On the Current
State of Universities
... universities are being
fundamentally transformed. Thoroughly corrupted by the "publish or perish"
syndrome and by the pressure to lower standards to accomodate the higher
proportion of young people going on to higher education, they are being
reduced to extensions of high schools and technical colleges, valued by
governments only insofar as they provide people with vocational training
or produce technological knowledge, and by students only to increase their
earning power. Arts and science faculties have lost status within universities
- with good reason. For the most part, undergraduate courses in arts faculties
are being reduced to a form of entertainment and courses taught in the
science faculties have been regeared to produce technicians. Within the
arts faculties, careerists have excluded or marginalized people driven
by a quest for understanding; while as Paul Feyerabend noted of the science
faculties: "Most scientists today are devoid of ideas, full of fear, intent
on producing some paltry result so that they can add to the flood of inane
papers that now constitutes scientific progress in many areas."
(p.25) TOP
On Postmodernism and
Economics
Despite the incredulity towards
all grand narratives, the grand narrative of economic progress as defined
by economists has retained its dominating influence as a guide for political
action by default. (p.25) TOP
On Academics and Intellectuals
Few academics today are intellectuals.
(p.26) TOP
On Advertising and
Reality
Advertisements have colonized
social life to define reality and its significance, while at the same time
reality has been depreciated and reduced to the status of a social product.
The world of advertisements has become more real than the world of everyday
life, and people in everyday life must strive to imitate the world created
by advertisements to be acknowledged as significant, to be taken as a meaningful
part of reality. (p.28) TOP
On the Subversion
of Language
… radical technologies create
new definitions of old terms, and .. this process takes place without our
being fully conscious of it. Thus, it is insidious and dangerous, quite
different from the process whereby new technologies introduce new terms
to the language. (p.8) TOP
… technology imperiously
comandeers our most important terminology. It redefines "freedom", "truth",
"intelligence", "fact", "wisdom", "memory", "history" - all the words we
live by. And it does not pause to tell us. And we do not pause to ask.
(pp.8-9) TOP
On Consumerism
In a technocracy - that is,
a society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition
and driven by the impulse to invent - an "unseen hand" will eliminate the
incompetent and reward those who produce cheaply and well the goods that
people want. (p.41) TOP
It also came to believed
that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when
people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but
as consumers - that is to say, as markets. (p.42) TOP
On the Meaning of Technopoly
Technopoly .. is totalitarian
technocracy. (p.48) TOP
Abetted by a form of education
that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly
deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical,
or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief. (p.58) TOP
The relationship between
information and the mechanisms for its control is fairly simple to describe.
Technology increases the available supply of information. As the supply
is increased, control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mechanisms
are needed to cope with new information. When additional control mechanisms
are themselves technical, they in turn further increase the supply of information.
When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown
in psychic tranquility and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people
have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity
to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.
One way of defining Technopoly,
then, is to say it is what happens to society when the defenses against
information glut have broken down. (p.72) TOP
On Technological Determinism
… technology creates its
own imperatives and, at the same time, creates a wide-ranging social system
to reinforce its imperatives. (p.105) TOP
In a growing Technopoly,
there is no time or inclination to speak of technological debits. (p.106)
TOP
On Technocratic Statisticians
Lacking a lucid set of ethics
and having rejected tradition, Technopoly searches for a source of authority
and finds it in the idea of statistical objectivity. (p.132) TOP
We must keep in mind the
story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river
with an average depth of four feet. That is to say, in a culture that reveres
statistics, we can never be sure what sort of nonsense will lodge in people's
heads. (p.132) TOP
On Power
The question with language,
as with any other technique or machine, is and always has been, Who is
to be the master ? Will we control it, or will it control us ? The argument,
in short, is not with technique. The argument is with the triumph of technique,
with techniques that become sanctified and rule out the possibility of
other ones. (p.142) TOP
The Technopoly story is without
a moral centre. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic
advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological
progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that suggest
stability and orderliness, and tells us, instead, of a life of skills,
technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to
produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly. (p.179) TOP
RANTS