AI agents are Ellul’s technical morality personified. They can’t “cheat,” they don’t “go rogue,” they just get the job done—and show us the moral dangers of caring about efficacy and efficiency.

So, I just published a paper where I implicitly argued that AI appeals to folks like Elon Musk because it appears to provide unvarnished facts—but that there is no such thing as unvarnished facts, only consensus that we come to through (informed!) dialogue and debate.

Doctors aren’t perfect, but the same experts that Kennedy is vilifying are the ones that produce the information AI is built on. This is a wild epistemological misunderstanding.

There are a handful of subreddits I follow via RSS, and the decision to stop supporting RSS is burning up whatever remaining respect I had for the platform.

I don’t want to defend Reddit too much here, because I’ve been disappointed with them for years, but this is another example of “the problem is with the mere existence of the technology,” and “the technology” is once again generative AI.

One of the most unintuitive things about Jacques Ellul’s thinking (for me, at least) is the way that it is built on skepticism of efficacy and efficiency. Maybe getting things done isn’t always good. Maybe doing things more efficiently isn’t always better. As someone spending a big chunk of his week overhauling his productivity systems so that he feels more on top of things, these propositions feel wrong when I first read them.

I had been wanting for some time to write an article channeling some of my grumpiness about AI, and so when Information and Learning Sciences announced a special issue on “Critical Studies Perspectives on AI’s Impact in Education,” it seemed like a good chance to actually act on that. I was especially interested in two of the example research questions from the CFP:

What research and scholarly paradigms, methods and theories are well-suited to understanding the proliferation of AI in education contexts?

I’m slowly coming up on a year since I migrated my exported Facebook posts into Day One, and while some of it (much of it) is cringeworthy, it still surfaces gems every once in a while. Fourteen years ago today, I posted something that was actually on my mind earlier this morning and that (like other parts of my life) Jacques Ellul’s work has given me a framework to understand better. Here’s the post:

Some good insights here. Taylorism is always worth talking about.

I am repeatedly on record as being a fan of the Book of Mormon despite believing it’s ahistorical and despite recognizing how deeply problematic some of its ideas are. If there’s one problematic idea that I’m not totally sure can be redeemed even with a critical, willing-to-push-back reading of the text, it’s the appropriation of Indigenous history into the core narrative of the Book of Mormon.

Recently rereading Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything drew my attention some specific aspects of this relationship that I think are particularly interesting (and troubling). They are also professionally interesting to me since Graeber and Wengrow are fundamentally pushing back on narratives of technical progress. In fact, I nearly wrote this post for my “Work” sub-blog but am too lazy this morning to do the scaffolding needed to make the Book of Mormon narrative accessible to those not familiar with it; I recognize that someone can also read my “Communities” posts without being super familiar with the Book of Mormon, but I’m going to roll the dice on that one and answer questions as they come up.

Hard article to read, but an important one. Here’s the thing: I know two people who own Meta “pervert glasses,” and I think if there is an innocuous use case for these glasses, they’re demonstrating it.

And yet, here’s Ellul on technical ambivalence:

And this technological nexus is characteristically ambivalent. Because the solution of one problem by technological means immediately raises a multitude of others, which result directly from those very means, it is impossible to say whether technique produces good or evil effects. It does both, simultaneously. We are confronted with a system in the strict sense of the word, what I will call the “technological system,” hence ethical issues may only be considered relative to the system as a whole, and not to specific instances.

Anyone following this blog for a while—even from a distance—will have noticed how frequently I reference Jacques Ellul, and anyone paying attention to what I’m reading these days will note that there’s been an uptick in the Mormon Studies books I’m reading recently. Without giving too much away, the idea for a book I mentioned a month ago brings these two ideas together. As evidenced by my recent presentation at the International Jacques Ellul Society, I think that Ellul’s writing is helpful for understanding Mormonism’s relationship with technology and media, and I expect to be writing more about this in the years to come.

Lots to like in this post.

Such a helpful collection of data, and I’m pleased by how many echoes of Ellul are in there, as I move forward with trying to apply his thought to Mormonism.

As I’ve said before, there’s something Ellulian in all of this AI/AI detection arms race. The creation of a different climate strikes me as more important than the utility (or problems) of any given tool.

I was reading some Jacques Ellul yesterday, where he noted that in “technical morality,” technology cannot do wrong, only the humans using the technology.

Flock’s response here seems to be a variation on that: The technology cannot be inaccurate, only the humans using it.

This story is full of twists and turns, and what I think is most important is how generative AI creates a new environment.

