Think more about Attention. Not about Information.
Information is exploding and global available Attention doesn't grow. People who pay attention to one thing, can't use the same time to pay attention to something else.
So govts and corps fight over this common pool of Attention using the Media (TV/Movies/Radio/Social/News/Sports/Gaming etc etc), just like they fought over land and oil and other natural resources. Media is literally used like front line troops of colonial empires in Attention capture wars.
But no one wins as long as Global Human Attention isn't given purpose. We await someone or some group to articulate that vision. Until then people working in Attention Capture fields will keep amusing us to death.
Arguably religion used to provide that purpose but most of the Western world has walked away from it without choosing something to replace that sense of purpose. If, as Marx asserted, that religion was the opiate of the masses then the current "attention economy" is the methamphetamine of the masses.
But no one wins as long as Global Human Attention isn't given purpose.
The problem is that "people working in Attention Capture fields" are the exact people who are winning, at least by the most common scoring mechanism of 'wealth'.
They're enriching their bank accounts just as they're impoverishing their spirits. On their deathbeds, no one ever says "gee, I wish I'd spent more time at the office." The same could be said for any other wealth-motivated exercise.
If I have learned one thing in life it is this: money is, at best, a necessary evil. A means to an end. Pursuing it as an end in itself is an indication that we have strayed from the path and forgotten what we were doing.
Negative attention will eventually have consequences. Either they grow deaf, run away, become enraged, etc.
I think of the millions of ads, singers, bullies, salesmen who've vied for my attention, and you wear down. You get sick of saying "no", pretending not to notice, brushing aside dialogs, feeling bad because you can't help.
I don't know, it's possible for a person to pay no attention to anything. Therefore it isn't always maxed out. Also the "quality" of attention can vary. I think the time spent looking at things has increased, but the level of focus and "deep attention" paid to things has likely fallen over time.
> But no one wins as long as Global Human Attention isn't given purpose. We await someone or some group to articulate that vision.
One of the best things I've done for myself is to stop reading the news. You will not believe how this ignorance has led me to a calmer life, to the gasp and concern of my peers, wondering how am I able to cope, to exist, without knowing what happens "in the world?"
As you say, anyone has 1 unit of attention, and unlike many other things, it is fully in our control. The biggest lie modern generations have been told is that the more knowledge about things, the greater the happiness. That you need to know what happens half a world away from you, often in more detail than what happens at your doorstep.
What saddens me the most about the future generations is seeing how politicised they has become, politics the game of rich old people; the powers that be have figured out that if they turn what happens in the palace into entertainment, people are distracted and don't get into them silly ideas like trying to change things. These days politics is slapstick comedy for "grown ups", and it's sad to see it infect the younger generations now.
You might enjoy this piece by Charles Simic, which is a touchstone of mine:
"I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day."
Grand visions are more in service of megalomaniacal egos than actual solutions. They all just paint over the very real complexities of the world and expect things to just work as they envisioned. Just get rid of the sparrows eating grains and it will just be fine! There are limits to what complexities can be contained within one human mind, and with a world already orders of magnitudes more complex than that we need the humility to admit that the vision of one human mind is not and cannot be all-encompassing. I think it is fair to say that the usefulness of grand visions is dead.
Most companies are still in it for the money, and attention is only a means to an end.
For the idiotic narcissist leaders that pop up every now and then, attention might be interesting by itself. But luckily for us, there's just very few of those. Most of our government bodies are comprised of people who actually mean to do good, and just a bit of attention to some important matters suffices.
A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages…chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements … they require out-door exercises–not this sort of mental gladiatorship.
A game of chess does not add a single new fact to the mind; it does not excite a single beautiful thought; nor does it serve a single purpose for polishing and improving the nobler faculties.
>>If men learn [to read], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.<<
Plato, 400-300 BC
Basically, learning to read and write would lead to an overreliance and provide only a "semblance of wisdom", rather than "true wisdom".
Which is not really wrong. Chess can be fun, but I always thought it is pretty fascinating that the chess champions are viewed by the media as some kind of genius. I mean, it's just a game, not more but also not less.
