The postman always rings twice

on Neil Postman's tech critique

I wrote an essay about Neil Postman a year or so ago for a publication called Digital Frontier that now seems to have disappeared from the internet. Not sure if that means they crossed over that frontier or not. This recent post about Neil Postman’s “techno-conservatism” by Matt Pearce has inspired me to repost it here.

Postman’s arguments can be appealing, especially given the dominance and aspirations of tech companies today, but they are basically reactionary — they stop short of critiquing capitalism, which is the larger problem with all the technology developed to support it — and usually culminate in spiritual exhortations, as though religion were the only bulwark against domination (rather than a long-standing technology of domination in its own right).

Anyway, here’s the essay:

It’s not unusual for some of the most strident critics of technology to inadvertently serve as its most insistent boosters. In 2021, Lee Vinsel, a professor of science and technology studies, coined the term “criti-hype” to describe this phenomenon, when critics take at face value the extravagant claims of developers, tech executives, and entrepreneurs about “how technologies, such as ‘AI,’ self-driving cars, genetic engineering, the ‘sharing economy,’ blockchain, and cryptocurrencies, will lead to massive societal shifts in the near-future” and reiterate them as certain dooms. As an example, Vinsel points to the critiques of social media manipulation that echo and intensify the industry’s own dubious claims about its marketing effectiveness. (Users’ minds are controlled by targeted ads!). More recently, in the wake of Open AI’s rise, “criti-hype” has been applied to the widely raised fears of all-powerful artificial general intelligence gone rogue; this sci-fi-stoked catastrophizing distracts from the more mundane but far more pressing concerns about the effects of automation and the social biases built into data collection and machine learning.

For Vinsel, criti-hype often stems from the funding available to researchers and the “professional concern trolls of technoculture” who “attach themselves to new ‘emerging technologies’ to study the ethics and social implications of speculative risks.” But criti-hype also recalls an established tradition in media criticism wherein critics fixate on the irresistible power of technologies as they “emerge” while skirting discussion of what drives their emergence.

Whether you go back a decade to the critiques of Web 2.0, or a century to the critiques of the modernity during the emergence of mass media, or even to ancient times and Plato’s condemnation of the technology of writing, a common theme can often be traced: information is suddenly circulating too freely, to the feeble-minded and easily manipulated, putting the very definition of reality and the procedures for validating it under assault. Rather than arising from a matrix of social conflicts, political struggles, and economic incentives, new technologies are treated by critics in this vein as an inevitability. They conquer society not through their ability to help us overcome our limitations so much as their ability to exploit intrinsic deficiencies in human nature, our proclivity to choose comfort, convenience, laziness, and self-centeredness over the virtues of diligence, discipline, and sacrifice. Emphasis is placed on what capabilities technologies purportedly take away from us — writing stops us from conversing and remembering; television stops us from reading and learning; the internet stops us from focusing and thinking — which simply inverts rather than counters the one-sided presentation of a technology’s benefits. Rather than assess the relevance and impact of a particular technological innovation on a specific context, it is treated as an indiscriminate gale blowing across the whole of society.

Critics in this tradition often end up implicitly endorsing a degree of technological determinism even as they vigorously condemn the idea that new technologies are part of a preordained march of progress for its own sake. They rightly refuse to accept that technologies are neutral, arguing that they are not “merely aids to human activity but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning,” as Langdon Winner put it his 1986 book The Whale and the Reactor. Another way of articulating this idea is Marshall McLuhan’s famous claim that “the medium is the message”: that any particular content is joined with and possibly annulled by the implications entailed by the mode of communication itself and what differentiates it from other media. Messages printed on paper have a structurally different impact on audiences than those engraved in stone or displayed on a screen, regardless of what the specific words are. Different means of representation support different ways of understanding and verifying reality, and these have consequences for how social institutions function.

Yet this line of inquiry raises the question of agency. Who, if anyone, directs the “powerful forces” that Winner describes? To what degree can the impact of a developing technology be predicted and intended? Can the medium’s message be attenuated and controlled? It appears that the dominant modes of communication in any era impose what they implicitly “want” on the people who come to be compelled to use them, reinforcing their prevalence. From this perspective, “technology” shifts from an abstract term for the various “aids” we have produced for ourselves into an autonomous historical agent that humanity must organize to confront. Resistance is framed as both necessary and futile, with the masses falling prey to the worst depredations of technology (becoming stupid, insensitive, lazy, lonely, and so on) while the critics appear as clear-seeing Casssandras doomed to perpetually raise the alarm that we are all intrinsically ill-equipped to heed.

Communications scholar Neil Postman typifies this strain of media critique. Though his work predates the internet and is wildly dismissive of computers — in Amusing Ourselves to Death, the 1985 critique of television that made him famous, he calls computers “a vastly overrated technology” that Americans have received with “their customary mindless inattention” — it nonetheless lays out lines of attack that have since become common in many panicked posts about the deleterious effects of digital culture, social media, and cell phones. Journalists and other commentators periodically rediscover Postman and champion his work for its prescience, and much of what he writes about how technology can come to dominate rather than serve us can feel intuitively right, perhaps even more than it did for his original audience.

But if his diagnoses continue to resonate, it may be less because of their prophetic accuracy than the evergreen mood of righteous despair they evoke, applicable to any experience of social upheaval: the sense that everyone should have known better and nothing really could have been done anyway. That is, rather than offer guidance on how to respond to the specific challenges presented by the rise of tech companies and the redistribution of power they herald, they offer the familiar comfort of yelling at clouds.

