Book Review:

The Technological Society (1954), Jacques Ellul

By Prasan Samtani @dhanuraashi

Paraphrasing Father John Culkin, “Until this century, man developed technique. Now, technique makes man.” Catholic layman and sociology professor Jacques Ellul demonstrates with incredible thoroughness how technology, once the servant of man, has been transformed into his master. In every sphere from economy, to work, to the state, and ultimately to human development itself, Ellul demonstrates the thoroughness by which technique has developed its own internal logic that demands its gradual taking over of every human sphere, ultimately permanently altering what it means to be human.

Ellul spends the first section of the book identifying what he refers to as technique, which is a concept that is necessarily larger than technology (machines). Rather, it refers to methods that perhaps stemmed from the development of machines, but are now routinely applied outside industrial life (for example, the techniques of public relations which are a subset of propaganda).

Ellul writes:

Technique has become objective and is transmitted like a physical thing; it leads thereby to a certain unity of civilization, regardless of the country or the environment in which it operates.

The key elements that underlie modern technique in Ellul’s view are (1) rationality and (2) artificiality. These had been developed to such a degree by the 2nd half of the 20th century that they cannot any more effectively be guided by human intention. For example, a nation that consciously chooses not to adopt techniques that make a particular human domain more “efficient” will necessarily be outcompeted by the ones that do, and will either then have to accept a subordinate position to the more efficient nation, or be completely absorbed into its sphere of power. Communities that do intentionally reject the development of certain techniques (e.g. the Amish or Old Order Mennonites) ultimately can only survive under the protection of societies that are technologically supreme and choose to tolerate them.

Furthermore, technique has such wide social sanction that any institution that opposes the advancement of technique is immediately subject to attack. Ellul writes:

The worst reproach modern society can level is the charge that some person or system is impeding this technical automatism. If a labor union says ‘In a period of recession, productivity is a social scourge’, his declaration stirs up a storm of condemnation, because he is putting a personal (human) judgment before the technical axiom that what can be produced must be produced.

Consider the absolute outrage directed at the ILA when union leader Harold Daggett determined that automation was not a net benefit to longshoremen.

This complete lack of empathy for fellow American citizens who were acting in fear of the loss of their livelihoods was enabled by the general belief that technique should reign, that what can be produced must be produced, and what can be automated must be automated, no matter the social cost.

Perhaps a better example that can help demonstrate how overlapping fields of technique can work to encircle man is the US Farm Crisis of the 1970s. Developments in fertilizer technology and mechanization (agricultural technique) took US farm productivity to astounding heights by the end of the 1960s. High demand for US grains was spurred on by world population growth. This prompted a change in US agricultural policy led by Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon, seeing the opportunity to advance laissez-faire economic policy in the agricultural sphere and undo New Deal programs that paid farmers not to plant their land. Farmers were encouraged to get big or get out, and to plant commodity crops from fencerow to fencerow. When the grain embargo on the USSR annihilated global demand for US crops, Ronald Reagan, elected on a promise to get “ugly old government” out of agriculture, refused to reinstate those programs (once again, economic technique taking precedence over human factors) - which led to families being forced off the land and aggressive rural depopulation.

Effectively, agricultural technique paved the way for the application of economic technique, which proceeded to eliminate the social basis of rural life in America. The village, the most basic unit of human settlement, has been all but eliminated in an entire continent (modern homesteading attempts to reinstate this somewhat, but is ultimately a simulacrum of the real thing, maintaining only the aesthetic without the economic and social interdependence between neighbors that characterizes village life).

This sequence of events ultimately leads to the creation of a new type of man, as Ellul writes:

The economic man was formulated in the 2nd half of the 19th century by a twofold movement. The first was the absorption of the entire man in the economic network. The 2nd was the devaluation of all human activities and tendencies other than the economic.

This comes up beautifully in the context of the great H-1B twitter wars of Christmas 2024, exemplified in the tweet below:

This version of economic man demanded by modern society is creature that necessarily has no room for any activity apart from the economic. The promotion of hustle culture (80 hour workweeks, grindset mentality) is itself a form of what Ellul calls human technique (propaganda) which has the task of reshaping man to his new environment. Importantly, Ellul points out that man no longer has the social basis by which he can guide technique at all:

Man in modern society is not situated in relation to other men, but in relation to technique. For this reason, the sociological structure of these societies is completely altered.

…

The important thing is that man, practically speaking, no longer possesses any means of bringing action to bear upon technique.

This is a fundamental result of societal atomization which is a byproduct both of technique overwhelming the human sphere, and then reshaping man into the homo economicus described by Ellul above. The program for performing this reshaping is unironically promoted by people like Vivek Ramaswamy:

As Ellul points out, this overapplication of technique results not in the enhancement of work, but in its degradation. Both Vivek and Patrick were “grinding”, but the aim of their grinding was not the advancement of their respective fields, but a parasitic leeching of resources away from productive people (Patrick via an MLM scheme, which is essentially an unproductive Ponzi, and Vivek via a more straightforward fraud).

Fifty years on, the reshaping of man is nearly complete, and horrors beyond even Ellul’s comprehension arise. We can only develop technical solutions to technical problems, but those create their own technical problems. One example is the development solar panels to reduce the impact of fossil fuels. The intention was to reduce demand for coal and oil, but the increase of intermittent solar energy availability has led to malign uses such as cryptocurrency mining. In effect, devoid of influencing technique through human intention, the end result appears to be that we are heading to a rural environment blanketed with solar panels for the purpose of minting meaningless currency and powering chatbots. And because of the total decimation of rural life, there is no collective that can effectively resist. The only purpose appears to be “winning”.

The question of what we ought to win is not only not answered, even raising the question is seen as a social violation. And thus Ellul ends the book on this somber note:

But what good is it to pose questions of motive? Of why? All that must be the work of some miserable intellectual who balks at technical progress. The attitude of scientists, at any rate, is clear. Technique exists because it is technique. The golden age will be because it will be. Any other answer is superfluous.