Technopoly (9 page)

If the telescope was the eye that gave access to a world of new facts and new methods of obtaining them, then the printing press was the larynx. The press not only created new sources of data collection but vastly increased communication among scientists on a continent-wide basis. The movement toward standardization of scientific discourse resulted, for example, in uniform mathematical symbols, including the replacement of Roman with Arabic numerals. Galileo’s and Kepler’s reference to mathematics as the language or alphabet of nature could be made with assurance that other scientists could speak and understand that language. Standardization largely eliminated ambiguity in texts and reduced error in diagrams, charts, and visual aids. Printing brought an end to the alchemists’ secrets by making science into a public enterprise. And not only for scientists: printing led to the popularization of scientific ideas through the use of vernaculars. Although some scientists—Harvey, for example—insisted on writing in Latin, many others (Bacon, of course) eagerly employed the vernacular in an effort to convey the new spirit and methods of scientific philosophy. When we consider that Vesalius, Brahe, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, and Descartes were all born in the sixteenth century, we can begin to grasp the relationship between the growth of science and the printing press, which is to say, the press announced the advent of science, publicized it, encouraged it, and codified it.

As is known, the press did the same for what is now called Protestantism. Martin Luther’s reliance on printed pamphlets and books as a means of religious propaganda is well documented, as is his own acknowledgment of the importance of print to his mission. And yet, for all of Luther’s astuteness about printing, even he was surprised on occasion by the unsuspected powers of the press. “It is a mystery to me,” he wrote in a letter to the Pope, “how my theses … were spread to so many places. They were meant exclusively for our academic circle here.
… They were written in such a language that the common people could hardly understand them.” What Luther overlooked was the sheer
portability
of printed books. Although his theses were written in academic Latin, they were easily transported throughout Germany and other countries by printers who just as easily had them translated into vernaculars.

Without going any further into the details of the impact of print on medieval thought, all of which are lucidly presented in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
, I will instead merely assert the obvious point: By the beginning of the seventeenth century, an entirely new information environment had been created by print. Astronomy, anatomy, and physics were accessible to anyone who could read. New forms of literature, such as the novel and personal essays, were available. Vernacular Bibles turned the Word of God into the words of God, since God became an Englishman or a German or a Frenchman, depending on the language in which His words were revealed. Practical knowledge about machines, agriculture, and medicine was widely dispersed. Commercial documents gave new form and vigorous impetus to entrepreneurial adventures. And, of course, printing vastly enhanced the importance of individuality.

Vitalized by such an information explosion, Western culture set itself upon a course which made technocracies possible. And then something quite unexpected happened; in a word, nothing. From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture undertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century, no significant technologies were introduced that altered the
form, volume
, or
speed
of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened
respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism. New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us our standard of excellence in the use of reason, as exemplified in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. I weight the list with America’s “Founding Fathers” because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be
argued
into existence
in print
. Paine’s
Common Sense
and
The Rights of Man
, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and the
Federalist Papers
were written and printed efforts to make the American experiment appear reasonable to the people, which to the eighteenth-century mind was both necessary and sufficient. To any people whose politics were the politics of the printed page, as Tocqueville said of America, reason and printing were inseparable. We need not hesitate to claim that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution stands as a monument to the ideological biases of print. It says: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” In these forty-five words we may find the fundamental values of the literate, reasoning mind as fostered by the print revolution: a belief in privacy, individuality, intellectual freedom, open criticism, and community action.

Equally important is that the words of that amendment presume and insist on a public that not only has access to information but has control over it, a people who know how to use
information in their own interests. There is not a single line written by Jefferson, Adams, Paine, Hamilton, or Franklin that does not take for granted that when information is made available to citizens they are capable of managing it. This is not to say that the Founding Fathers believed information could not be false, misleading, or irrelevant. But they believed that the marketplace of information and ideas was sufficiently ordered so that citizens could make sense of what they read and heard and, through reason, judge its usefulness to their lives. Jefferson’s proposals for education, Paine’s arguments for self-governance, Franklin’s arrangements for community affairs assume coherent, commonly shared principles that allow us to debate such questions as: What are the responsibilities of citizens? What is the nature of education? What constitutes human progress? What are the limitations of social structures?

