
Jacques Ellul, that stubborn Frenchman who stared straight into the ugly heart of modernity, wrote in The Technological Society that technique is more than machines. It’s a mindset. A method.
It’s the all-consuming need to optimize, to measure, to strip the soul out of everything in favor of efficiency. It turns life into a series of systems and progress into a conveyor belt with no off switch.
And we’re all on that belt, smiling like idiots, clutching our smartphones, swiping right for love, left for oblivion.
Progress has become our prayer, efficiency our god. But Ellul saw the devil in the details. He knew the road to hell was paved with data points and algorithms.
Breaking It Down for Stupid Bro
Imagine you’re trying to make friends, kid. You could just wander around the neighborhood, hang out at a park, or talk to someone at school.
That’s the old way—chaotic, full of surprises, sometimes awkward as hell.
Or you could use an app that tells you who’s nearby, what they like, and whether they’ve got the same weird obsession with vintage Pokémon cards as you do.
The app?
That’s technique. It simplifies, organizes, makes things easy. But it also takes away the randomness, the spontaneity, the magic of bumping into someone and realizing they’re your person.
That’s what Ellul’s screaming about: when you let efficiency take over, life becomes a spreadsheet instead of a story.
The Anatomy of Technique
Let’s break Ellul’s idea into something even a sleep-deprived coffee addict can handle:
Aspect | Explanation |
---|---|
Universality | Technique isn’t just for machines; it’s for every damn thing—war, love, school. |
Self-Perpetuation | Each technical advance fuels another; it’s a runaway train. |
Ethical Displacement | Forget morality—does it work? That’s the only question technique asks. |
Autonomy | Technique evolves on its own, like a monster out of Mary Shelley’s notebook. |
Think about those sleek dating apps. Allegedely, they weren’t created to make you lonely, but they turned love into a numbers game anyway. Love, that messy, beautiful chaos of poetry and sweat, has been stripped down to a spreadsheet.
Match percentages, compatibility scores, swipe statistics—it’s love reduced to a cold calculation, like choosing a sofa on Amazon.
You don’t wonder if someone’s laugh will light up a dark room or if their quirks will drive you crazy in the best possible way. No, you wonder if they meet the algorithm’s criteria.
Are they efficiently compatible?
And the worst part?
We’re all too busy swiping to notice the damage.
Too busy chasing dopamine hits to realize we’ve outsourced our hearts to a machine. We call it progress, but it’s really a funeral procession for romance. We scroll past potential lovers like they’re items on a clearance rack, tossing aside anyone who doesn’t sparkle under the fluorescent lights of a screen.
It’s brutal, this endless parade of faces, curated and filtered to death.
Every profile is selling something, and every swipe left feels like rejecting a human ad campaign. Swipe right, and you’re just another customer in love’s discount store.
We say it’s about connection, but what we’re really doing is building walls.
Each swipe is another brick in the fortress of our own loneliness.
And when the app pings us with a match? For a moment, there’s hope. But it’s hollow. You’re not meeting a person; you’re meeting a probability.
We’ve turned love into a game, and we’re all losing.
The Infinite Loop of Nowhere
Smartphones didn’t just land in our pockets; they embedded themselves in our lives like parasites. They buzz, beep, and demand attention, herding us into the eternal now.
Social media? That’s technique’s playground.
It turns human connection into likes, shares, and follows.
Everything quantified, everything ranked. You don’t post a photo of the sunset because it moved you—you post it because you want dopamine hits.
Ellul might have called the smartphone the ultimate manifestation of technique. It’s a black hole of optimization:
App Type | What It Does |
---|---|
Social Media | Optimizes attention spans, crushes self-worth. |
Dating Apps | Turns romance into a marketplace of profiles. |
Productivity Tools | Makes you feel guilty for not being efficient 24/7. |
Streaming Platforms | Destroys patience; no one waits for anything anymore. |
We’ve given our lives to these glowing screens, and for what? To feel connected? Most of us feel lonelier than ever.
The Counterarguments: The Dreamers and the Realists
Not everyone thinks Ellul nailed it.
Some folks believe the online world, like all technology, is just a tool—a hammer that builds or destroys, depending on the hand that wields it.
