The Technological Society

by Jacques Ellul

What we have here is a hoax, in the Marxist sense of the term. The actual function of unionism is to support technical progress. It seeks a profound transformation of the condition of the workers through objective industrial organization, independent of the idea of capitalist profit.

“There is no such thing as a collective critical faculty.”

Amusement seeks to distract, propaganda to lead. The principal difference, however, relates to spontaneity. Propaganda technique is calculated and deliberate, whereas amusement technique is spontaneous and nondeliberate. The former is the result of the organizer’s decision; the latter, of the mob’s need.

The difficulty experienced by pilots of hypermodern aircraft in changing over to another type of machine, or even to another machine of the same type, is well known. This last seems a good example of the irreversible conditioning of the individual by technique.

Man and technique bear the same relation to each other as the social superstructure bears to the economic infrastructure in the Marxist scheme of things. Technicized man literally no longer exists except in relation to the technical infrastructure.

No doubt, man will continue to steer the machine, but only at the price of his individuality.

Progress must obviously be paid for by even harsher subjection to the instrument of salvation.

The task of the technician is to develop machine techniques and human techniques to such a pitch of perfection that even the man face to face with the perfectly functioning machine no longer has human initiative or the desire to escape.

The ability to forget the machine is the ideal of technical perfection.

Everywhere, it is said, human liberty affirms itself in a world that the skeptics have declared closed to it.

Jazz is one of today’s most authentically human protests.

It is good for city dwellers to go to the country. It is good that a marked eroticism is wrecking the sclerotic traditional morality. It is well that poetry, thanks to such movements as surrealism, has become really expressive once more. But these phenomena, which express the deepest instinctive human passions, have also become totally innocuous. They question nothing, menace nobody. Behemoth *11 can rest easy; neither Henry Miller’s eroticism nor André Breton’s surrealism will prevent him from consuming mankind.

I am somehow unable to believe in the revolutionary value of an act which makes the cash register jingle so merrily.

Then there is the modern passion for nature. When it is not stockbrokers out after moose, it is a crowd of brainless conformists camping out on order and as they are told.

Nowhere is there any initiative or eccentricity.

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.

Any author who seeks to have his manuscript published must make it conform to certain lines laid down by the potential publishers. A manuscript which in subject matter and format does not conform has no chance.

It had been forgotten that technique means not comfort but power.

The great law here is that all things are necessary to make a society and that even revolt is necessary to make a technical society.

The expression of criticism is permitted because its repression would be even more catastrophic. But it is permitted only on condition that it entail no serious consequences, or, better put, so that no serious consequences to the power of the state can result The technical apparatus, in fact, assures this by confining the most violent explosions of human ecstasy within itself and by satisfying without danger and at small cost to itself certain spiritual needs of the citizen reader.

the customer becomes a butterfly dipping into whatever flower he chooses.

Miniature fireworks issue from the magic bottle, but not revolt. A few printed pages out of the deluge of printed matter will never make the butterfly a revolutionary.

But Miller’s book, far from pushing a man to revolt, vicariously satisfies the potential revolutionary, just as the sexual act itself stills sexual desire, or jazz soothes the Negroes’ bitter longing for freedom. We have noted that jazz has become universal. The reason is now clear: it is the music of men who are satisfied with the illusion of freedom provoked by its sounds, while the chains of iron wind round them ever tighter.

All revolutionary movements are burlesques of the real thing, but this must not be imputed to the activities of Machiavellian wirepullers. The phenomenon appears naturally in the interaction of human techniques with social movements that seek to express basic human instincts.

It will not be a universal concentration camp, for it will be guilty of no atrocity. It will not seem insane, for everything will be ordered, and the stains of human passion will be lost amid the chromium gleam. We shall have nothing more to lose, and nothing to win.

We shall be rewarded with everything our hearts ever desired. And the supreme luxury of the society of technical necessity will be to grant the bonus of useless revolt and of an acquiescent smile.

To wield power well entails a certain faculty of criticism, discrimination, judgment, and option. It is impossible to have confidence in men who apparently lack these faculties. Yet it is apparently our fate to be facing a “golden age” in the power of sorcerers who are totally blind to the meaning of the human adventure.

Technique exists because it is technique. The golden age will be because it will be. Any other answer is superfluous.