I think students using generative AI to cheat is super dumb. I also think that using AI detectors is super problematic. Independent of what did or did not happen here, I’m struck by the way that the mere existence of these kinds of technologies creates a multilayered climate of suspicion and distrust.

Rereading The Dawn of Everything finally pushed me to use an on-hand Libro.fm credit to get this in audiobook so I could give it a try. I find Graeber to be a bit uneven (I appreciate most of what he writes, but I don’t find all of his arguments totally convincing), and so I waffled on whether to give this full marks.

Ultimately, I went with the more generous rating, because even if some of his ideas didn’t land with me, it’s useful to have so much of his thinking captured in one place. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll need to get a print copy of this for the same research project that Dawn of Everything had me thinking about.

I’ve mentioned a few times recently across my different subblogs that importing my Twitter archive into the Day One journaling app has been interesting for my ability to go back into my past in ways that I wasn’t able to before. Yesterday, going through Day One’s “On This Day” feature turned up a tweet from five years earlier that stood out to me:

Also, this started as a silly idea while biking to campus one morning, but I increasingly want to write something on Mormonism, technology, and authority that a) discusses interplay between “tools” and “systems” (both as tech) and b) uses Hiram Page and seer stones as an example.

I wasn’t expecting to count this as a “work read” when I decided to reread it a couple of months ago, but wow, did it ever help make sense of some ideas I’m kicking around for a potential book project.

Like my last read, I have to admit that I’m ill-suited to evaluate the historical or anthropological claims. I really appreciate the framework it brings to its inquiry, though, not least for the way it echoes similar ideas in Jacques Ellul’s work. This gets me thinking about anarchist commonalities between these authors, which is something I want to explore more.

Je viens de passer trois jours à un colloque sur Jacques Ellul, un penseur français qui m’intéresse beaucoup en ce moment (et depuis déjà un peu de temps). J’avoue sans honte qu’une des choses qui m’a attiré chez Ellul, c’était sa francophonie, car le français m’est très cher et je suis toujours à la recherche des moyens d’entraîner mes propres capacités francophones.

C’était donc un grand plaisir de rencontre d’autres francophones à ce colloque (même si la plupart des gens qui y assistaient étaient des anglophones qui lisaient Ellul uniquement en traduction—je ne critique pas, je constate). J’ai pu bavarder avec deux Bordelais.e.s sans trop dire des bêtises, je crois que j’ai bien réussi à savoir quand je pouvais tutoyer (alors que la plupart du temps, j’ai du mal à comprendre ces nuances), et j’ai même fait la bise pour la première fois depuis bien des années (en disant au revoir à une nouvelle amie).

Later this week, I’ll be presenting for the first time at the International Jacques Ellul Society. My paper is called Image and Word in Mormonism’s Foundational Media Events, and I’ll be using Ellul’s image and word framework in The Humiliation of the Word as an explanatory framework for how the founding events of Mormonism can be understood by scholars and believers as either the sure-and-certain image or the ambiguous and fleeting word. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Latter-day Saints and their leaders tend to prefer the image over the word, and I think Ellul’s writing helps understand why this is (beyond the obvious reasons)

I had another chance to preach for the Beyond the Walls ministry based out of Toronto yesterday. I went a bit off-script in emphasizing passages other than the one I was assigned to, but I’m pretty happy with the result, and I hope it worked out for others, as well. There are a lot of people (Jacques Ellul, Pete Enns, Thomas Römer) whose ideas are floating in the background of this sermon without ever getting mentioned—it channels a lot of thoughts that I’ve had over the past decade or so. Here are the recording and the script:

Recently, I’ve been thinking about Jacques Ellul’s image/word dichotomy as more broadly applicable than to media—as applicable to the whole technical phenomenon that he criticizes. That is, by virtue of its seeming objectivity, the technical phenomenon enjoys trust that is not warranted when one digs into the details and sees the fuzziness and subjectivities and artifice that prop the whole thing up. Doctorow’s critique here seems firmly in that vein.

I don’t mind being a broken record when pointing out Ellulian vibes. Check this paragraph out:

These are unfortunate examples of how AI can lead to mistreatment of people because of technical flaws as well as misplaced human faith in the technology’s supposed objectivity. These cases involve different tools, but the underlying issue is the same. AI systems produce probabilities, and people treat them as certainties.

One of the things I’ve had to wrestle with while engaging more and more with Jacques Ellul is that Ted Kaczynski thought he was pretty cool, too.

This Mauro Lubrano quote in the piece sums up a lot of my same feelings:

While anti-technology violence is unacceptable, it should not be used as an excuse to securitize AI and emerging technologies, thereby silencing those who are critical of the current trajectory.

Another good take on Leo and Tolkien.