How the world works
Neil Postman
Cost
Neil Postman (United States · 1931-2003) — Cost.
What actually happened?
Technopoly opens with a story Plato recorded. The Egyptian god Theuth brings writing to King Thamus and calls it a remedy for memory. Thamus does not thank him. He answers first that an inventor is fond of his own invention and is therefore not the right judge of it, and then that writing will make people lean on marks outside themselves instead of recalling from within: what you have found is not a remedy for memory but for reminding. Postman then turns on Thamus too. Thamus is right about only half of it, seeing what writing takes and not what it gives; the enthusiast makes the opposite mistake and sees only the gift. Postman wants both eyes open.
The Faustian bargain
Technology is never free: it hands you one thing and takes another, and no receipt is issued for the thing taken. So is it any good has no answer. Ask what it gives and what it cancels.
The spell checker saved you the dictionary and took your certainty about the word. You can no longer spell it.
The winners and the payers are different people
Advantages and costs are never spread evenly. A technology is pure gain for one group and pure loss for another, and the group deciding to adopt it is usually the one gaining.
Typesetting software saved the publisher a whole hot-metal floor, and none of it went to the compositors.
Not additive, ecological
People expect addition: the day carries on, one chore gets cheaper. What happens is ecological — Europe after the printing press was not the old Europe with a machine in it, it was a different Europe.
The shared document saved you the attachments. What changed is that progress is visible at all times, so no stretch of work is unwatched.
Used long enough, it stops looking like technology
His fifth point: once something has been around long enough it is taken as the way things are rather than as an invention, and nobody asks who installed it or why.
Nobody asks in the meeting why this is measured in hours. The clock stopped looking like an invention.
Its makers are not the right judges
An inventor is fond of his invention and sees what it can do rather than what it removes. The case for and against a tool should not rest on the people who know it best.
What a system really costs is described best by whoever is blocked by it daily and cannot change it.
How do I use it today?
Take one tool you have adopted in the last six months and make a two-column table. On the left, what it actually gave you, in hours or in units shipped. On the right, what it cancelled: one thing you used to do and no longer do, and one feel for the work you used to have and no longer have. Then ask who is pure gain here, who is pure loss, which side you are on, and what you would still be able to do if it disappeared tomorrow.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
All technological change is a trade-off.
The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population.
A new medium does not add something; it changes everything.
Media tend to become mythic.
It is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect.