Today in Technology History
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January 6
Jacques César Ellul was one of the last century's most prominent critics of technology. Born on January 6, 1912 in Bordeaux, Ellul was a French intellectual who wrote four dozen books on topics such as religion and politics. His book The Technological Society, originally published in French in 1954, is a potent indictment of our modern approach to technology. Technology has made our world drab and unsatisfying, Ellul said:
The machine, so characteristic of the nineteenth century, made an abrupt entrance into a society which, from the political, institutional, and human points of view, was not made to receive it; and man has had to put up with it as best he can. Men now live in conditions that are less than human. Consider the concentration of our great cities, the slums, the lack of space, of air, of time, the gloomy streets and the sallow lights that confuse night and day. Think of our dehumanized factories, our unsatisfied senses, our working women, our estrangement from nature. Life in such an environment has no meaning. Consider our public transportation, in which man is less important than a parcel; our hospitals, in which he is only a number. Yet we call this progress. ... And the noise, that monster boring into us at every hour of the night without respite.
Rather than simply inveighing against technology, Ellul criticized the broader concept of "technique" -- the mindset which impels us to seek rational and efficient solutions for every problem. Technique destroys our traditions and erodes our freedom, Ellul argued, and by submitting to it we are dooming ourselves to a ghastly future.
Ellul died in 1994. The accuracy of his bleak and pessimistic predictions remains to be seen.
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