Name: Technopoly
ISBN: 9780679745402

Technopoly

With characteristic wit and candor, Neil Postman, our most astute and engaging cultural critic, launches a trenchant--and harrowing--warning against the tyranny of machines over man in the late twentieth century. We live in a time when physical well-being is determined by CAT scan results. Facts need the substantiation of statistical study. The human mind needs "deprogramming" while computers catch devastating "viruses." We live, then, in a Technopoly -- a self-justifying, self-perpetuating system wherein technology of every kind is cheerfully granted sovereignty over social institutions and national life. In this provocative work, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death chronicles our transformation from a society that uses technology to one that is shaped by it, as he traces its effects upon what we mean by politics, intellect, religion, history--even privacy and truth. But if Technopoly is disturbing, it is also a passionate rallying cry filled with a humane rationalism as it asserts the manifold means by which technology, placed within the context of our larger human goals and social values, is an invaluable instrument for furthering the most worthy human endeavors. --Publisher

What Hacker News says

oldsklgdfthOct 2026

I'm a big Neil Postman fanboy and he wrote two books. This conversation is in the intersection of the two.

Technopoly[0] on how society is now organized with technology as the end as well as the means. Technology giveth and taketh. There are winners and losers. Winners are those make use of the new technology. Losers are those that cannot. The more technology permeates our lives, the more this disparity will permeate society.

The End of Education[1] discusses the purpose of education and ways to pursue that end. The end of public education, in his view, is to create a public. A society with common goals and a common narrative.

What I appreciate about Postman's writing is his restraint in calling something "good" or "bad", but rather looking at tradeoffs. Posing the question of if the tradeoffs are acceptable for our ends. I walk away optimistic from his readings. Haidt is more gloomy and likes romanticizing his "past". He contrasts pressing images on glass in texting to the feeling of picking up the phone to call a friend, but ignores that the telephone itself had profound impacts on society.

Shout out to Amusing Ourselves to Death[2] which develops ideas around how visual mediums, ie video, carry different messages than say text. Dovetails nicely into the social media conversation. But it broadens your view of TV and its impact.

One day I'll get around to writing "Prompting Ourselves to Death" as an hommage.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Education

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

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pjmorrisSep 2026

Last year I read 'Amusing Ourselves' and 'Technopoly'. A very interesting thinker.

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rroblakSep 2025

You should read Postman's Technopoly. He critiques "context-free" news as leading to a confused viewership and argues that it's an unexpected consequence of modern news media: trying to give the viewer a fully-coherent understanding of current news simply wouldn't play as well as shallow, quick stories.

This creates a skewed information-action ratio, where people are inundated with information about problems they have no power to influence. Consequently, news is reduced to a form of trivia, and the act of being "informed" becomes a passive— and ultimately meaningless— ritual.

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tinesJun 2025

Brilliantly written. Another of my favorite works on these ideas is Technopoly by Neil Postman. Absolutely a must-read.

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sphMay 2025

It’s easy to blame money, for it’s the most visible and measurable metric in a technologically driven culture. But other scholars have pointed to technology itself as being the issue, the relentless chase of data-driven efficiency, not money, which is just a secondary effect downstream. We went from being a tool-making species, to using tools to organize every aspect of our lives. I recommend Neil Postman’s Technopoly and, of course, good old Uncle Ted.

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specialistApr 2025

Yes and:

TLDR: Technology is intrinsically political.

I'm grateful that HN informed me about right-to-repair, EFF, privacy, cybersecurity, and so forth.

I was so upset I when the Clinton Admin promoted the Clipper chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip I can't believe we're still arguing about the issue (right to use encryption) today. That was probably the first time I realized that politics had real impact on my world.

Coincidentally, Neil Postman's book Technopoly was my gateway drug into criticism (Ted Nelson's Computer Lib, McLuhan, Chomsky, Donald Norman, etc, etc). Transmuted me from a naive optimistic technophile into a skeptic.

Then the (now evergreen) electronic voting and tabulation debacle radicalized me. I just couldn't believe that otherwise intelligent people supported that crap.

Then I tried (and failed) to protect personal privacy (electronic medical records, secret ballots).

It makes me crazy when people, like geeks and policy makers and bosses, who I think should know better, advocate for stuff that can't be true. I've tried to explain that perpetual motion machines simply aren't possible. Making me sound like the nutter.

(One of our local papers called me a "sweaty paranoid kook" for having the gall to correct their misunderstandings over how voting with postal ballots works. That was fun.)

(Workwise, I got a soft demotion when I/we tried to explain to the boss that the blackbox demographic database they licensed (without our knowledge) simply doesn't work. "How can that be true?! Everyone else is using this database." Ya, sure, believe the sales pukes over your own team. Terrific.)

So. I don't know how to separate technology from politics. It's unfortunate that everything swiftly gets coded as partisan. Whereas I see everything in terms of punching up vs down; our popular culture persists in making everything a team sport.

FWIW, Joshua Citarella (Do Not Research, Doomscroll, etc) is probably the most cogent contemporary critic I follow today.

Initially, Citarella just wanted to figure out how to be a working artist. As in "get paid to produce culture". He (and his community) ingested acres of knowledge and have synthesized a largely coherent worldview (criticism of platform economics, neoliberalism). Helping me to gel and articulate my own worldview, forged over the decades of working on the frontlines of technology and policy.

Absolutely, I'd rather spend my time programming, solving problems, tinkering, hanging out with my peers, talking shit. Alas, the real world continues to conspire to deprive me of these simple pleasures. Makes me cranky. I choose to fight back.

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