TrueLife - Technopoly Unveiled: Defying Technology’s Grip to Reclaim Conscious Culture

Episode Date: June 24, 2020

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Technopoly by Neil Postman. copyright 1992. This video is the first of a two part review. A thought provoking book, that shines a light on the sinister undercurrent of mankind's relationship with technology. An Ideology that paves the way to atrocity, from labor camp punchcards to surveillance capitalism, technology is being used to streamline efficiency, increase production, and eradicate morality. Think of this book as a companion to the Aldous Huxley novel "Brave New World". An in-depth, behind the scenes look  into the actual science of how a scientific dictatorship was created. One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini, check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Hey, good morning. Aloha, everybody. Hope you had a great New Year's Eve. You were safe, had some fun, and are looking forward to good things that are going to be happening this year. This will be my first show of this year. I got a new book review for you,

and it's a good one. It's a really good one. It's called Technopoly by Neil Postman. And it is a critique of culture in a roundabout way. When I first started to think about doing this book review, I sat down and I wrote out quite a bit about some valid points in this book. and how it's affecting us today, and we're going to get into those.

However, this book is one of those books. It just really makes you think. It really helps kind of cross the bridge of how we got to where we are today with technology. And as I was thinking about that, I ended up getting away from a lot of points that I want to talk about in the book review later. So this might be a two-parter. So let me just talk. First off, a little bit more about the book and then I'm going to get into kind of a rant

or kind of a meandering pathway kind of out in the forest a little bit. So I hope you like it and hope you take time to listen to it. So when you think about technology today, you know, you can think about it, most people think about it as friendly. not everybody I mean there's technology has done a lot of good things for us but it's also created a lot of

the weapons that killed lots of people and destroyed families and countries and it's also been pretty oppressive in a lot of different ways so let me give you a little a little tidbit out of that particular area about technology being a friend or a or a foe here's a little excerpt in fact most people believe that technology is a staunch friend. There are two reasons for this. First, technology is a friend. It makes life easier, cleaner, and longer. Can anyone ask more of a friend? Second, because of its lengthy, intimate, and inevitable relationship with culture, technology does not invite a close examination of its own consequences. It is the kind of friend that asks, for trust and obedience with which most people are inclined to give because its gifts are truly bountiful.

But of course there is a dark side to this friend. Its gifts are not without a heavy cost. Stated in the most dramatic terms, the accusation can be made that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living. I thought that that was pretty well, pretty well thought out paragraph about technology. And that, my friends, is where I started to kind of go out onto a different area. That part made me start thinking about, you know, can I see any of this in my life? Can I see the way technology has treated myself?

And I can. It made me start thinking about anybody who's ever worked for a large, multinational corporation. And one of the first things that you're given is an employee number. What does a number do? Well, in the case of humans, a number dehumanizes you. And it's much easier to see that this number right here is not performing the way you want it to. You know, when you come in in your day and you say you're looking at a set of production numbers and you come down to number 01725 and you, you know, you scan right across and you go, oh, well, you look at this column and that column and then you come down to number 01725 and you, you know, you scan right across and you go, oh, well, you look at this column and that column. And you go, oh, well, you know, this number is just not performing well here.

You know, you run into the problem of the map is not the territory. It looks like that number is not being productive. But you don't understand why it's not being productive. All you see is the other numbers around it that are producing well. So if that's all you see, then it's easy to make the conclusion that that number, that person is malfunctioning. And that could be true. But a bigger question is why would that number be malfunctioning? Why would that person be malfunctioning?

Well, maybe they just lost a relative. Maybe they lost a kid. You know, maybe they, they had a fight with their spouse. Maybe they got injured. You know, maybe the map isn't at the territory. Maybe that particular number is different than all the rest. However, when you just see the numbers,

you dehumanize everyone. And that's kind of what. what multinationals are all about. They don't really care about the human component. I mean, that's why we get to the term, you know, that's how we get to the term of human capital or human resources. Like that term, that word, those words together,

just, they're dehumanizing. You know, when you start treating people like numbers, you start treating people like animals, sometimes they start acting like animals. But going back to the multinationals and technology and the book Technopoly. You know, we're using technology today. And the book is going to argue this point that we're trading efficiency for morality.

