Technocracy of an The Improbable World

Time ?

clock

"People cannot adopt technologies from other cultures unless they have the skills necessary to modify, adapt, and develop them to suit their own purposes. . . . the most outstanding feature of the European scene was the extent to which mechanical equipment and non-human energy sources were used."

Time distortion was only experienced due to very rapid acceleration.

unexpected outcomes

Timing and the measure of recurrences may be just about the most important fine technique ever adapted from our machinery. But time –May not be what you may have thought it is, an elapsed duration.

pendulm

"The thrust of a century of scholarship had the effect of making us lose confidence in our belief systems and therefore ourselves . . . . the success of technology and the devaluation of traditional beliefs took on the exaggerated significance that pushed technocracy in America over into Technopoly."

Postman, p. 55.

unexpected outcomes

Time as a tool of exclusion

"Suffice to say that if we see the use of non-human energy as crucial to technological development, Europe in 1150 was the equal of the Islamic and Chinese civilizations. In terms of the sophistication of machines, however, Europe was still a backward region, which stood to benefit much from its contacts with Islam.

Pacey. p. 44.

Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization. 1990.

Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1993.

Carroll Pursell, White Heat: People and Technology, 1994.

Clocks

Mechanization

From Technocracy to Technopoly

The Improbable World

"The invisible technologies"

The key to the transformation was "fine technology" adapted to meet new conditions and exapted to completely different means to revolutionary and novel ends or purposes.

numbers were Hindu in origin by way of the Arabs to Europe.
paper for making cheap graphical drawings
metric devices with uniform distances & accurate weights and measures
sources for timber to manufacture charcoal
furnaces that could control heat accurately
sources of iron from bog ore or mines
metal gears with precision edges
wheels with less friction and wear between the drive shaft and the hub
presses for olive oil and wine making were then used for printing
lubricants from plant sources or animal fat
a skilled work force of novices, apprentices, journeymen, and masters

All of these examples above are types of "fine technology" adapted from one set of circumstances for which they were intended to often very new and unintended ends.

Gears for clocks and later timing gears for textile machinery are just such exapted technologies.

Without these material advancements and sustained craft improvements machinery would have been impossible to construct and disseminate throughout the world.

unexpected outcomes

Technocracy, or the rule of the machines, that Postman says "did not entirely destroy the traditions of the social and symbolic worlds."

Social world was organizationally dominated by feudal elite and artisans forming craft guilds with specific knowledge of materials.
Symbolic world was dominated by religion, the clergy and morality based on faith as expressed in good works.

Symbolic Social

world

Pacey's conceptual idea that technology is multifaceted.

unexpected outcomes

By that they mean that --yours and mine-- our personal lives are permeated by the mechanized social world and technology's symbolic impressions that take up residence in the mind without our even noticing how completely we are beguiled by its charm, ease of use or simple power without recognizing the occupant's darker sides.

So it is not only tools or the technical and material capacity we possess that changes people, but the social or psycho-sexual, and intellectual or emotively expressive facets of people's personalities that can be and are readily changed by the tools they employ.

Two worlds contrasted
	Medieval	Contemporary

	Christ seated as a shepherd, mosaic in Ravenna, cathedral.	Jackson Pollock's "Lavender Mist."

social	Feudalism	Commercialism
symbolic	Art from a literate religious faith	Polymorphic and graphical display
tools	Eotechnic: wind and water driven	Systemic: Electrical, electronic, digital.

unexpected outcomes

Organizational or the socio-technical facet

Social world was characterized by feudal elite and artisans who eventually formed craft guilds with often secret knowledge of materials.

Often dominated by older elite systems often in transition from positions of power to a loss of status.

The eclipse of religion, craft, custom, regional pride and hereditary aristocracy as means of control over new technology fostered an absence of control.

In the vacuum created by social decay, spiritual disintegration, and rapid mechanization four characteristics of contemporary society began to emerge: materialism, cautious forethought, alertness, and the consequent estrangement.

Capital accumulation changes when newer, more profitable procedures, based on new or existing technology is introduced. The flow of resources may also lead to excess capital accumulating due to restricted policies or shortages created by new means or new techniques of acquiring raw materials or finished goods
Accumulated behaviors that in their amalgam cause psychological changes. Such as operating dangerous machinery or flying in an airplane which dictate extreme caution because of the character of the tools, tool complex and techniques employed.
Driving an automobile is the most complex psychomotor function that most people ever perform; alertness is only one of many behavioral changes this machinery demands from users.
Alienation, or the separation of the skilled worker from those capabilities a person possesses from training in specific crafts, is used to describe the impact of industrial production on the labor force and the value of that labor in terms of new automated machinery. Critics charge that skills are lost, such as Pacey does, with respect to the knowledge of materials that craft workers may have, that some architects and engineers may lack.