But playing Chess at any serious level (more than a couple hours a week) has some non Chess side effects; it teaches you to examine your own behaviour, it teaches you that even if you're very good you can still lose (and hopefully how to lose well), and it teaches you that the other side gets a vote (get a turn, no action happens in a vacuum).
Lenin eventually took the same view - that chess was distracting him from a higher purpose. Perhaps a harmless game would have been a better use of his time.
Given that the vast majority of people go to work to earn money for businesses that exist either to exploit natural resources or appreciate in value in the eyes of an economic system that prioritizes increasing capital valuations above all else, including human dignity, long-term survival and the life of other species, I would say we're already there.
Talking about a dystopian future is a convenient way to assuade our sense of dissonance that the present is most certainly not that.
Case in point, nobody wants to rid the Earth of insects, fill the oceans with plastic or plough microplastics into every orifice, but we are all complicit and can't seem to gather ourselves to fix it.
People make too much of what Orwell supposedly feared may happen some day. He was writing about stuff the Soviet and British governments were doing in his time, and in particular, imagined what Soviet rule over Britain may look like. Assigning this philosophy to him and criticizing him for it seems unfair.
Bit of an aside, it was fun to notice the Australian references in the comic. Surprises me still to see something Australian on the "regular" internet.
He passed away before the first iPhone and now my only 2 wishes are: 1) a new book about how smartphones revolutionize the modern world and 2) a new Lauryn hill album
Doing things merely to stimulate pleasurable brain chemistry is fine unless all you do is play games or watch formulaic media that have no lasting effect or achievement.
A couple of years ago i was working for a design studio which produced an image movie for a big cooperation which somehow painted an utopian future for their upcoming product ideas. In that movie there was a woman reading in "Brave new future". It was clear none of the people involved read the book. My remarks were swept aside by claiming hardly anyone has read the book anyway... headlessness might be a real issue.
The book predates the song and album by about 7 years, so the album name references the book. Postman even mentioned the fact in his 1995 book "The end of education"
Outrage and fear are exhausting, let me tell ya. Somehow I cannot get away from nursing my PTSD online, with sick pleasure in picking fights and "winning" arguments.
Sometimes I wake up with a thread racing through my mind and the perfect retort to my "adversary"
I honestly don't hate you guys, but you give my life purpose and meaning... So thank you
It is interesting that these two books essentially show the most extreme end result of the two major economic systems. Socialist authoritarian communist states gravitate towards 1984, capitalist liberal democracies turn into Brave New World.
Exactly! Both Orwell and Huxley are right but in different contexts. Also note that both of their works are an exaggerated caricature of aspects of Society which they wished to highlight and show its insidiousness. Thus one has to look beyond the "painted picture" and understand what was being meant.
However; Orwell had a better insight on the overall issues which can be found in his essays eg. "Notes on Nationalism", "All Art is Propaganda", "Politics and the English Language" (eg. Newspeak) etc.
>it's what capable and smart people value and pursue that makes all the difference.
How do you know capable and smart people will keep having good values? Seems to me that it's true until it isn't - populism takes over politics, ideology takes over the humanities, science gets Goodharted to death, etc. Values are highly circular - we value what high-status people in our (sub)culture value, and you become high-status by getting what people value. This holds for smart people as well.
are you saying smart people are immune to the temptations of attention-dopamine?
because i'd consider myself above average in terms of intelligence and ambition but i still fall into the procrastination trap often. now you might say that this makes me in fact "stupid" per your defininition (or maybe arrogant as i overestimate myself) but i see this in other people as well.
i also would not say that being "productive" as in moving humanity ahead must be the KPI by which everyone is measured. you only have one life, you can spend it how you want, even if that is watching tiktoks 24/7.
> Thinly veiled 'I despise stupid people', this one.
Are you talking about this comic (i.e. a few sentences from the book) or the whole book?
I read the book a few years back and it's entirely focused on culture as a whole and less about the individual choices. He's not making a point of "television makes you dumb" (or "dumb people watches television"), but rather he makes the distinction between an "oral"-, "press"- and "television"-based culture. He claims that it's bad when television becomes the main platform that a society centers its communication around.