You know, we're, anybody who spent time with, if you had a disagreement with someone and you really cared about them and you said it and you talk to them, chances are you're going to be able to at least see things from their point of view. You may not agree with them. You might not work everything out. But if you use a little empathy, you're probably going to be able to come away with a better understanding of the situation. But it's time consuming and it's hard and it's it is something that, you know, would probably get in the way of efficiency. So you can understand why someone sitting in a boardroom in New York doesn't really care about the well-being of someone driving a truck in, say, California.

That doesn't matter to them. All that matters to them is meeting the quotas or meeting their monthly projections. You know, and if you don't see a face, you just see a number, you can think, oh, well, look, I'll get somebody else. In fact, most of the books written on management in the 90s or early 2000s were all about trying to intimidate your people and scare them. And, you know, that's how you get people to work hard as you, you've got to come in and, you know, just be a punk and tell people you're trying to run a business, you're trying to turn a profit. You know, when you get there, I think you've already lost. So that's the first kind of branch I went out on when I started thinking about technology friend or foe and trading efficiency for morality. And then I started thinking to myself.

How is technology really penetrating all our lives today? I mean, it's all around us. It's, I think you could argue that some of the big tech companies are more important than some governments. You could say that Eric Schmidt has more power than Donald Trump, or that Sergey Bren has more power than Macron, or Jeff Bezos has more power than Macron, or Jeff Bezos has more power than. and you know, Angela Merkel. And in fact, you wouldn't be wrong. I don't know if it's a case of more power or more authority, but it's an equivalence, I would say.

They both have a lot, you know, a country has citizens, a multinational has employees. One country gives people social security and another one might give him a 401K. And when you start thinking about it from that perspective, it opens up another avenue, a different form of government that we had in the past, that of like a religious institution.

If you look at like the Pope and the Vatican, like he kind of has his own believers, or if you look at Judaism or Islam. In fact, I'm going to make the claim now that, technology is going to be, if it isn't already, the religion of 2020 for the next 100 years. You can call it transhumanism with Ray Kurzweil or, you know, whatever label you want to put on it, I think the term religion would be, would do well to put on it. you know, when you think about, you know, whether it's the Christian religion or the Catholic religion or Judaism or Islam, the high priests were the people in charge and they were, granted, I needed to come back and give you guys some dates and stuff, but just kind of thinking out loud here. You know, when you think back to, you know, the Christians invading the Muslim territories and the crusades and leaders of their.

church having all kinds of authority and don't the CEOs of these multinational tech corporations have that same authority now i mean aren't they in fact influencing a lot of different governments with their technology i mean we saw in 2016 we saw a lot of people covering how facebook was used to manipulate the way people think. And, you know, I think that's the same type of mentality that people would say about religion previously. An interesting thought might be that, you know, in the United States, we had a separation of church in state.

I think it might be a pretty good idea right now to have a separation of technology in state. Not taking technology away from the state. the state, but just, you know, being mindful of the very people that are running the corporations, it may not be best for them to, you know, these so-called experts. It may not be best for them to have such an influential spot in people's cabinets, you know, versus having might be better for them to have input. Because it seems to me, what,

we're seeing now is just a complete takeover of the governments. Right. If you're if you're the big technology companies, you don't care if someone's a Democrat or if someone's a Republican or whatever. You just want to collect the data, right? You know, if you look at Google who recently took out the whole don't do evil from their slogan, their whole model is based on on surveillance capitalism. And that's the model of the future. That could be the, you know, surveillance capitalism is the prayers said by the high priests of the tech companies. They're just, you know, they're passing the plate around every time you sign one of those, you know, when you check, when you check that box at the bottom of, whatever it is you sign up for. That's like passing the plate around.