Critics | Key Argument | Examples |
---|---|---|
Optimists | The internet is a democratizing force, spreading knowledge and creativity. | Books: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. |
Technophiles | AI and algorithms will eventually solve humanity’s biggest problems. | Characters: Tony Stark in Iron Man. |
Humanists | Humans adapt; we’ll find a way to live with this and thrive. | Movies: Her (love in a tech-driven world). |
Ellul’s rebuttal is simple: the system doesn’t care what you want. It just grows, consumes, and optimizes. It’s not here to serve you; it’s here to perpetuate itself.
The Science of Technique
Ellul’s observations about technique’s self-perpetuating nature don’t just line up with modern technology; they practically scream at you from the abyss.
It’s not a coincidence—it’s the inevitable result of a system designed to feed itself. Machine learning algorithms, for instance, are Frankenstein’s monsters built with code and greed.
Once you set them loose, they don’t stop. They don’t ask if they’re doing good or harm. They just optimize, endlessly, ruthlessly.
Take recommendation algorithms—the ones that decide which YouTube video you’ll watch next or which product will haunt you across every website you visit.
They’re designed to learn, evolve, and fine-tune their tactics. At first, they might nudge you toward something harmless, like a cat video.
But give them time, and they’ll figure out how to drag you into rabbit holes of junk you never needed. They don’t care about you. They care about keeping you hooked, wringing out every last second of your attention like a bartender squeezing the last drop from a lemon.
It’s the same in neuroscience, where dopamine pathways light up like Christmas trees whenever you score a hit of digital validation.
Every like, share, or retweet is a jolt of chemical pleasure, but don’t mistake it for joy. It’s efficiency in its purest, ugliest form: maximum engagement, minimum effort.
Think about the infinite scroll—the endless feed that keeps going, no matter how much you consume. There’s no natural stopping point, no “You’ve had enough.”
It’s designed to trap you in a loop. Your thumb swipes, your brain buzzes, and before you know it, three hours are gone, and you’re staring at a meme you don’t even understand.
Or take autoplay on streaming services. You didn’t decide to watch the next episode of that trashy reality show—it decided for you.
It saw your hesitation and pounced, serving you another dose of mindless entertainment before you could think, Maybe I should go outside, touch grass, talk to a human being.
This is the self-perpetuating nature of technique Ellul warned about.
It doesn’t just serve a purpose; it creates one. It doesn’t just grow; it metastasizes.
Algorithms don’t stop refining themselves because their creators forgot to build in an off switch. Why would they? The system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as intended.
And you?
You’re not a user; you’re a product. Your attention is the raw material, mined and processed until there’s nothing left but an empty, scrolling shell of a human being.
And the worst part? You’ll beg for more, because the machine knows your brain better than you do.
The Day I Quit Facebook
A few years ago, I quit Facebook. It wasn’t a dramatic, torch-the-bridge kind of thing. One morning, I woke up, scrolled through my feed, and realized I didn’t care about any of it.
People I’d never meet. Political rants I’d forget in an hour. Ads for crap I didn’t need.
The final straw? A friend’s vacation photos—posed, perfect, and lifeless. I wasn’t jealous; I was sad. They weren’t living. They were curating.
I hit “delete” and poured myself a whiskey at 10 a.m. It felt good. Freeing. But it also felt empty, like walking out of a crowded room and realizing there’s no one waiting for you outside.
The Bitter End
Ellul’s critique leaves us stranded in a digital wasteland, where the pursuit of efficiency has flattened everything meaningful.
Nietzsche warned us about the abyss, but he didn’t say it would come with Wi-Fi.
And yet, amidst the darkness, there’s a sliver of light.
Ellul believed that resistance was possible—not by smashing our devices, but by remembering what they can’t replace.
A shared meal. A handwritten letter. A walk in the woods, without GPS telling you where to go.
Ellul doesn’t end with hope; he ends with a challenge. The system is vast, impersonal, and relentless. It will keep growing, consuming, optimizing, until there’s nothing left.
But we can choose—every day, in small, defiant acts—to step off the conveyor belt.
Albert Camus once said, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” While Ellul doesn’t go that far, his warning is clear: if we let technique dictate every aspect of our lives, we may as well be dead already.
Still, the choice remains ours. Progress or humanity. Optimization or meaning.
The future waits for no one. But maybe it waits for those brave enough to decide.
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