In today's world we are very reliant on technology to perform our simple everyday tasks, however it was not always this way. There was a point in time when we began to become more independent on technology and less dependent on our own capabilities. When did this shift occur, when exactly did we begin to become increasingly reliant on technology? According to a book published by Neil Postman, "To give a date to the beginnings of Technopoly in America is an exercise in arbitrariness. It is somewhat like trying to say, precisely, when a coin is flipped in the air begins its descent. You cannot see the exact moment it stops rising..." In this chapter of this novel the author identifies that in Brave New World, Huxley identified "the emergence of Henry Ford's empire as the decisive moment in the shift from technocracy to Technopoly, which is why in his brave new world time is reckoned as BF and AF." Throughout Brave New World, the citizens of the World State substitute the name of Henry Ford, an early industrialist who founded Ford Motor Company, wherever people in our own world would say "Lord”. In addition they have T's painted across their shirts and this is a substitute for the cross. This shows that at all levels of society religion has been replaced by reverence for technology. The citizens of the World State also use the phrase "Oh Ford" when they feel they must. Neil Postman describes a technocracy as a "society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition and driven by the impulse to invent." Neil Postman suggests that technocracy "filled the air with the promise of new freedoms", so are the citizens of Brave New World in a technocratic society? No, they have no freedoms, although they are made to believe that they have many freedoms. Brave New World is a society that has drifted into a Technopoly. Postman describes this as a society where “the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and through its efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment can not be trusted...and the affairs of citizens are best guided by conducted experiments." This description is reoccurring in Brave New World, where humans are devalued and machines are placed above human importance. The humans have become slaves to machines, they labor in order to increase productivity, but their lives are given no meaning. They are conditioned and have no real opinions of their own. The dependence of technology has grown so much, that without it the entire society would be in ruins. The technology owns the humans and the humans become subservient to it, in a way the humans become machine-like themselves. They are produced in a factory and then molded in order to fit as a part of a larger "machine", society. Taylor fits into this discussion, because Postman likes to use the publishing of his book "The Principles of scientific Management" in 1911 as the first written work that contained the "exploit and formal outline of the assumptions of the thought-word of Technopoly." Although Taylor only intended it to apply to industrial production, the principles published in this book became much more significant than just that.
