customs completely, such as families, parenthood, and religion. Instead, their only dependency is based on Henry Ford, who invented the assembly line and the Model T car. Postman acknowledges the fact that the World State represents a technopoly when he states "Huxley himself identified the emergence of Henry Ford's empire as the decisive moment in the shift from technocracy to technopoly," (49). In the novel, efficiency is indeed a primary concern of the leaders, demonstrated by the methods in which humans are produced. No longer do humans have to worry about reproduction - there's an assembly line and ovaries which pump out thousands of babies (and the factory workers boast about this efficiency). This situation is not a technocracy, because the focus is not on inventing for freedoms and well-being, but rather inventing things that will make society more efficient and have to think much less.
Similar to Brave New World, Postman notes that America has become the first technopoly because of how much we rely on technology to do our work for us. Today, Americans don't even have to think if they don't wish to. We have things like Google which find the answers for us. We have fast food chains that make our food for us, requiring no effort on our part. Things that make our lives more efficient aren't necessarily the best for us.
Regarding this chapter, Postman acknowledges Frederick Winslow Taylor as the "originator of scientific management," (50). Scientific management originally was only supposed to relate to industrial production. Taylor's idea was to increase profits while also increasing the working conditions. This is similar to Brave New World in that people are conditioned to like what they do and have no other ideas of what life might be like. In turn, the people are happy and so the system runs efficiently.
