The Technological Society

by Jacques Ellul

The technical phenomenon is the main preoccupation of our time; in every field men seek to find the most efficient method. But our investigations have reached a limit It is no longer the best relative means which counts, as compared to other means also in use. The choice is less and less a subjective one among several means which are potentially applicable. It is really a question of finding the best means in the absolute sense, on the basis of numerical calculation.

1) Economic technique is almost entirely subordinated to production, and ranges from the organization of labor to economic planning. This technique differs from the others in its object and goal. But its problems are the same as those of all other technical activities. 2) The technique of organization concerns the great masses and applies not only to commercial or industrial affairs of magnitude (coming, consequently, under the jurisdiction of the economic) but also to states and to administration and police power. This organizational technique is also applied to warfare and insures the power of an army at least as much as its weapons. Everything in the legal field also depends on organizational technique. 3) Human technique takes various forms, ranging all the way from medicine and genetics to propaganda (pedagogical techniques, vocational guidance, publicity, etc.). Here man himself becomes the object of technique.

Magic clearly displays the characteristics of primitive technique, as Leroi-Gourhan indicates when he says that technique is a cloak for man, a kind of cosmic vestment. In his conflict with matter, in his struggle to survive, man interposes an intermediary agency between himself and his environment, and this agency has a twofold function. It is a means of protection and defense: alone man is too weak to defend himself. It is also a means of assimilation: through technique, man is able to utilize to his profit powers that are alien or hostile. He is able to manipulate his surroundings so that they are no longer merely his surroundings but become a factor of equilibrium and of profit to him. Thus, as a result of techniquë, man transforms his adversaries into allies. These characteristics of material technique correspond perfectly to the characteristics of magical technique. There, also, man is in conflict with external forces, with the world of mystery, spiritual powers, and mystical currents. But there, too, man erects a barrier around himself, for he would not know how to defend himself by his own unaided intellect. He uses any means that will serve him both for defense and for adjustment. He turns to his own profit the hostile powers, which are obliged to obey him by virtue of his magical formulas. Masson-Oursel, in a recent study, confirms this. He shows that magic is basically a “scholasticism of efficiency” which man employs as an instrument against his environment; th...

What was the doctrinal position of early Christianity regarding practical activity, from the very beginning? On the moral plane, Christianity condemned luxury and money—in short, everything that represented the earthly city, which was consecrated to Satan and opposed to the City of God. This was the era of the anchorite, of the renunciation of city life, of cenobitism presented as an ideal. The tendency was toward the restriction of economic life. On the theological plane, there was the conviction that the world was approaching its end, that it was useless to strive to develop or cultivate it, for the Lord was soon to return. It was wiser to be concerned with eschatology than with worldly affairs.

That something might be useful or profitable to men did not make it right and just. It had to fit a precise conception of justice before God. When an element of technique appeared to be righteous from every point of view, it was adopted, but even then with excessive caution. Only inventions (representing a choice among techniques made by individuals versed in Greek or Latin) judged worthy were applied or even allowed to become known. It was within this narrow compass that certain monks propagated and improved technical instruments. The spread of the hydraulic mill by the Cistercians is well known; likewise the many specialized mills to be found at the Abbey of Royaumont (the smith’s mill, the fullers mill, etc.). But these exceptions were few.

With the disappearance of religious and social taboos came the creation of new religions, the affirmation of philosophic materialism, the suppression of the various hierarchies, regicide, and the struggle against the clergy. These factors acted powerfully upon the popular consciousness and contributed to the collapse of the belief in these taboos.

The union between the bourgeoisie and technique was expressed not only in the development of factories, but much more subtly in the fact that the majority of technicians came from this class. It was the bourgeoisie which promoted the advance of science.

Technical progress is a function of bourgeois money. Yet today the Marxists claim that the bourgoisie either have attempted to restrain technical progress or make it serve the purposes of war. Their claim, however, does not prevent history from contradicting their theories. Marx himself would never have made such statements; what is true today was not true in his time.

Karl Marx rehabilitated technique in the eyes of the workers. He preached that technique can be liberating. Those who exploited it enslaved the workers, but that was the fault of the masters and not of technique itself.

In the United States this took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Until then, the society of this country was inorganic. But at that time the American social milieu was favorable; moreover, the Americans profited from the technical consciousness evolved in Europe, and so they arrived immediately at a model for technique. Giedion has noted that the Americans began by mechanizing complex operations, which produced the assembly line, whereas the Europeans tended to mechanize simple operations, such as spinning. This American accomplishment was the result of the exceptional flexibility of the American milieu. These conditions were not found in the other European countries: Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Russia. In these nations the social structures remained as they were and the social hierarchy was not attacked. The taboos of religion were fanatically respected, and those of society were not questioned. The Inquisition and the Tribunal of the Empire jealously guarded the spiritual and sociological divisions of society. This world was already undermined, ruined, and emptied of content, but its rigid forms were universally accepted as good. There were few changes in the cities and none at all in the rural areas. The traditional organism remained intact And when enlightened despotism began to create some excitement, this world was so little prepared that it exhausted itself in the struggle against the old social structures. Consider, for example, the fate of Pete...

