Below are posts associated with the âJacques Ellulâ tag.
Ellul on technique and turning stones to bread
I have long felt that it was important to recognize that technological development does not improve human lives as much as social change does. Reading through Jacques Ellulâs ThĂ©ologie et technique (Theology and Technique), I liked the way that this passage (on p. 35) seemed to capture that idea:
La technique a enfin permis Ă lâhomme de changer les pierres en pain. Et il est bien content. Mais il ne comprend pas pourquoi il nâest pas encore dans le Paradis aprĂšs ce miracle.
on abstracting human life in games
Abstractionâand especially the abstraction of humans and their livesâhas been on my mind a lot lately. It comes up in David Graeberâs Debt: The First 5,000 Years (though I need to read the print version so that I can take better notesâI have fond memories of the audiobook but canât recall the exact details of his argument). It also comes up a lot in Jacques Ellulâs writing, which Iâve been consuming a lot of lately.
Jacques Ellul and success as the only techbro metric
When I was in grad school, a faculty member in my program told me a story about his then-quite-young son, who was having a grand old time climbing on top of the kitchen table and then leaping off of it to the floor below. (Truth be told, my memories of this conversation are fuzzy, and the son might have been engaged in some otherwise dangerous behavior.) The father tried to tell the son to stop doing this, warning: âYou could have hurt yourself!
đ linkblog: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would âkillâ the AI industry
The sheer hubris of this attitude! The AI industry must exist, even if it means that it will put others out of business, and therefore any moral standard that would put the AI industry out of business must be abandoned. Very Ellulian.
đ bookblog: Presence in the Modern World (â€ïžâ€ïžâ€ïžâ€ïžđ€)
Iâm glad I found this book through the UK library. I had read that itâs foundational for the ideas Ellul would explore through the rest of his career, and that pans out. I donât agree with everything, and I think he overreaches sometimes, but I did find this book compelling, and a good addition to my Ellul studies.
more on the Liahona, efficiency, and technique
Yesterday afternoon, I was explaining (poorly) to some friends that I had been thinking about what the story of the Liahona in the Book of Mormon has to teach readers of that volume of scripture about (generative) AI. So, that connection was naturally on my mind when I was reading more of Jacques Ellulâs Presence in the Modern World over breakfast.
I continue to be pleasantly surprised by how relevant Ellulâs writing feels for today.
Jacques Ellul and Civilization VI
Okay, so I know that most of my long-form blogging for the past few months has touched on Jacques Ellul in some way, but Iâm reading a lot of his work right now, and I wouldnât keep referencing his work if I didnât find it relevant in some way. Iâm particularly pleased that Ellulâs writing is helping me revisit some ideas (and concerns) that I had over a decade ago, when I was applying to and then first beginning grad school.
đ linkblog: The Simulation Says the Orioles Should Be Good
Listened to Jason talk about this story on the 404 podcast while doing dishes last night (interspersed with watching clips of Moneyball, which Iâve never seem), and so I came back to skim the original article.
I donât really care about baseball, so maybe Iâm not allowed to have this opinion, but this all seems like a hellscape that Jacques Ellulâs technique explains pretty well.
new publication: Jacques Ellul and educational technology
Iâve repeatedly referenced 20th century French technology scholar Jacques Ellul on my blog(s) since the beginning of the year. While my interest in Ellulâs work is also personal and political, I wrote back in February that one of the main reasons Iâm reading a lot of Ellul right now is to add a stronger theoretical foundation to my scholarly work.
With that context in mind, Iâm happy to share that my first Ellul-inspired article has just been published in the Journal of Computing and Higher Education!
technology in Community of Christ's efforts to become a 'prophetic people'
I spent a lot of the morning anxious about generative AI after reading about other professorsâ struggles with how the technology has upended how we teach. Itâs long been frustrating to me that teachers and others bear the burden of adapting to a world that big tech companies have created, seemingly with the goal of enriching themselves. Later in the morning, I read a worrying story about how a company called Flock is building tools that will let customers of their automated license plate readers (including Lexington, the city I live in) do even more invasive surveillance of the people they pick up on their cameras.