The presumed close connection among information, reason, and usefulness began to lose its legitimacy toward the mid-nineteenth century with the invention of the telegraph. Prior to the telegraph, information could be moved only as fast as a train could travel: about thirty-five miles per hour. Prior to the telegraph, information was sought as part of the process of understanding and solving particular problems. Prior to the telegraph, information tended to be of local interest. Telegraphy changed all of this, and instigated the second stage of the information revolution. The telegraph removed space as an inevitable constraint on the movement of information, and, for the first time, transportation and communication were disengaged from each other. In the United States, the telegraph erased state lines, collapsed regions, and, by wrapping the continent in an information grid, created the possibility of a unified nation-state. But more than this, telegraphy created the idea of context-free information—that is, the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political
decision-making and action. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.
²

But it did not do so alone. The potential of the telegraph to transform information into a commodity might never have been realized except for its partnership with the penny press, which was the first institution to grasp the significance of the annihilation of space and the saleability of irrelevant information. In fact, the first known use of the telegraph by a newspaper occurred
one day
after Samuel Morse gave his historic demonstration of the telegraph’s workability. Using the same Washington-to-Baltimore line Morse had constructed, the Baltimore
Patriot
gave its readers information about action taken by the House of Representatives on the Oregon issue. The paper concluded its report by noting, “… we are thus enabled to give our readers information from Washington up to two o’clock. This is indeed the annihilation of space.” Within two years of this announcement, the fortunes of newspapers came to depend not on the quality or utility of the news they provided but on how much, from what distances, and at what speed.

And, one must add, with how many photographs. For, as it happened, photography was invented at approximately the same time as telegraphy, and initiated the third stage of the information revolution. Daniel Boorstin has called it “the graphic revolution,” because the photograph and other iconographs brought on a massive intrusion of images into the symbolic environment: photographs, prints, posters, drawings, advertisements. The new imagery, with photography at its forefront, did not merely function as a supplement to language but tended to replace it as our dominant means for construing, understanding, and testing reality. By the end of the nineteenth century, advertisers and newspapermen had discovered that a picture was worth not only a thousand words but, in terms of sales, many thousands of dollars.

As the twentieth century began, the amount of information available through words and pictures grew exponentially. With telegraphy and photography leading the way, a new definition of information came into being. Here was information that rejected the necessity of interconnectedness, proceeded without context, argued for instancy against historical continuity, and offered fascination in place of complexity and coherence. And then, with Western culture gasping for breath, the fourth stage of the information revolution occurred, broadcasting. And then the fifth, computer technology. Each of these brought with it new forms of information, unprecedented amounts of it, and increased speeds (if virtual instancy can be increased).

What is our situation today? In the United States, we have 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting video tapes; more than 500 million radios; and more than 100 million computers. Ninety-eight percent of American homes have a television set; more than half our homes have more than one. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year 300,000 worldwide), and every day in America 41 million photographs are taken. And if this is not enough, more than 60 billion pieces of junk mail (thanks to computer technology) find their way into our mailboxes every year.

From millions of sources all over the globe, through every possible channel and medium—light waves, airwaves, ticker tapes, computer banks, telephone wires, television cables, satellites, printing presses—information pours in. Behind it, in every imaginable form of storage—on paper, on video and audio tape, on discs, film, and silicon chips—is an ever greater volume of information waiting to be retrieved. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we are awash in information. And all the sorcerer has left us is a broom. Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the
solution of even mundane problems. To say it still another way: The milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.

All of this has called into being a new world. I have referred to it elsewhere as a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy. We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.

Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs. Those who feel most comfortable in Technopoly are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity’s supreme achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved. They also believe that information is an unmixed blessing, which through its continued and uncontrolled production and dissemination offers increased freedom, creativity, and peace of mind. The fact that information does none of these things—but quite the opposite—seems to change few opinions, for such unwavering beliefs are an inevitable product of the structure of Technopoly. In particular, Technopoly flourishes when the defenses against information break down.