I published an Op-Ed [...] Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable.”
The author was idealistic and gullible. Capitalism rewards rarity and value as much as feudalism rewards honour and faith - they don't, those discourses are just there to "sell" you the economic system.
Those knowledge workers do all this social media greasing because better exposure affords them better deals than using the same time to refine their skills.
Postman’s masterwork is his 1992 book
Caveat: I didn't read the book.
Those three phases sound like bollocks for me. Tech doesn't fight ethical and moral values; it shapes them. Because tech is rather close to the material conditions, while moral and ethical values are part of the superstructure. And it has been like this since we learned to make fire.
Still, I'll play along and pretend that I take the concept of technopoly. The concept is silly but the author is still talking about a distinct chunk of human history, associated with the globalisation of information.
A major source of this destabilization was the Trump-Clinton election cycle, which, among other things, created a subtle but consequential shift in our relationship with the products coming out of Silicon Valley.
Tell me "I focus too much on USA, too lirrle elsewhurr" without saying so.
The same process is happening everywhere, even in places with no Trumpet or Klingon or Bidet. It's the thesis ("stay connected 24/7") generating its own antithesis ("nope").
During this period, Postman writes, “tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.”
They always did it.
“Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,”
Where are the anthrax bombs and the Nine Years' War?
I'm being serious; unlike Postman's book, I did read Huxley's. And the major factor that allowed the World State to seize power was war ravaging society and causing economic collapse. That is nothing like the technopoly through this text, that is the natural development of information as yet another capitalistic product.
Consider our current struggles to make sense of generative A.I. tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The problem with those gen model tools is not that they enable automation, and Luddites would go against it. It's simply that they suck.
As such, it's less about a struggle against those tools and more with how they were marketed. And without them, you'd get something else being shilled in their place.
This is already a big wall of text so I'll stop here. The text is fun food for thought, so my criticism should not be considered as "it suuucks".