The combined affects of materialism, cautious forethought, alertness, and the consequent estrangement. was the capacity to compartmentalize, separate or distance the once closely associated steps of cause, effect and consequences.

materialism enhanced by capital accumulation
cautious forethought enhanced by ever more powerful machinery,
alertness required by automated systems, and
the alienation that was a consequence of manufacturing created a culture of estrangement.
Each separated point in what was once a fluid sequence forced the attentive, but rare mind, to combine the isolated bits and pieces into a coherent if not discernible framework.

unexpected outcomes

Ideology or the ideo-technic facet.

Symbolic world was dominated by imagery, religious iconography, and visual patterns of association.

Upon debating with Niels Bohr about the implications of quantum mechanics, Einstein asserted that "God does not play dice with the universe," in an attempting a rebuttal to the statistical uncertainties that were and remain, at the core of Bohr's interpretation (the Copenhagen Interpretation) of quantum dynamics, the behavior of atoms, and the play of light frequencies in the electromagnetic fields binding fermions, bosons and radiation together at the heart of matter. Bohr admonished Einstein not to "tell God how to think."

Examples of symbolic expressions that inherently rely on technology, tools or implements:

Familial terms such as God the father, Madre de Dios (mother of God), or "Uncle Sam" are one form of making something abstract seem more real, or practical.

Technical references are another:

Jesus as the carpenter is an allusion to craftsmanship as was Moses to the stonemason.

Christ as the Good Shepherd was replaced by "a watchmaker God."

"God as my copilot," could only make sense in an industrial world based on machinery.

Rosie the Riveter referred to the fact that industrial capability allowed women to work as effectively as men in building industrial equipment.

Above all, technically automated systems required guidance if the techniques used were to have any desired outcome, or socially desirable outcomes.

The threat of lingering dread.

Time | Keys | Dual worlds | Society | Ideology | Terms

unexpected outcomes

Transitions | Renaissance | New culture | Control | Mechanism means? | Modern | Mechanization | Adaptations

"21st Century schizoid man"

July 16, 1945 at the Trinity site, Alamagordo, New Mexico. Of it Einstein said "everything changed, except the way we think."

Atomic weapons of mass destruction.

Human facets of existence are how we act and react to the world. Therefore they are personal, in that they are manifest differently by each person's behaviors, attitudes and rationale based partially on experience, but a good deal on how they respond to their own peculiar representation of the world.

Psycho-sexual means that we conceive of our society as a collection of others with needs and desires much like our own.
emotively expressive means that we, like most people, possess an ability and desire to make our feelings, conditions, and beliefs known to others.

Clock metaphors

unexpected outcomes

Like clockwork, out of time, time-out, timely, time is actually a delusion, as much as an illusion.

Advances in technical capacity :

wheel	fine technology	gears	molecules	nano - atoms

The measure of technology's power over the symbolic word is how the very words we use in our language to denote important concepts have changed.

See Pursell, Makes no Sense.

older	newer

eleventh century	fifteenth century
On the floor of the Chartres Cathedral this labyrinth symbolized the Medieval Christian conception of our human way in the divine world whose mystery is a maze inscribed within the underlying fabric of experience. Constructed between 1194-1260.	In the tower of the Prague town hall, this mechanized clock with functioning automata, symbolizes the new power of the machinery to redefine the human role in an astronomically predictive world. Constructed in 1410 and rebuilt 1490.

The introduction of the mechanical clock and its miniaturized derivative the watch created a new arbiter of social behavior, personal reference, and even the way people referred to their conception of their deity.

Pursell like Postman–but not to the same extent–sees a sinister side of the ability to separate duration into distinct, yet identical, units of time, Arkwright the capacity to separate hand motions into sequenced mechanical steps in a process of weaving, and Joseph Henry's battery operated telegraphy. The telegraph allowed transfer of messages by breaking the context into into bits and pieces of differential code. The code was based on the on or off (dashes or dots) switch of the telegraph keys. The mechanical was becoming something else.

The appeal to mechanistic (or mechanical), material and machine qualities to justify behavior, ethics and education led to a redefinition of morals

relativism, newest set of ideas that truth is not discernible, only related to what people think is so.
pragmatism, an older set of spiritual ideas were replaced by any criteria used to judge something's value is material; hence value is derived from only "what works."
utilitarianism, the earliest set of new beliefs was defined in the 18th century as "the greatest good for the greatest number" trumps all competing values. Utilitarianism defined.
relativism: 20th century, pragmatism: 19th century, utility: 18th century values became fused in Presentism.

Postman argues that precision, efficiency and objectivity became "by-words" or watch words (pass words for admittance) to the new auto-atomized world of submission to the machinery of progress and the creation of a culture of expertise. (The ideal of technopoly)

Postman, Technopoly, pp. 90-91.

Mechanical, material and metallic means to mutually managed ends.

