The Technological Society Can’t Save Itself

The Technological Society Can't Save Itself

Drawing on the writings of Jacques Ellul, we can see that small adjustments to our practices will not be enough to alter our society’s relationship to technology. We must first understand the extent to which our technological society has shaped us before we can begin to reshape our society.

By L.M. Sacasas

Since about 2016, a growing number of disillusioned technologists, executives, and investors have been issuing their mea culpas for their role in shaping our present techno-social environment. Notable among these has been the coterie which coalesced around Tristan Harris, a former Google engineer who spent three years as a Design Ethicist for the company before leaving to eventually found the Center for Humane Technology. Harris has been especially critical of how digital media platforms have been designed to hijack our attention, how they profit from outrage and anger, their complicity in the spread of misinformation, and their disregard for user privacy. According to the center’s framing of the problem posed by Silicon Valley, “we need radically reimagined technology infrastructure and business models that actually align with humanity’s best interests.” Consequently, among its stated goals, it aims to “articulate… the path toward a new era of truly humane technology.” Recently, Harris and others associated with the center were prominently featured in the widely discussed 2020 documentary, The Social Dilemma, which casts a critical light on the consequences of social media.

The efforts of newly minted techno-humanists like those at the Center for Humane Technology warrant our attention, but not our uncritical attention. Scholars and activists have complained that their work has been ignored in favor of the belated realizations of former industry insiders. Others have noted that those who were at least partly responsible for getting us into the mess we’re evidently in are not to be trusted with the work of getting us out of it. Similarly, it is not clear that those who have been so close to the source of the problem have sufficient perspective to understand its scope or depth.

Jacques Ellul, who is best remembered for his critique of the modern technological order, was perhaps the most insightful and astute Christian social critic of the last century. From Ellul’s point of view, all gestures toward a more humane technological system that arise from within that system are bound to fail. More precisely, they serve the system rather than humanity. In fact, in The Technological Society, his best-known work first published in 1954, Ellul directly challenged the idea of what he then called “technical humanism.”

Ellul recognized that we could not understand the role of technology in modern life if we contented ourselves with an analysis of this or that device or system. A much broader understanding of technology was necessary. For this reason, Ellul chose to speak about la technique. It’s an expansive concept that has been neatly summarized by James Fowler: “Ellul’s issue was not with technological machines but with a society necessarily caught up in efficient methodological techniques. Technology, then, is but an expression and by-product of the underlying reliance on technique, on the proceduralization whereby everything is organized and managed to function most efficiently, and directed toward the most expedient end of the highest productivity.”

Movements like that represented by the Center for Humane Technology are a natural pendulum swing within the technological framework: “The claims of the human being have thus come to assert themselves to a greater and greater degree in the development of techniques,” Ellul observed, “this is known as ‘humanizing the techniques.’” In this move to humanize technique, “Man is not supposed to be merely a technical object… His fatigue, pleasures, nerves, and opinions are carefully taken into account.” This may fill the “uneasy with hope” or suggest that “from this moment man is taken seriously,” but such hopes were, in Ellul’s view, misguided.

Ellul believed that if we were to seek the “real reason” for the desire to humanize technique, we would ultimately discover a deeper concern for the technological system than for the human beings it affects. On this view, the human being is construed as merely another element of the system that is regrettably malfunctioning, so the technicians approach this malfunction as they would any other:

He considers man only as an object of technique and only to the degree that man interferes with the proper function of the technique. Technique reveals its essential efficiency in discerning that man has a sentimental and moral life which can have great influence on his material behavior and in proposing to do something about such factors on the basis of its own ends. These factors are, for technique, human and subjective; but if means can be found to act upon them, to rationalize them and bring them into line, they need not be a technical drawback. Of course, man as such does not count.

At this point, a humanist might celebrate the manner in which the system has been made to account for the human element. But there was no consolation to be had as far as Ellul was concerned: “Unfortunately, it is a historical fact that this shouting of humanism always comes after the technicians have intervened; for a true humanism, it ought to have occurred before. This is nothing more than the traditional psychological maneuver called rationalizing.”

In the technical milieu we still have to deal with nature and society, but they are thoroughly mediated by the technical milieu.

But Ellul also anticipates an objection: “‘Who cares what the real causes were if the result is respect for man or for nature? If technical excess brings us to wisdom, let us by all means develop techniques. If man must be effectively protected by a technique that understands him, we may at least rest assured that he will be better protected than he ever was by all his philosophies.’”

Ellul’s rejoinder? “This is hocus-pocus. Today’s technique may respect man because it is in its interest and part of its normal course of development to do so. But we have no certainty that this will be so in the future.” “Tomorrow it might be in technique’s interest to exploit man brutally, to mutilate and suppress him,” Ellul adds. “We have, as of now, no guarantee whatsoever that this is not the road it will take.” Thus, Ellul concludes “To me … it seems impossible to speak of a technical humanism.”