He's also honest that there's probably far more junk (in absolute terms) in printing than in television: "Television is not old enough to have matched printing's output of junk." It's not about the amount of "junk" – it's about something more fundamental about the medium.
I found the book quite interesting and would highly recommend reading it!
> They'd be boozing (more than they already are) if there wasn't such variety of cheap and available entertainment, the author doesn't seem to realize?
That's an extremely pessimistic view of the world: Categorizing a set of human beings as "stupid" and saying that it doesn't matter how society is structured?
And "smart people" are also influenced by how our society is structured, no?
>He's not making a point of "television makes you dumb" (or "dumb people watches television"), but rather he makes the distinction between an "oral"-, "press"- and "television"-based culture. He claims that it's bad when television becomes the main platform that a society centers its communication around.
Or as Postman himself put it, "the medium is the metaphor". And he strongly disliked the metaphor TV was bringing to bear on the Western World.
And everyone should note this is the television of the 1980s. You still don't really have home recording, there are a limited number of channels, and the monoculture truly exists.
> And everyone should note this is the television of the 1980s. You still don't really have home recording, there are a limited number of channels, and the monoculture truly exists.
This is a good point as well! When reading it I was reflecting on how internet compares to 1980s television. Yes, it has much more dopamine-fueled content, but it's way less of a monoculture. It gives a lot of opportunity for people to seek out what they're interested in and there's hundreds (thousands?) of communities with very different set of thoughts.
plenty of smart people wasting their lives scrolling through bullshit. you don't use your brain to solve problems if you're never bored and allowing your mind to wander.
Brave New World and 1984 are books to avoid every extreme on politics, either left or right (put every Monopoly neocon fanboy, racist non-civic nationalist or burocratic socialist in there).
1984 looked scary, but BNW was hopeless. It exerced a much better control. The world of 1984 collapsed down itself.
The islands in BNW: "He's being sent to an island. That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who's any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson."
A person running for president of this country comes from show business and there are venture capitalists like Mark Andreeson who seriously talk about him as somebody who knows policy all because they can get a seat at the table.
I think it's fair to say the "why not inject yourself with bleach!" people shouldn't be running the show while there's a class of people who do what people tell them without questioning whether it's a good idea. People in power have a responsibility not to suggest things that would kill people. That isn't a high bar.
A demented figurehead with other people behind him directing the show. It's as if acting was the perfect training for the worst idea for a position in a system of checks and balances.
Biden was never an entertainer like the other 2 demented old men (entrusted with WMDs) under discussion.
If we send you to space you'll have to pass a fitness test.. Because we aren't stupid?
But sure, anyone in the middle of a psychotic break who can't tell fact from fiction should be fine for the entirety of national interests. Shoot down another plane for the old Gipper!
> If we send you to space you'll have to pass a fitness test.. Because we aren't stupid?
The real problem societies face is reaching a good fitness test for decision makers.
That includes voters - discriminating, promoting, managing (etc.) the best electorate. And we had more focus and success in the past (abbeys, Venice etc.) than in the present, where the matter of electoral systems is kept like a theoretical branch of political science. And in running reality, people get Gerrymandering - an _opposite_ effort.
That's a problem, but I think the problem is checks and balances for actual repairs to the checks and balances that would restrict a role are prohibitely hard to make while privilege escalations enlarging a role are at best temporarily denied.
Mr Trump was supposed to be picked up by a military tribunal and probably executed. Whether that tribunal system is overreaching would have been an excellent discussion, after the execution.
The OP did not express the idea properly: people are not prejudicially disqualified because of the industries they worked in, but intrinsic disqualification comes from twisted profiles. "Guts exciters", getting followers through seducing their lower instances, is one of them.
I am not labelling individuals here - but there are very many around the world fitting that description.
Hey guys, what if good things were actually bad? Wow!! Instead of enjoying ourselves we should instead spend eight hours a day intently studying woodworking & tax policy. The fact that people enjoy talking to each other and looking at cat pictures on social media proves that people will accept fascism and that Western liberal democracy is fated for impotence.
