Do We Live in a Technopoly?

When our defenses against "information glut" have broken down.

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In a TikTok that recently came across my feed, user @canadianchesthair humorously expresses, “I’m 29 but I’m more confused than I ever have been.” He attributes this to how we “live in a time” where access to information has effectively allowed us to believe whatever we want because information backing up whatever claim you choose is easily available. He then goes on to show two examples from Google searches that illustrate that drinking coffee both increases and decreases your risk of blindness.

The video, which has over a million views and hundreds of thousands of likes, is pinpointing a certain anxiety about the environment we currently live in, in a way that obviously resonated with a lot of people.

This problem identified by @canadianchesthair is one that well-known tech critic Neil Postman identified in 1992 in his final book Technopoly:

“One way of defining Technopoly, then is to say it is what happens to society when the defenses against information glut have broken down. It is what happens when institutional life becomes inadequate to cope with too much information. It is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure.” (p. 42)

Two things happened that created this scenario. First, the amount of information available via technology exploded rapidly. Postman was writing this in 1992, so this is even before smartphones and social media put that information at our fingertips all the time. Second, institutions that traditionally have helped people to sort through what information was useful, true, or relevant —like religions and universities— began to lose their function. Regardless of how flawed these institutions were at serving this purpose, providing the population with a lens, they could use to sort through an incomprehensible amount of information, was a key part of their function.

These two things happened nearly simultaneously, and we landed in the environment we’re in today. The information available to us is so overwhelming, that people need a “reducing valve” to help them sort through it and remain sane. And in the absence of effective institutions to help us do this two things happen:

First, people simply seek out information to confirm what they already believe, and if their standards for what constitutes credible information are low enough (and for a lot of people they are) they can find information supporting whatever they want.

And second, perhaps more significantly, algorithms and the tech companies behind them, act as the “reducing valve.” Your Facebook feed (or TikTok fyp) effectively becomes the “institution” that helps you sort between valid and invalid information. The problem with this should be self-evident. Not only are we handing the keys to the castle over to corporations that are primarily profit-motivated, but we’re allowing them to do this job using cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology that is far from transparent or well understood.¹

For Postman, when human institutions cease to function as the reducing valve, and we instead lean on technology (algorithms) as the solution to a problem created by technology (information glut) we’ve entered into a Technopoly.

You might be thinking that the solution is for individuals to develop better skills for discerning between true and false, credible and incredible information. And to some extent it is, certainly, an individual with better media and information literacy is better equipped to navigate the Technopoly. But by what mechanism do we teach information literacy to the masses? And even if you develop better discernment, you can still only discern between the information that you actually see, and isn’t the information you’re exposed to mostly controlled by algorithms?

In Technopoly Postman poses no solution. And I have none for you today, at least that can be detailed quickly in this post. But I’ll leave you with this: While we might already be living in a Technopoly, I don’t think it’s inevitable that we have to remain there.

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1. Examples of this abound. But one recent example is the story of how YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was radicalizing people, while the company either didn’t know or didn’t care.