When I was a junior in high
school, I concluded that the purpose of the English curriculum was to make us
all despondent and suicidal, the reading list including such cheerful works as
Camus’s The Stranger and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. For bonus points, in French that year I read Sartre’s Huis Clos (that’s No Exit for you non-French-taking folks) and a few other choice
pieces of literature about doom, gloom, and sometimes murder. I was reminded of this general French
tendency to despair in reading Jacques Ellul’s book, The Technological Society and have come to the conclusion that many
French writers’ books should come with a pack of Gauloises and as much red wine
as necessary to dull the pain.
Not that the book was not worth
reading. Despite the fact that it
was written in 1964, it has a lot of relevance to our current situation as
creatures in a society driven by technology. I can only imagine what Ellul would make of our Internet
age.
His central argument is that
technology (or technique, in his preferred usage) is the primary force in our
societies. It is no longer a tool
that humans use to improve conditions.
Instead, it shapes people and society according to its own particular
needs for maximum efficiency. He
contends that we are, essentially, helpless to combat this overwhelming force
because there is no longer any place where one can truly go off the grid.
That first part is fairly
convincing. He musters a lot of
good thinking and research to back up his contention that technology wins. I’m not so sure about the second part
where we can’t retake our souls from the machine. I would like to think that we are not without hope.
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