There is a middle ground between woodworking and TikTok, no? People enjoyed talking to each other and had fun before we had technology.
It’s easy to see social media as harmless, and maybe it is, but it also has the potential to act as a powerful tool for serving propaganda and brainwashing.
I’m not suggesting an actual conspiracy theory here but it’s concerning that a few huge companies have the power to broadcast (and control) the flow of information to a majority of population, who will consume that information by and large without suspicion.
If for some reason Facebook or TikTok really wanted to meaningfully shift public opinion, they probably could, and in any direction they might choose.
There wasn't a time "before we had technology". Best to avoid that
line of thinking if you want to escape the determinist (Veblem) trap
and end up like Kaczynski.
Postman is an author we enjoy but seldom acknowledge the wider genre
into which he fits. It's called "tech critique".
You can study it through the ages, comparing the outlooks and
influences of Einstein, Ellul, Freud, Fromm, Heidegger, Illich,
Kaczynski, Marcuse, Mumford, Nietzsche, and Postman, as well as sci-fi
writers like Wells, Forster, Clarke, Gibson, Le Guin, Dick...It makes
a very good companion to a study of the philosophy of science.
Some takeaways (at least ones that stick in my mind):
Technology is inseparable from the human condition, There are no
primitivist escapes, noble savages or gardens of Walden.
By the same token there is not and won't ever be any golden age of
Utopian technology.
Technology most closely resembles a "drug" in all its manifest
functions.
Technology comes with an accumulative maintenance cost.
It is monotonic/directional. There's no easy way back and we can't
uninvent stuff.
Minimising the _harms_ of technology while maximising the benefits and
maintaining human dignity amidst it is the best we can do.
Even if initially excited by new developments all people are
ultimately ambivalent about technology. They fear it, use it
begrudgingly and resent their dependency on it. Iron bridges and steam
locomotives raised the same questions as GPS and iPhones do today.
Many people romanticise and worship technology. It is a secular God.
If we "love" it, it's the sick love of an addict or the sadomasochistic
power glee (tech "dealers" like Ellison, Zuck, and Musk)
A tiny few (that's us) enjoy a curious fascination that makes tech an
"end in itself". Those people get used to create a supply for the
dealers and addicts.
Anyway you gotta love Postman, if only for exquisite use of
"centrifugal bumblepuppy". What he describes in this passage is really
the soporific control/domination effects of technology in the hands of
tyrants/dealers who delight in the subjugation of attention - which I
think is made best by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America.
Information is exploding and global available Attention doesn't grow. People who pay attention to one thing, can't use the same time to pay attention to something else.
So govts and corps fight over this common pool of Attention using the Media (TV/Movies/Radio/Social/News/Sports/Gaming etc etc), just like they fought over land and oil and other natural resources. Media is literally used like front line troops of colonial empires in Attention capture wars.
But no one wins as long as Global Human Attention isn't given purpose. We await someone or some group to articulate that vision. Until then people working in Attention Capture fields will keep amusing us to death.
The problem is that "people working in Attention Capture fields" are the exact people who are winning, at least by the most common scoring mechanism of 'wealth'.
If I have learned one thing in life it is this: money is, at best, a necessary evil. A means to an end. Pursuing it as an end in itself is an indication that we have strayed from the path and forgotten what we were doing.
Negative attention will eventually have consequences. Either they grow deaf, run away, become enraged, etc.
I think of the millions of ads, singers, bullies, salesmen who've vied for my attention, and you wear down. You get sick of saying "no", pretending not to notice, brushing aside dialogs, feeling bad because you can't help.
https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Laurie-Anderson/Language-I...
One of the best things I've done for myself is to stop reading the news. You will not believe how this ignorance has led me to a calmer life, to the gasp and concern of my peers, wondering how am I able to cope, to exist, without knowing what happens "in the world?"
As you say, anyone has 1 unit of attention, and unlike many other things, it is fully in our control. The biggest lie modern generations have been told is that the more knowledge about things, the greater the happiness. That you need to know what happens half a world away from you, often in more detail than what happens at your doorstep.