It’s not that Postman is wrong in his view of technological change. In a lecture from 1998, he helpfully lays out five ideas that sum up his views, none of which seem especially disputable:

“First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice … The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life … Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything … And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

These broad principles serve as guidelines for what Postman in Technopoly (1992) calls the individual “technological resistance fighter,” one who “maintains an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural.” Tech critics today could readily put these principles to use to analyze the internet, cell phones, social media, AI, or any of the other innovations that have been put forward in the decades since Postman was writing.

Yet in the 1988 lecture, Postman situates his five ideas within an overriding conservative perspective that holds that “there is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and it is a delusion to believe that the technological changes of our era have rendered irrelevant the wisdom of the ages and the sages.” In other words, human nature is fixed and universal, and it remains what it is regardless of technological conditions or predominant media forms. And because human nature is conceived as fundamentally frail, if not corrupt, the development of technology will always be successfully directed toward exploiting these eternal weaknesses.

Postman’s stated resistance to technological determinism is compromised by a larger fatalism about the human condition. This is especially apparent in the dichotomy he sets up in Amusing Ourselves to Death between two dystopias, one as imagined in George Orwell’s 1984 and one elaborated by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. Orwell’s dystopia assumes that overt repression, censorship, and state violence would be required to enact a totalitarian degree of social control, whereas Huxley imagines control implemented through permissiveness, indulging a population’s predictable tendencies to prefer immediate gratification and the continuous consumption of trivial entertainment to the rigors of a democratic civil society. Postman follows Huxley and agrees that “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” But this assertion isn’t supported but presumed; it’s seen as self-evident that people prefer to think less and feel more.

Much of Amusing Ourselves to Death is given over to a defending the exceptional conditions and effects of print culture in the face of the encroaching electronic-screen anti-culture. Print forges good citizens biased toward rationality and deliberation, while screens lead to inundated and overwhelmed individuals who surrender to images and trivia, who are vulnerable to both overindulgence and ready manipulation. “Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now — generally coherent, serious and rational,” Postman writes. “Under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd.”

Postman regards television as the demon spawn of the telegraph and the photograph, technologies that together work to undermine the usefulness of information and turn communication into an inescapable series of distractions. Television, Postman argues, “has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.” Americans “no longer talk to each other; they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images.” This, of course, anticipates any number of contemporary claims about the narcissism of self-expression on social media, the decline of reading skills, and the ever-intensifying experience of information overload in the internet regime.

But rendering technological change as a clash of epistemologies that take hold over an entire society not only threatens to obscure the struggle between concrete forces battling over material stakes but it also makes resistance into a strictly personal matter, ultimately a struggle with oneself to go against the prevailing media trends and all the entrenched interests that are playing to your worst instincts. Postman exhaustively catalogs television’s deleterious effects and its vulgarizations of what he takes to be traditional cultural forms, but he also assumes its hegemony was always assured and that its corrosive effects on us are precisely what made it irresistibly appealing to people in aggregate. Television’s popularity (and now, the internet’s) is taken as simultaneous proof of its power and its worthlessness. It both caters to and reproduces people’s tendency to choose pleasure instead of duty, revealing their unfitness for the autonomy that Postman’s critique is otherwise out to defend.

The assumption that people can’t be trusted to recognize their own interests or fight for their own freedoms leads Postman into a kind of rhetorical dead end. How do you force people to be free? How do you convince them that their own laughter is a lie? Postman issues a thunderous warning about the dangers of screen media: “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk,” he writes. No less than “culture-death is a clear possibility.” Yet for all that, he insists that it would be futile “to take arms against a sea of amusements.” Lamenting the absence of a worthy public sphere, how “serious discourse dissolves into giggles,” he writes as though he knows his own book will be a dead letter, that no one who would need to read it is capable of it any longer. He flatly declares that “Americans will not shut down any part of their technological apparatus, and to suggest they do so is to make no suggestion at all.”

Instead he hopes that people can somehow be educated out of their moral weakness through a better appreciation of the temptations media and technology present us. It’s telling that in Technopoly, Postman likens technologists to priests and castigates them for making “sin and evil disappear” from their quantified understanding to the universe. Rather than submit to the false and deceitful authority of technology, which promises an unearned redemption of humanity, the masses should, in effect, recognize their fundamental sinfulness and rediscover the institutions that have already been devised to protect humankind from its own fallen nature.

When critique strays from a material analysis of the conditions that have generated new technologies, it can easily lapse into a kind of criti-hype that covertly celebrates technological innovation that makes us feel vulnerable and confused, opening the way for a call for renewed religious authority. But it seems insufficient to say humans are bad and their technology will make them worse, as if this were the profound insight that all new kinds of media conspire to disguise. Though Postman’s eloquent mode of reaction can be seductive, it serves more to mask than to illuminate the specific threats of any particular technological innovation, granting them a force that is beyond regulation, making any collective effort to rein them in beside the point. In general, it flattens all social change into the same moment of betrayal that things won’t stay exactly as they are, that power won’t stand still and insists on finding new configurations. There are real threats in the biased ways data is collected and decisions are automated, or in how individuals are monitored openly and surreptitiously, or how income inequality is being exacerbated by technological consolidation. The parameters within which technology should operate must be established collectively, politically, but mounting moral panics about new technology results only in a withdrawal into individual soul-searching. The point of tech criticism should not be to confirm our powerlessness but to clarify how to better distribute the power that technologies put at our command.