Industrial changes in tools, organization of work, and personal relations led to a monopoly of values in the hands of technologically astute (savvy) elite or a managerial control class:

Richard Arkwright's textile factories and machine operators replacing weavers, loom crafts, and tailors.

Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Principles of Scientific Management.

Henry Ford and the industrial reform of manufacture, mass-production, urban design, & psychology.

unexpected outcomes

In summary, the rule of machinery was replaced by a convergence and then systematic utilization of complementary tool complexes: clocks + armaments + textiles + telecommunications = mechanization.

From the floor of mechanization would (as a foundation) come the sizable tectonic changes of steam engines, electrical circuits, and mass production based on standardization, interchangeable parts, and machine tools (machines that made machinery work effectively) that built the factory we might call automation.

The power derived from this convergence of wind and water driven machinery with steel and fire crafted materials transformed mechanical objects into industrial potential. Inventors with visionary and exaptive capabilities became the new expert elite.

Speeding up of the transformations

unexpected outcomes

Such a rapid transformation of skills, materials, and capabilities provoked the search for a new order with new meanings. Mechanization, mechanical analogies, and machine driven metaphors emerged as the sole source of meaning, value, and identity.

Mechanization's metamorphosis into a tangible industrial force was so swift, that the sources of transformation were faster and more complete that public schools and media could keep up with and thus social lag, or demographic drag occurred.

This "lag and drag" is a situation where some with older skills cannot keep up, are not employable, and do not adapt to new technical demands, emerging techniques, and mechanic's tools of the widespread advances in steam driven machinery, electrical circuitry, and rapid movement that characterized 19th century manufacture.

Note too, that added to the speed of the machinery was the speed of production and replacement of older forms of organization. So, at this speed of advancement the changes became "invisible" to most participants.

Once these unseen forces (standardization, sequencing and interchangeable parts) became widespread, existing forms of control in the forms of traditions upheld by 1) religious faith, 2) the extended family, or 3) landed elites also became "irrelevant" to a discussion of the social control required by factories, railways, or mechanized armies.

The power of the new experts to control the production of this new wealth, order, or power created by industrial machinery offered opportunities for a new elite to create new means of social organization and civil control.

For example, being paid by the item manufactured (this was called piece-work), was eventually replaced by workers being paid by the time spent working. This "labor theory of value" was reinforced because the now miniaturized clock could measure that amount of elapsed time between when workers were entering and leaving the factory.

Production as the efficiency in time spent fabricating a product was now called "productivity."

This, as Postman argues, was how a "state of culture" was crafted out of a "state of mind." Although we should mention that a state of order (Pursell) emerged by internalizing the external opportunity created by clock-time, into the behavioral value of punctuality as people adapted to the precision demanded by the rising technocracy of the "well oiled machine."

Postman pp. 71, 90-91, & Pursell pp. 69-70.

All this means?

Time | Keys | Dual worlds | Society | Ideology | Terms

unexpected outcomes

Transitions | Renaissance | New culture | Control | Mechanism means? | Modern | Mechanization | Adaptations

In these ways: key concepts, fundamental ideas, and older morality were all redefined and the challenges raised to older organizational arrangements of technical expertise –such as craft guilds– were largely swept aside by an industrial, "brave new world order."

Postman, Technopoly, pp. 40-55.

Postman's analysis of the transition from a tool using to a tool commanding culture is not easy to summarize, but the above nine points to his argument force you to understand how material changes brought about psychological and intellectual changes that redefined customary boundaries that enabled technology to shape modern industrial cultures.

machinery
convergence
complementary
systematic
speed of industrial emergence
unseen
labor
social control
new symbolism for the moral imagination

Postman's inquiry.

From Technocracy to Technopoly

The Improbable World

"The invisible technologies"

Vocabulary

presentism, is the belief that contemporary society can be understood without respect to or reflection upon history, or the events that preceded current conditions. In contrast to historicism.

submission, "submission is to understanding, what practice is to proficiency" By that analogy we also suggest that submit means to capitulate, comply, cooperate with deference, or serve a more potent force, or an obedience to a powerful means to an irresistible end.

In this case see Pursell's myths: progress, productivity, necessity.

In the extremist case, see Postman's Broken Defenses on bureaucracy & Eichmann, pp. 87, 115.

Utility

zeitgeist, meaning the spirit of the times, German for zeit (times) and geist (spirit) the moving characteristics of an age. Hence literally clocks sequenced time repetitively, but as they became widely dispersed, figuratively they reinforced a mechanized view of the world where in the 19th century the term "mechanization takes command" could be said to express the "spirit" of that age, or zeitgeist.

unexpected outcomes

Arnold Pacey,, Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-year History, p. 44.

Postman–Tech | Postman–Television | Pursell | Pacey–Meaning | Pacey | Tenner |Eberhart | Snow | Kaku