What saddens me the most about the future generations is seeing how politicised they has become, politics the game of rich old people; the powers that be have figured out that if they turn what happens in the palace into entertainment, people are distracted and don't get into them silly ideas like trying to change things. These days politics is slapstick comedy for "grown ups", and it's sad to see it infect the younger generations now.
"I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day."
https://archive.is/0GZmW
(I haven't managed to stop reading the news unfortunately...)
We tried out the grand visions to improve the human condition with one great push in the 20th century- didn’t work out so well
Instead we need small incremental lasting change - thinking we can transform life within a generation without repercussions, that’s just silly
Most companies are still in it for the money, and attention is only a means to an end.
For the idiotic narcissist leaders that pop up every now and then, attention might be interesting by itself. But luckily for us, there's just very few of those. Most of our government bodies are comprised of people who actually mean to do good, and just a bit of attention to some important matters suffices.
Ironically, we are discovering the human condition by evaluating what we are “not”.
… but, we are.
attention usually takes the path of least effort.
A game of chess does not add a single new fact to the mind; it does not excite a single beautiful thought; nor does it serve a single purpose for polishing and improving the nobler faculties.
Scientific American, July, 1858
[0]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/19th-century-conce...
>>If men learn [to read], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.<<
Plato, 400-300 BC
Basically, learning to read and write would lead to an overreliance and provide only a "semblance of wisdom", rather than "true wisdom".
[0] https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/
All of which are very valuable life lessons.
If you can be a champion at anything you deserve recognition - just look at the people lauded for chugging dozens of hot dogs
Talking about a dystopian future is a convenient way to assuade our sense of dissonance that the present is most certainly not that.
Case in point, nobody wants to rid the Earth of insects, fill the oceans with plastic or plough microplastics into every orifice, but we are all complicit and can't seem to gather ourselves to fix it.
HN discussion from 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554733
Wikipedia entry for the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
So many things changed since he died but his ideas hold up pretty good.
Sometimes I wake up with a thread racing through my mind and the perfect retort to my "adversary"
I honestly don't hate you guys, but you give my life purpose and meaning... So thank you
However; Orwell had a better insight on the overall issues which can be found in his essays eg. "Notes on Nationalism", "All Art is Propaganda", "Politics and the English Language" (eg. Newspeak) etc.
They'd be boozing (more than they already are) if there wasn't such variety of cheap and available entertainment, the author doesn't seem to realize?
It's not what stupid people do in their free time - it's what capable and smart people value and pursue that makes all the difference.
Nietzsche laid this out quite beautifully in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Huxley and Orwell are kindergarten philosophy by comparison.
How do you know capable and smart people will keep having good values? Seems to me that it's true until it isn't - populism takes over politics, ideology takes over the humanities, science gets Goodharted to death, etc. Values are highly circular - we value what high-status people in our (sub)culture value, and you become high-status by getting what people value. This holds for smart people as well.
'Good' values don't exist, so we need not worry about that one :)
because i'd consider myself above average in terms of intelligence and ambition but i still fall into the procrastination trap often. now you might say that this makes me in fact "stupid" per your defininition (or maybe arrogant as i overestimate myself) but i see this in other people as well.
i also would not say that being "productive" as in moving humanity ahead must be the KPI by which everyone is measured. you only have one life, you can spend it how you want, even if that is watching tiktoks 24/7.
Are you talking about this comic (i.e. a few sentences from the book) or the whole book?
I read the book a few years back and it's entirely focused on culture as a whole and less about the individual choices. He's not making a point of "television makes you dumb" (or "dumb people watches television"), but rather he makes the distinction between an "oral"-, "press"- and "television"-based culture. He claims that it's bad when television becomes the main platform that a society centers its communication around.
He's also honest that there's probably far more junk (in absolute terms) in printing than in television: "Television is not old enough to have matched printing's output of junk." It's not about the amount of "junk" – it's about something more fundamental about the medium.
I found the book quite interesting and would highly recommend reading it!
> They'd be boozing (more than they already are) if there wasn't such variety of cheap and available entertainment, the author doesn't seem to realize?
That's an extremely pessimistic view of the world: Categorizing a set of human beings as "stupid" and saying that it doesn't matter how society is structured?
