Do you remember this scene from Metropolis? It is famous for the explosion that happens shortly the above clip. The young protagonist Freder has a vision of a ravenous machine-god eating ranks of proletariat workers. “Moloch!” he cries, and faints.
But until the explosion occurs, the machine runs flawlessly. Look at it: its operators
Technique transforms everything it touches into a machine.
— p.4
Why should we pay attention to what Ellul wrote over 60 years ago? I believe that any technologist who is serious about considering the social and ethical impact of their work should be familiar with the idea of technique. It is not enough to consider the impact of individual methods, devices, or technologies in isolation. In this interconnected world, technology enables and benefits from the integration of economies and societies. To think productively, we need a theory that accommodates, explains, and confronts this interconnectedness.
Ellul’s theory of technique does these things, and so I think it is an idea we should be conversant with. I hope that by examining Ellul’s ideas in today’s context, we can reinvigorate a useful critique not just of this ride-hailing startup or that social network, but the technical system that demands their existence.
Technique transforms everything it touches into a machine.
— p.4
Alarms cry out and overloaded gauges spin as the enormous engine reaches critical temperature and explodes, dousing its operators in scalding steam. They stagger away, desperately trying to free themselves from clothes melting to their bodies. “Moloch!” cries Freder as he witnesses the horror of the accident.
The young protagonist of Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis imagines the engine transformed into a huge demonic face. Platoons of workers march into its maw and are sacrificed to the pounding wheels and pistons within. It is a vision of humanity sacrificed to technology, a parable about the horror and devastation of mechanisation.
But another, subtler, horror is also illuminated in that famous scene. In the moments before the accident, Freder observes the enormous machine in flawless operation, powering the city he lives in. Ranks of underclass machine operators move in a precisely choreographed dance, pulling levers and turning wheels with a rhythmic tempo. They are almost indistinguishable from the rotating arms of the engine itself, seeming to actually be part of the mechanism. They remain human only biologically: in all other aspects, they have become machines.
1. The nature of technique
Technique transforms everything it touches into a machine.
— p.4
In his depiction of humans whose existence is totally dictated by the requirements and tempo of the machine, Fritz Lang anticipated Jacques Ellul’s polemic masterpiece La Technique. The work explores the concept of technique, which Ellul argues is a vital, and almost entirely overlooked, determinant of the course of human history.
Technique, as Ellul puts it, is the rational maximisation of efficiency in all areas of human action. Technique is not machinery; technique demands that humans become machines in order to be efficient. In a technical world, most potently symbolised by the clock, humans are not the determiners of their own destiny, or even of their daily schedules. They are subjected and subordinated entirely to mechanisms far greater than themselves.
The human being is no longer in any sense the agent of choice […] He is a device for recording effects and results obtained by various techniques. He does not make a choice of complex and, in some way, human motives.
— p.80
2. The autonomy of technique
The complete separation of the goal from the mechanism, the limitation of the problem to the means, and the refusal to interfere in any way with efficiency; all this […] lies at the basis of technical autonomy.
— p.133
Ellul’s technique resembles an ideology more than an artefact—though calling it an ideology would imply that humans consciously thought it up and promoted it. But in fact, technique is an almost-subconscious force in society, obeying its own internal logic.
By refusing to consider factors that are not technical (i.e. immeasurable factors not relating to yield or efficiency), technique creates a new moral universe, separate from both traditional and modern humanistic ethics. This alone might pose little concern. But technique swiftly engenders itself: the introduction of efficiency in one place demands efficiency in adjacent areas, and so the technical moral universe expands.
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.
— p.97
Let’s consider Uber for a moment, since I have already hinted at it. Consider how we are told that our cars, sitting uselessly in driveways or parking lots, are assets that are not being used to their fullest extent. Technicians lament the wasted potential, the inefficient allocation of vehicles to people who are not currently using them.
Now, there’s not much to object to here. I do happen to think the world has too many cars, and their ubiquitous use and ownership has led to a variety of bad outcomes (two examples being pollution and vast fields of parking spaces). A more efficient system which allowed for fewer cars to be shared more efficiently seems like an obvious good.
However, to drive this efficiency, we needed an Uber, a company which aggressively flouts regulation, shepherds workers into precarious employment, and can only be achieved by pervasive tracking of human movement. The technique of mass car production and ownership almost inevitably led to these further techniques of “gig economy” insecurity (rebranded by propaganda techniques as the “sharing economy”) and GPS surveillance.
3. Technique encounters the state
For [the technician], the state is not the expression of popular will, or a creation of God, or the essence of humanity, or a modality of the class war. It is an enterprise with certain services which ought to function properly. It is an enterprise which ought to be profitable, yield a maximum of efficiency, and have the nation for its working capital.
— p.264
On politics and the economy
In the largest portion of the work, Ellul walks the reader through the consequences of the technical development of the economy and the state. His perspective, from the midst of the Cold War, seems foreign to a generation born without the distant shadow of the USSR. But his analysis of the technical basis for both communism and capitalism is illuminating, explaining the alienation experienced under both regimes.