You're just given a percentage of your data, of your money forever. It doesn't really seem like it's going to slow down anytime soon. You know, it's kind of mesmerizing and sad and fascinating. All at the same time, I did write down a couple of other notes that I wanted to kind of go in a little bit about. We talked about human resources and employee numbers and the deep. humanization by multinational corporations using technology. You know, it wasn't that long ago that companies like IBM made punch cards for our German friends. They say history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

And I think you could make the same claim that today, companies like Google or, you know, other tech companies. are providing some of our Chinese friends with the ability to set up invasive monitoring systems, social credit scores, and, you know, the ability to detain people for wrong speak as our friend, or double speak, as our friend George Orwell would talk about. It seems that we're there.

you know what staying on the on that topic and i want to reference another book um franz de wall he's a he's a he's a a man a scientist really who's studied animal behavior and he wrote a book called bottom up morality and after 30 years of studying primates he makes the claim that it wasn't god who introduced us to morality. Rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to live. Now, that's an interesting statement right there. Let me just read that again so you guys can really kind of mow it over. It wasn't God who introduced us to morality, rather it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to. And you should be asking yourself, who is this we?

Well, it's the people in power, right? And if you look at any form, I don't want to say any form, but if you look at a lot of forms of religion, you know, when the conquistadors came over, they had a monopoly on the eating of the flesh of God, right? When they found out that other people in the world had that same right, well they had to put a stop to that right that was the end of maria sabina and the mushroom cults

but i think it was alan watts who talked about religion and and and about kind of the you know you can go to the you can go to the christian church and they'll say oh yeah that you know we we are the best church and oh it's fine oh you were you were part of islam well they're a good church they got a they got a good system but you know we're the real thing and if you go to uh Like the Mormon church, they'll say, oh, you know, Christianity's it's like 99% right and they're good over there and good on you for being You know a religious person, but if you want to know the real answers You come and hang with us because we're the real deal You know or the same thing for Catholicism or Judaism like oh, you know, those are all great ideas

But we're the real deal. You know every one of them think that they have the right answer and that fits in well with what France to Wall's bottom-up morality is saying. You know, we have created these belief systems, you know, to help us live the way we feel we ought to live. And by that, I mean, we ought to be in control. We ought to be the ones making decisions. You know, and where do you get the right to make a decision? Where do you get the right to rule over people? Well, that's a divine right.

You know, it's an act of God that clearly we're God's true. chosen people, right? God wants us to do it. That seems to be the claim that the majority of religions and cults and, you know, organizations tend to tell themselves in order to do horrific things. So, you know, another interesting topic there is the language of religions. You know, there's some evidence to say that, you know, in the early Christian churches and medieval times and other religions throughout the past, that the most literate people were the people in the church. And whether, you know, sometimes they had secret languages where they would communicate through symbology. Maybe not secret. Maybe just that only a select few of people

really knew the true writings of the church. Scientology, you got Tom Cruise and David Miscavage and the rest of the C.org people or, you know, in the different organizations as far as like the Knights Templars, you know, maybe they had their own secret codes in the Bible and the same thing in Judaism and different sex of that. You know, they had a, they had their own kind of language. And I think you could, I could argue that coding is a form of language. And while it's open to anybody to learn, you know, you don't get to see the source code of Amazon

or the source code of Google. You don't get to see the very foundational tenants or the, you don't, as a regular person or even as employee of those corporations, you're not going to get to see the, you know, the very foundations of what things are about. And I would argue that that code could be, similar to the precious text of ancient religions.

You see you have the high priest of yesterday, just like the high priest of today, which I would argue would be people in the tech community. It's a fascinating thing to think about. And that's kind of the little rabbit hole I went down with before I even got to my book review about Technoply by Neil Postman. So I hope every one of you is having an amazing first day of the new year and you got a lot of things to look forward to. I'm going to put down the link to the book in the show notes down there.

And then a little bit later I'm going to post up the actual book review that gets into detail about a lot more in depth about technopoly and some of its consequences. is and and it's one of its major tenants that for everything technology gives you it takes something away so think about that for a little bit and I'll see you guys on the flip side here I hope you're having a great day and looking forward to doing the actual review in a little bit a lot