Later, in a 1963 essay, Ellul discussed another manifestation of technological humanism: the proliferation of techniques to compensate for the consequences of technique. “It is useless to hope,” he argued, “that the use of techniques of organization will succeed in compensating for the effects of techniques in general; or that the use of psycho-sociological techniques will assure mankind ascendancy over the technical phenomenon.”

In the former case, Ellul went on to explain, we might manage to escape certain crises “but this will but confirm the fact that Technique constitutes a closed circle.” In the latter case, we might preserve a measure of sanity and well-being, “but these results will come about through the adaptation of human beings to the technical milieu.” Therefore, he concludes, “Psycho-sociological techniques result in the modification of men in order to render them happily subordinate to their new environment, and by no means imply any kind of human domination over Technique.”

In a series of interviews with the CBC edited by Willem Vanderburg and published as Perspectives on Our Age in 1981, Ellul returned to the same theme: “All phenomenon in our society are either an imitation of technique or a compensation for the impact of technique.” “People cannot be happy in a purely technical milieu,” he goes on to say. “They can no more live spontaneously in the technical milieu than the astronaut in the cosmos.”

The “technical milieu” is a phrase with a technical meaning. Ellul had earlier described how humanity has inhabited three distinct and successive milieus or environments: the natural, the social, and the technical. Characteristics or features of prior milieus are not altogether eradicated by the new milieu, but their relative status does change. Consequently, in the technical milieu we still have to deal with nature and society, but they are thoroughly mediated by the technical milieu. It may be, Ellul went on to say, that people will adjust themselves to the “rigid, rational, and icy world that is the world of technique,” but Ellul did not believe this had happened or was even likely to happen. “It was a tragic error of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” he claimed, “to believe that people were originally rational beings and that all irrationality must be suppressed.” On the contrary, “Each person is a creature of passions, of flesh and blood, a creature of impulses and desires.”

Such a creature finds it impossible to be happy in a purely rational, technical milieu, consequently such a creature requires compensations. According to Ellul, “a very large number of factors characterizing the modern world are purely compensatory factors, making up for the impact of technique.” “We have no choice but to live in a world dominated by technique,” he explains, “but we are forced to find something providing satisfactions elsewhere and permitting us to live otherwise.”

What is striking about Ellul’s observations is the degree to which, following on the advent of digital media, the current configuration of our technical milieu has absorbed what we might have classified as compensatory elements directly into its operation. In other words, whereas we might imagine that the sorts of compensatory factors Ellul has in mind, the entertainment industry say, were more akin to release valves that relieve psychic pressure so that the technical milieu can carry on with its real work, we now recognize that even our games and our putative diversions are constructed so as to fuel the technological system, chiefly by generating the data upon which the system feeds.

In The Technological Society, Ellul had warned of “the convergence on man of a plurality, not of techniques, but of systems or complexes of techniques.” “The result,” he warned, “is an operational totalitarianism; no longer is any part of man free and independent of these techniques.” In the mid-twentieth century, Ellul could not yet see how this convergence might develop, but we are now able to see that digital technology is the material base facilitating such a convergence of systems of technique and that the smartphone may be its discreet point of convergence upon the human body. From this point of view we might also recognize that our compensations, the variety of means we deploy to assert or indulge the recalcitrant elements of our humanity, are not merely a necessary by-product of the pressures of the technical milieu, they are now integral to its functioning.

Writing in 1962, Ellul observed that “when Technique displays any interest in man, it does so by converting him into a material object.” “Technique indeed guarantees him such material happiness as material objects can,” Ellul was prepared to grant, “but, the technical society is not, and cannot be, a genuinely humanist society since it puts in first place not man but material things.”

A technical society “can only act on man by lessening him and putting him in the way of the quantitative.” Ellul posited a “radical contradiction” between “technical perfection and human development.” Such perfection, he believed, “is only to be achieved through quantitative development and necessarily aims exclusively at what is measurable. Human excellence, on the contrary, is of the domain of the qualitative and aims at what is not measurable.” “In our times,” Ellul went on to say, “technical growth monopolizes all human forces, passions, intelligences, and virtues in such a way that it is in practice nigh impossible to seek and find anywhere any distinctively human excellence.”

The challenge Jacques Ellul poses to a Christian humanist vision is at once simple and demanding: to articulate an account of human flourishing that does not amount to a calibration of the human for the sake of technological milieu. If we have built an environment that is fundamentally inhospitable to human flourishing, then Christian humanism cannot simply follow in the path of the technological humanists, whose work, well-intentioned as it may be, never quite escapes the system it aims to critique. This is no small task. If Ellul is right, our habits, assumptions, and imagination have been captive to technique. To imagine an alternative requires us first and foremost to grasp the degree to which this has been the case. Only then, might we be prepared to offer a genuine alternative.

L.M. Sacasas is associate director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, Florida, and author of The Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and society.