Its effects on democracy he considered catastrophic. The technique of propaganda, especially, threatens the freedom of humans to act according to their own judgement. As methods for manipulating human decision making become more developed and effective, the popular will is directed in accordance with technique.
We ought, on the whole, to abandon the idea of a ravaging and dictatorial state. Let us think only of the cold and impersonal mechanism that holds all sources of energy in its hands.
— p.196
Popular will can only express itself within the limits that technical necessities have fixed in advance.
— p.209
The state rarely discovers and applies any true techniques, for the simple reason that it has too much power and too many financial resources for its agents to seek out economy of means—the first requirement. […] The private person, on the other hand, is constrained by pecuniary necessity to develop true techniques.
— p.241
One of the gravest symptoms of our times is that technique has little by little emptied socialism of any content. […] The socialist state, because it is efficient, has been obliged to adopt the technical principles of capitalism. Hence, in order to distinguish the socialist situation from the others, socialism always falls back on that vaguest of all concepts, teleology.
— p.256
Every statesman is faced with the dilemma: either he must apply these techniques on their own invariable terms, or he must renounce them and forego the results they tend to produce. We must not lose sight of the fact that techniques furnish the best possible means, each in its own sphere.
— p.268
All of us, more or less, take propaganda to be the defense of an idea or system. We hear constantly that it cannot therefore be of any harm to the democracies. After all, there are a plurality of political parties employing propaganda to maintain opposing or even contradictory ideas; the citizen has a free choice among them. […] The hope [thus expressed] comes to this: the citizen receives a blow in the face from his neighbor on the right, which, fortunately, is compensated for by another blow from his neighbor on the left.
— p.373
On the adaptation of humans to a technical environment
The tool enables man to conquer. But, man, dost thou not know there is no more victory which is thy victory? The victory of our days belongs to the tool.
— p.146
One of the greatest feats of technique is its ability to integrate the existing natural resources, of which humans are a large and significant portion. Far from a crushing Orwellian regime, technique acts subtly and realises that for maximum efficiency, the worker (for human workers are still necessary) must be appeased, and even happy. No wonder Aldous Huxley was a fan of the work, and was instrumental in causing its translation into English.
Ellul describes at length the “human techniques” aimed at transforming humankind into something compatible with the new “technical milieu” being created. The alienation created by the transformation of humans into machines is palliated by all sorts of compensatory techniques, from films and sport to education to ergonomics.
Ellul’s bucolic ideal of the “natural milieu” before technique is difficult to accept uncritically, but his diagnosis of technical alienation, and his demonstration of further techniques which attempt to improve it, rings all too true in an age of mass media, dating apps, and epidemics of mental illness.
To obey a multiplicity of motives and not reason alone seems to be an important keynote of man. When, in the nineteenth century, society began to elaborate an exclusively rational technique which acknowledged only considerations of efficiency, it was felt that not only the traditions but the deepest instincts of humankind had been violated.
— p.73
The combination of man and technique is a happy one only if man has no responsibility.
— p.136
It is important to consider, for labor, not only time but intensity. […] We know that the peasant interrupts his workday with innumerable pauses. He chooses his own tempo and rhythm. He converses and cracks jokes with every passer-by. […] We cannot say with assurance that there has been progress from 1250 to 1950. In so doing, we would be comparing things which are not comparable.
— p.192
The further economic technique develops, the more it makes real the abstract conception of the economic man. […] The human being is changing slowly under the pressure of the economic milieu; he is in process of becoming the uncomplicated being the liberal economist constructed.
— p.219
It is necessary to protect man by outfitting him with a kind of psychological shock absorber. Only another technique is able to give efficient protection against the aggression of techniques.
— p.332
Basically, the Soviets believe it necessary to discover not the individual’s predestination but his adaptability. Vocational guidance then has the task of adapting the individual, through education, to planned manpower requirements. Vocational guidance is thus subordinated to planning technique.
— p.360
The yield is greater when man acts from consent, rather than constraint.
— p.409
On the future
Particularly disquieting is the gap between the enormous power [technicians] wield and their critical ability, which must be estimated as null. […] 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 human adventure.
— p.435
In the closing pages of the book, Ellul indulges in a cathartic excoriation of the technicians who are not just structurally entombed in technique (as we all are), but who enthusiastically prophesy the coming liberation of humankind through its means. Though Ellul insists he is no pessimist, it would take a very generous reader to come to the same conclusion. His dialectic approach to his works might explain this; La Technique presents the case for one side, which is compensated for in his other works of theology or social commentary.
Ellul was in some ways content to witness and proclaim the technical reality as he saw it. But he also acted throughout his life to challenge it, and to promote human flourishing and adventure. I hope his words and ideas might inspire us to similar reflection and passionate action.
All quotes in this article are taken from John Wilkinson’s 1964 translation. Out of respect for Ellul’s stance that “books are made to be read and not consulted,” I have provided the name of the section each quote appears in, but no page references.
I am keenly aware that I am myself involved in technological civilisation, and that its history is also my own.
— p.xxvii