The joint occurrence of the five factors we have briefly analyzed explains the exceptional growth of technique. Never before had these factors coincided. They are, to summarize: (1) a very long technical maturation or incubation without decisive checks before the final flowering; (2) population growth; (3) a suitable economic milieu; (4) the almost complete plasticity of a society malleable and open to the propagation of technique; (5) a clear technical intention, which combines the other factors and directs them toward the pursuit of the technical objective. Some of these conditions had existed in other societies; for example, the necessary technical preparation and the destruction of taboos in the Roman Empire in the third century. But the unique phenomenon was the simultaneous existence of all five—all of them necessary to bring about individual technical invention, the mainspring of everything else.

In fact, technique has taken substance, has become a reality in itself. It is no longer merely a means and an intermediary. It is an object in itself, an independent reality with which we must reckon.

It is not, then, the intrinsic characteristics of techniques which reveal whether there have been real changes, but the characteristics of the relation between the technical phenomenon and society.

Here we have two antithetical orders of inquiry. When there is an abundance of instruments that answer all needs, it is impossible for one man to have a perfect knowledge of each or the skill to use each. This knowledge would be useless in any case; the perfection of the instrument is what is required, and not the perfection of the human being. But, until the eighteenth century, all societies were primarily oriented toward improvement in the use of tools and were little concerned with the tools themselves. No clean-cut division can be made between the two orientations. Human skill, having attained a certain degree of perfection in practice, necessarily entails improvement of the tool itself. The question is one of transcending the stage of total utilization of the tool by improving it There is, therefore, no doubt that the two phenomena do interpenetrate. But traditionally the accent was on the human being who used the tool and not on the tool he used.

Technique did not pose the problem of adaptation because it was firmly enmeshed in the framework of life and culture. It developed so slowly that it did not outstrip the slow evolution of man himself.

It was impossible to conceive of a tool that was not beautiful.

Men sought to reintroduce indispensable factors of aesthetics and morals. Out of this effort came the unprecedented creation of certain aspects of style in the 1880’s: the tool with machine-made embellishments. Sewing machines were decorated with cast-iron flowers, and the first tractors bore engraved bulb’ heads. That it was wasteful to supply such embellishments soon became evident; their ugliness doubtless contributed to the realization. Moreover, these flourishes represented a wrong road, technically speaking. The machine can become precise only to the degree that its design is elaborated with mathematical rigor in accordance with use. And an embellishment could increase air resistance, throw a wheel out of balance, alter velocity or precision. There was no room in practical activity for gratuitous aesthetic preoccupations. The two had to be separated. A style then developed based on the idea that the line best adapted to use is the most beautiful.

Thus, during the latter part of the nineteenth century—in the mechanical, medical, and administrative spheres—exact instruments were available from which fantasy and irrationality had been totally eliminated. The result was fewer instruments. As further progress was made, however, a new element of diversification came into play: in order that an instrument be perfectly efficient, it had to be perfectly adapted. But the most rational instrument possible takes no account of the extreme diversity of the operational environment. This represents an essential characteristic of technique. Every procedure implies a single, specific result.

The more an instrument is designed to execute a single operation efficiently and with utmost precision, the less can it be multipurposive. A new diversification of technical apparatus thus appears: today instruments are differentiated as a result of the continually more specialized usage demanded of them.

We must, therefore, examine carefully the positive characteristics of the technique of the present. There are two essential characteristics of today’s technical phenomenon which I shall not belabor because of their obviousness. These two, incidentally, are the only ones which, in general, are emphasized by the “best authors.” The first of these obvious characteristics is rationality. In technique, whatever its aspect or the domain in which it is applied, a rational process is present which tends to bring mechanics to bear on all that is spontaneous or irrational. This rationality, best exemplified in systematization, division of labor, creation of standards, production norms, and the like, involves two distinct phases: first, the use of “discourse” in every operation; this excludes spontaneity and personal creativity. Second, there is the reduction of method to its logical dimension alone. Every intervention of technique is, in effect, a reduction of facts, forces, phenomena, means, and instruments to the schema of logic. The second obvious characteristic of the technical phenomenon is artificiality. Technique is opposed to nature. Art, artifice, artificial: technique as art is the creation of an artificial system. This is not a matter of opinion. The means man has at his disposal as a function of technique are artificial means. For this reason, the comparison proposed by Emmanuel Mounier between the machine and the human body is valueless. The world that is being created ...

