Postman's theory of technocracy is a society with the idea of progress. A society that strays from its traditional ideas and instead follows innovation, but maintains that they are still in control of the technology. This society allows technology to shape new social classes and beliefs. "Objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measure, and progress" (Postman 42). The "tool-using"(Postman 45) culture was said to have been left behind with the invention of the invention. Still, religion and innovation seemed to coexist together because people in these technocratic societies knew that "science and technology did not provide philosophies in which to live"(Postman 47). The technocratic society of the nineteenth-century America was between a rock and another rock: they didn't fully believe in God, and they didn't fully believe in conscience.
"Technopoly. . .is totalitarian technocracy"(Postman 48). In Postman's theory of Technopoly, as opposed to technocracy, the roles are reversed: the human are now the slaves to the machines. Instead of using technology as a tool to reach a goal, it becomes the goal itself.
Frederick W. Taylor is considered the father of scientific management. And he concluded that "the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency"(Postman 51). Taylor created this idea in the hopes to increase profit while increasing wages with shorter, more efficient hours in the work place. The thinking was then done for us, much like the idea of human as machines in Brave New World, the technology increases our progress.
