Why Technology is Enslaving and Dehumanizing Us
- Andy McIlvain
- 14 hours ago
- 2 min read
Video from Academy of Ideas
Why Technology is Enslaving and Dehumanizing Us
The following is a transcript of this video.
“Man is caught like a fly in a bottle. His attempts at culture, freedom, and creative endeavor have become mere entries in technique’s filing cabinet.”
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
In the mid-1950s the French philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote a book titled The Technological Society. In sit he proposed that technology, or more broadly what he called technique, was enslaving mankind. In this video we explore this fascinating, yet terrifying thesis.
“The number of “technical slaves” is growing rapidly, and the ideal of all governments is to push as fast as possible toward technical enslavement.”
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
A technological society is one that is dominated by what Ellul called technique. Technique is a method of action, or a means for achieving ends, that prioritizes efficiency above all else. Technique, in other words, searches for the one best way to solve a problem or accomplish a task, and in its search for optimal solutions it disregards broader moral, aesthetic, spiritual, and cultural considerations. Or as Ellul explains:
“. . .technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
Ellul believed that technique had become the dominant ordering principle of society, and he identified several subdivisions of technique. Firstly, there is the machine. Machines are the ultimate manifestation of technique as they constantly evolve in pursuit of greater efficiency, they deliver consistent and precise results at speed and scale, and they strip away the variability that defines many other human endeavours. The spread of the machine into ever more domains of life, is reflective of our tendency to view most problems through a technical mindset. Machines, however, are but one manifestation of technique, or as Ellul wrote..." from the Transcript