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The technological society requires men to be content with what they are required to like; for those who are not content, it provides distractions—escape into absorption with technically dominated media of popular culture and communication. And the process is a natural one: every part of a technical civilization responds to the social needs generated by technique itself. Progress then consists in progressive de-humanization—a busy, pointless, and, in the end, suicidal submission to technique. The essential point, according to Ellul, is that technique produces all this without plan; no one wills
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The Technological Society is a description of the way in which an autonomous technology is in process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all nontechnological difference and variety is mere appearance.
The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, 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. Its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past.
The reader may be inclined to say that, if everything happens as stated in the book, man is entirely helpless—helpless either to preserve his personal freedom or to change the course of events. Once again, I think the question is badly put. I would reverse the terms and say: if man—if each one of us—abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these
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