Response #3

Postman identifies Henry Ford’s emergence as the shift to technopoly. Noting that technopoly did away with the co existence of two thought worlds tradition vs. technology that had lived in technocracy. With technopoly the focus was on efficiency and making things, faster, better and at a lesser cost.  Taylor (page51) noted that under a technopoly the primary if not only goal of human labor and thought was efficiency. With the rise of factories mostly garment making the workers were reduced to little responsibility to think at all, a system was able to do the thinking for them. A Luddite was coined as a nay sayer of technology and those who asked what we were leaving behind but were met with people like Rockerfeller, Edison and Bell who were dubbed Robber Barons for monopolizing and cornering markets once mastered by skillful craftsmen who now not only lost their livelihood or passions but were reduced to just manning a machine for much less money.

In reading The Thin Blue Linels a Burning Fuse I got the feel that the author is in a way a modern day postman in pointing out the customs or tools we’re adopting may have gone too far and that maybe we’ve lost site of whats important or even worse what we’ve lost. On page one of TBL at the very bottom it says ” For the time being tis is limited to the poorest, blackest neighorhoods, but what seems exceptional in Ferguson today will be commonplace around the country tomorrow. I instantly thought of the similarity to the shift between technocracy and technopoly. At one time technopolies were in some areas, some industries and nobody realized this monumental shift until it was in their backyard, their field of work. And by then it was too late it was there and happening and anyone who opposed the steam roller was cast into “intellectual blackwater” or dubbed a “Lubbite”.

Auguste Comte said ” people must sometimes be treated as if they were machinery which is considered a necessary and unfortunate condition of technological development”. That sounds a lot like the common day phrase or conception that the government , the police see us as numbers, sheep, machines that can be fixed or programmed. Page one of the TBL discusses the Mike Brown case and its verdict then boldly stating ” various politicians and media outlets had labored to prepare the public for this for months in advance.” That sounds like modern day for “treating people like machines” “preparing them for months in advance”. Are we slaves to media outlets, news, social or interactive? Mark Twain believed that machines should be slaves to their masters and not the other way around, but in 2015 is that really the case? Are we so co dependent on machines that we can be conditioned or densensitized to outcomes before they even occur, in a sense PROGRAMED to see things one way like a computer. At what cost have we let go of tradition and founding our own ideas for the sake of technological development?

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One Response to Response #3

  1. Good stuff, but watch your spelling!

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