“Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.” As Postman points out in chapter three of his book, a Technopoly makes normal, accepted things taboo. In Brave New World, much the same happens. John, the “savage” among all of the “civilized”, longs for union and relationship; he has a religion, a mother, and most rare, a sense of identity and cannot completely understand why these are bad things. In the new world that Bernard has so led him to, he finds that he is completely alone. His ideas and ideals are seen as laughable, yet intriguing, especially to Hemholtz.
Hemholtz is trying to find what he is missing. He is rethinking this Technopoly that everyone around him has so fed into, and looking to John to see his views on these taboo subjects- such as family, poetry, and the individual. What makes them so taboo isn’t what they are, but what is behind these ideas. To have a family, there must be value put upon a life; to have poetry, there must be deep thought and a search into the day to day to find something more, something beautiful; and to have an identity would mean that one was valued, special, and unique. None of that is acceptable in the Technopoly, and by “acceptable” I don’t mean that it is not allowed, but it is viewed as unthinkable. What good are feelings, thoughts, and relationships if the all efficient assembly line does not need it? Removing the thinking of humans, only the machine and formulas are needed. The machines knows better than the people and the machine is more efficient than the people, thus the machine is the only thing to be trusted. The new world only needed the machine, and not a thing else.
