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The Technological Society (1954)

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Tue, 01/04/2022 - 13:56 — plickb
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The Technolocal Society
By: Jacques Ellul
Narrated by: Arthur Morey
Length: 21 hrs and 20 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 02-23-21
Language: English
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Technological-Society-Audiobook/1799931811

As insightful and wise today as it was when originally published in France in 1954, Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society has become a classic in its field, laying the groundwork for all other studies of technology and society that have followed.

Ellul offers a penetrating analysis of our technological civilization, showing how technology - which began innocuously enough as a servant of humankind - threatens to overthrow humanity itself in its ongoing creation of an environment that meets its own ends. No conversation about the dangers of technology and its unavoidable effects on society can begin without a careful listening of this book.

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Tue, 01/04/2022 - 18:36 — euxalot

Welcome to Concen, and many thanks for sharing this.

Ellul had a big influence on the Sixties generation, particularly those folks who espoused resistance against "the machine". But Ellul was writing even before the that, at the early stages of today's society. We on these boards are the inheritors of this fully technoligized society, one not just of machines, but a society rampant with the logic of manipulation and gain that lies behind machines. Companies built on these ideas made an ever deeper pact when they began to computerize themselves and to incorporate the cybernetic logic of control, with its feedback loops and information flows, into their management structures.

Ellul's most important points:

  • The forces of “technique” have begun to run amok, invading and transforming all spheres of human activity
  • The ceaseless drive for effi­ciency and productive power squeezes the life out of individuals, cultures, and the natural world, and
  • Technology installs a new and invisible framework around the world we live in, a potentially catastrophic structure of knowing and being that swallows us up whether we like it or not.

The above shows Ellul drawing on the thoughts of Heidegger.

I also thought the following observations of Ellul are interesting and worth knowing about:

  • It is far from accidental that ecstatic phenomena have developed to the greatest degree in the most technicized societies
  • It is to be expected that these phenomena will continue to increase, and
  • This indicates nothing less than the subjection of mankind’s new religious life to technique: ecstasy is subject to the world of technique and is its servant.

Here, Ellul draws on Mircea Eliade (more than Heidegger).

Erik Davis makes this important observation about the thoughts of Ellul:

  • The freak embrace of consciousness technology was not a spiritual resis­tance to the dominant society, but a complete capitulation to it
  • In this sense, the re-emergence of so many motifs of the sixties counterculture within the rhetoric of information culture fol­lows a distressingly predictable logic, as the System simply extends its technological tendrils ever deeper into the soul.

While this is ultimately a Faustian moral tale, with a spattering of fire and brimstone, Ellul is an important thinker, and I thank you for sharing him here.