And "smart people" are also influenced by how our society is structured, no?
Or as Postman himself put it, "the medium is the metaphor". And he strongly disliked the metaphor TV was bringing to bear on the Western World.
And everyone should note this is the television of the 1980s. You still don't really have home recording, there are a limited number of channels, and the monoculture truly exists.
This is a good point as well! When reading it I was reflecting on how internet compares to 1980s television. Yes, it has much more dopamine-fueled content, but it's way less of a monoculture. It gives a lot of opportunity for people to seek out what they're interested in and there's hundreds (thousands?) of communities with very different set of thoughts.
1984 looked scary, but BNW was hopeless. It exerced a much better control. The world of 1984 collapsed down itself.
Those slave-owners held it self-evident that all men had the unalienable right of liberty (among other rights.)
I can't remember 1984 well enough to remember any specific examples of doublethink, but they can't be as good as this one.
GP was talking about Reagan, not Biden.
If we send you to space you'll have to pass a fitness test.. Because we aren't stupid?
But sure, anyone in the middle of a psychotic break who can't tell fact from fiction should be fine for the entirety of national interests. Shoot down another plane for the old Gipper!
The real problem societies face is reaching a good fitness test for decision makers.
That includes voters - discriminating, promoting, managing (etc.) the best electorate. And we had more focus and success in the past (abbeys, Venice etc.) than in the present, where the matter of electoral systems is kept like a theoretical branch of political science. And in running reality, people get Gerrymandering - an _opposite_ effort.
Mr Trump was supposed to be picked up by a military tribunal and probably executed. Whether that tribunal system is overreaching would have been an excellent discussion, after the execution.
I am not labelling individuals here - but there are very many around the world fitting that description.
-Vocal Minority, Intellectual Minority, Minorities et al.
It’s easy to see social media as harmless, and maybe it is, but it also has the potential to act as a powerful tool for serving propaganda and brainwashing.
I’m not suggesting an actual conspiracy theory here but it’s concerning that a few huge companies have the power to broadcast (and control) the flow of information to a majority of population, who will consume that information by and large without suspicion.
If for some reason Facebook or TikTok really wanted to meaningfully shift public opinion, they probably could, and in any direction they might choose.
There wasn't a time "before we had technology". Best to avoid that line of thinking if you want to escape the determinist (Veblem) trap and end up like Kaczynski.
Postman is an author we enjoy but seldom acknowledge the wider genre into which he fits. It's called "tech critique".
You can study it through the ages, comparing the outlooks and influences of Einstein, Ellul, Freud, Fromm, Heidegger, Illich, Kaczynski, Marcuse, Mumford, Nietzsche, and Postman, as well as sci-fi writers like Wells, Forster, Clarke, Gibson, Le Guin, Dick...It makes a very good companion to a study of the philosophy of science.
Some takeaways (at least ones that stick in my mind):
Technology is inseparable from the human condition, There are no primitivist escapes, noble savages or gardens of Walden.
By the same token there is not and won't ever be any golden age of Utopian technology.
Technology most closely resembles a "drug" in all its manifest functions.
Technology comes with an accumulative maintenance cost.
It is monotonic/directional. There's no easy way back and we can't uninvent stuff.
Minimising the _harms_ of technology while maximising the benefits and maintaining human dignity amidst it is the best we can do.
Even if initially excited by new developments all people are ultimately ambivalent about technology. They fear it, use it begrudgingly and resent their dependency on it. Iron bridges and steam locomotives raised the same questions as GPS and iPhones do today.
Many people romanticise and worship technology. It is a secular God.
If we "love" it, it's the sick love of an addict or the sadomasochistic power glee (tech "dealers" like Ellison, Zuck, and Musk)
A tiny few (that's us) enjoy a curious fascination that makes tech an "end in itself". Those people get used to create a supply for the dealers and addicts.
Anyway you gotta love Postman, if only for exquisite use of "centrifugal bumblepuppy". What he describes in this passage is really the soporific control/domination effects of technology in the hands of tyrants/dealers who delight in the subjugation of attention - which I think is made best by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America.