Technical activity automatically eliminates every nontechnical activity or transforms it into technical activity. This does not mean, however, that there is any conscious effort or directive will.

The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional, personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself be the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.

The exclusive character of technique gives us one of the reasons for its lightning progress. There is no place for an individual today unless he is a technician. No social group is able to resist the pressures of the environment unless it utilizes technique. To be in possession of the lightning thrust of technique is a matter of life or death for individuals and groups alike; no power on earth can withstand its pressures.

man of genius who discovers something. It is no longer the vision of a Newton which is decisive. What is decisive is this anonymous accretion of conditions for the leap ahead.

Self-augmentation can be formulated in two laws: 1. In a given civilization, technical progress is irreversible. 2. Technical progress tends to act, not according to an arithmetic, but according to a geometric progression.

And here we enter into another area, the nature of the technician. In this decisive evolution, the human being does not play a part. Technical elements combine among themselves, and they do so more and more spontaneously. In the future, man will apparently be confined to the role of a recording device; he will note the effects of techniques upon one another, and register the results. A whole new kind of spontaneous action is taking place here, and we know neither its laws nor its ends. In this sense it is possible to speak of the “reality” of technique—with its own substance, its own particular mode of being, and a life independent of our power of decision. The evolution of techniques then becomes exclusively causal; it loses all finality. This is what economists such as Alfred Sauvy mean when they say that “by a slow reversal…production is more and more determined by the wishes of individuals in their capacity as producers, than by their decisions as consumers.” In reality, it is not the “wishes” of the “producers” which control, but the technical necessity of production which forces itself on the consumers. Anything and everything which technique is able to produce is produced and accepted by the consumer. The belief that the human producer is still master of production is a dangerous illusion.

journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt the man to the machine.

There is an attractive notion which would apparently resolve all technical problems: that it is not the technique that is wrong, but the use men make of it. Consequently, if the use is changed, there will no longer be any objection to the technique.

Technique is in itself a method of action, which is exactly what a use means. To say of such a technical means that a bad use has been made of it is to say that no technical use has been made of it, that it has not been made to yield what it could have yielded and ought to have yielded. The driver who uses his automobile carelessly makes a bad use of it. Such use, incidentally, has nothing to do with the use which moralists wish to ascribe to technique. Technique is a use. Moralists wish to apply another use, with other criteria. What they wish, to be precise, is that technique no longer be technique. Under the circumstances, there are no further significant problems.

It is only after a period of dubious experimentation that a technique is refined and its secondary consequences are modified through a series of technical improvements. Henceforth, someone will say, it will be possible to tame the monster and separate the good results of a technical operation from the bad.

it is not my intention to show that technique will end in disaster. On the contrary, technique has only one principle: efficient ordering. Everything, for technique, is centered on the concept of order.

Technical progress favors war, according to Nef, because (a) the new weapons have rendered more difficult the distinction between offense and defense; and (b) they have enormously reduced the pain and anguish implied in the act of killing.

Technique has progressively mastered all the elements of civilization. We have already pointed this out with regard to man’s economic and intellectual activities. But man himself is overpowered by technique and becomes its object The technique which takes man for its object thus becomes the center of society; this extraordinary event (which seems to surprise no one) is often designated as technical civilization. The terminology is exact and we must fully grasp its importance. Technical civilization means that our civilization is constructed by technique (makes a part of civilization only what belongs to technique), for technique (in that everything in this civilization must serve a technical end), and is exclusively technique (in that it excludes whatever is not technique or reduces it to technical form).

No technique is possible when men are free. When technique enters into the realm of social life, it collides ceaselessly with the human being to the degree that the combination of man and technique is unavoidable, and that technical action necessarily results in a determined result. Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being. For technique, this is a matter of life or death. Technique must reduce man to a technical animal, the king of the slaves of technique. Human caprice crumbles before this necessity; there can be no human autonomy in the face of technical autonomy. The individual must be fashioned by techniques, either negatively (by the techniques of understanding man) or positively (by the adaptation of man to the technical framework), in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization.

Because of the autonomy of technique, modern man cannot choose his means any more than his ends. In spite of variability and flexibility according to place and circumstance (which are characteristic of technique) there is still only a single employable technique in the given place and time in which an individual is situated.

Nothing belongs any longer to the realm of the gods or the supernatural. The individual who lives in the technical milieu knows very well that there is nothing spiritual anywhere. But man cannot live without the sacred. He therefore transfers his sense of the sacred to the very thing which has destroyed its former object: to technique itself.

technical development follows its own proper laws, not the tastes of the public. It was not the public which demanded air travel and television. Technical progress created these things, and they were technically diffused and imposed on the public. The mechanism of standardization is identical with that of every technique.

