Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

Postman's later, sharper book: the argument that contemporary culture has moved from using technology as a tool (tool-using cultures) through technocracy (where tools reshape social institutions) to technopoly — a culture that has surrendered its capacity to question technology at all. The claim is that technopoly produces not just bad decisions but a specific kind of blindness: the inability to see what technology is taking away while it gives. For product direction the book is a useful provocation — most product organisations operate inside technopoly without noticing, and Postman's vocabulary for naming what is lost is harder to find elsewhere. Read alongside Amusing Ourselves to Death for the media-specific version and Illich for the design-oriented counterpart.