Man indeed participates in the economy, but technique causes him to participate not as a man but as a thing.

Thus, we have a two-way street: technical development inevitably brings about state intervention in the economic world; and, reciprocally, when the state intervenes it finds a technical apparatus which it develops further.

The economy, to a greater or lesser degree, conditions the creation of the nation-state. Alternative explanations—political and intellectual—are given for the creation, let us say, of the Fascist state. But the most profound cause of this phenomenon was the economic impasse in which Italy and Germany found themselves. The nation-state was primarily a response to the cessation of economic evolution. That there were other causal factors is clear, but we are seeking to locate the central cause. The problem of the adaptation of the whole of society to the economic movement in all its ramifications is not to be solved by economics alone. It is a technical problem. The economy, with its enormous productive capacity, volume of trade, mobilization of society, and economic techniques which thirst to be applied, is no longer a closed circle, a single activity among others. It engages the life of the whole society and of all men in it.

Hence, in order to distinguish the socialist situation from the others, socialism always falls back on that vaguest of all concepts, teleology. Capitalism, it is said, has regard only for itself; it seeks but to preserve itself. Socialism, on the other hand, is a constructive force on the march. But nothing warrants the belief that the means employed will result in socialism. Teleology can only create a stir for a short time as an instrument of propaganda; but it is far from certain that such propaganda can give character to socialism, which more and more is losing its specific reality as a result of technique.

The task of the expert is to furnish the politician with information and estimates on which he can base a decision. A clearly defined division of responsibility corresponds to this functional division: that is, the expert has no responsibility. The problem is, above all else, to maintain the independence of the technician; he must avoid pressures, involvement in contests of influence, and the personal quarrels of the members of the administration. When the technician has completed his task, he indicates to the politicians the possible solutions and the probable consequences—and retires. Unfortunately, the Americans do not consider the inverse problem, which is, objectively speaking, becoming more important When the expert has effectively performed his task of pointing out the necessary ways and means, there is generally only one logical and admissible solution. The politician will then find himself obliged to choose between the technician’s solution, which is the only reasonable one, and other solutions, which he can indeed try out at his own peril but which are not reasonable.

we must admit that the state’s appropriation of technique has dispelled much of technique’s familiar magical appeal. Man is gradually losing his illusions about technique and his bedazzlement with it. He is becoming aware that he has not created an instrument of freedom but a new set of chains; this appears with compelling clarity when the state exploits technical instruments. Man, however, is still not willing to believe in the reality of this new situation; he tends to reject, above and beyond bad technical uses and doctrines, the results of this conjunction between state and technique.

Technique, then, brings its own ideology; and every technical realization engenders its own ideological justifications.

It is thus possible through psychological means to draw from man his last measure of effort and at the same time compel him to bear up under the disadvantages with which the new society hinders him. This is the first goal of psychological techniques. The only thing that matters technically is yield, production. This is the law of technique; this yield can only be obtained by the total mobilization of human beings, body and soul, and this implies the exploitation of all human psychic forces.

He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world. Admittedly, the machine has enriched man as it has changed him. The machine’s senses and organs have multiplied the powers of human senses and organs, enabling man to penetrate a new milieu and revealing to him unknown sights, liberties, and servitudes. He has been liberated little by little from physical constraints, but he is all the more the slave of abstract ones.

He acts through intermediaries and consequently has lost contact with reality. The interested reader may wish to consult Friedmann’s admirable work concerning the separation of the worker from his material. Man as worker has lost contact with the primary element of life and environment, the basic material out of which he makes what he makes. He no longer knows wood or iron or wool. He is acquainted only with the machine. His capacity to become a mechanic has replaced his knowledge of his material; this development has occasioned profound mental and psychic transformations which cannot yet be assessed.

Everything alive chooses of itself its attitudes, orientations, gestures, and rhythms. There is, perhaps, nothing more personal to a living being—as far as the observer is concerned—than its movements. In reality there is no such thing as movement in general; there are only the movements of individual things.

The fundamental rule of the world today is the rule of economic, political, and class competition—and this competition extends to the social and human relations of friendship and sex. The disequilibration between the traditional affirmation and the new criterion has produced the climate of anxiety and insecurity characteristic of our epoch and of our neuroses, and corresponds exactly to the distinction between the individualist society and the mass society.

Another aspect of this adaptation is the adjustment of the individual to technical instruments. The instruments in our possession are, in effect, mass instruments, both in the realm of material action and in that of psychological action. If at present we desire to exert any influence on man, it is possible to do so only through the mass media and only to the degree that man is a mass man. I shall return to this fact with reference to mass education and to propaganda methods, both of which are able to move the mass individual only by “massifying” him more and more.