đ bookblog: Anarchie et christianisme (â€ïžâ€ïžâ€ïžđ€đ€)
Ăa faisait plusieurs mois que je voulais lire ce livre, et jâai Ă©tĂ© content de pouvoir en commander un exemplaireâsurtout avant la folie actuelles des taxes douaniĂšres. Je dirais pas que le livre mâa deçu, car il y a plusieurs passages qui mâont impressionnĂ©. Pourtant, il me semblait peu organisĂ© et trop concentrĂ© sur des « preuves » que la Bible est un livre anarchiste. Jâaime assez bien les inteprĂ©tations quâEllul a proposĂ©es, mais toute insistence que la Bible doit forcĂ©ment dire telle ou telle chose mâagace.
Star Trek V, the Liahona, and Jacques Ellul's technique
Despite what my recent Star Trek comics binge might lead you to believe, my Star Trek fandom is actually kind of spotty in its coverage. Itâs not so complete that Iâve ever actually seen Star Trek V (though I hear Iâm not missing much), but itâs absolutely complete enough to be familiar with its most famous line. A being claiming to be the ultimate, galaxy-wide monotheistic deity asks for transport on the Enterprise, prompting a skeptical Kirk to ask âwhat does God need with a starship?
moral surrender, the environment, and generative AI
Last week, I blogged about how the purported inevitability of generative AI gets used to sidestep moral concerns about it. Earlier this morning, I shared a link to a story from The Verge that illustrates that perfectly, and so I wanted to write just a little bit more about it.
First, letâs quote some more from Jacques Ellul, whom I referenced in the last post (and whom Iâve just been referencing a lot in general recently).
two things that bug me about arguments that generative AI is inevitable or whatever
I donât know that âinevitableâ is the right word to use in the title of this post. What Iâm trying to evoke is that specific argument about generative AI that now that itâs here, thereâs no going back, so the only real/responsible/whatever choice is to learn to use it properly, teach others to use it, accept it as part of life, etc. These are the arguments that the world is forever changed and that thereâs no going backâthat the genie is out of the bottle so we might as well harness it.
Jacques Ellul's technique and Brian Daley's Alderaan
I recently finished an audiobook of Jacques Ellulâs The Technological Society and have been finding other things to listen to now that I donât have mid-twentieth century French philosophical reflections on technique to think through anymore. Last night, I began (re)listening to the National Public Radio Star Wars radio dramaâadapted by Brian Daleyâwhile cleaning up the kitchen, and I continued listening on the way in to work today. The radio drama is interesting in so many ways!
đ bookblog: The Technological Society (â€ïžâ€ïžâ€ïžâ€ïžđ€)
This is an ambitious bookâprobably overambitious, and I donât agree with all of the claims, especially with 60-70 years for Ellulâs ideas to marinate in continued technological development. Yet, his ideas are valuable and prescientâI donât buy his claims as an ontological argument, but I think they make for a compelling theoretical framework for making sense of lots of whatâs happening today.
Jacques Ellul and the value of research
Last month, I wrote on both my reading up on Jacques Ellul and on concerns about how we understand the purpose and value of research. Iâm continuing to readâor, rather, listen toâEllulâs The Technological Society, and I was interested to find a passage that brought together these two ideas. Hereâs Ellul, writing in the mid-twentieth century:
We have already examined the requirement of immediate applicability; here we meet it again on the state level.
policy and the prophetic voice: generative AI and deepfake nudes
This is a mess of a post blending thoughts on tech policy with religious ideas and lacking the kind of obvious throughline or structure that Iâd like it to have. Itâs also been in my head for a couple of weeks, and itâs time to release it into the world rather than wait for it to be something better. So, here it is:
I am frustrated with generative AI technology for many reasons, but one of the things at the top of that list is the knowledge that todayâs kids are growing up in a world where it is possibleâeven likelyâthat their middle and high school experiences are going to involve someone using generative AI tools to produce deepfake nudes (or other non-consensual intimate imageryâNCII) of them.
Jacques Ellul's technique and generative AI
Throughout my career, Iâve been a data-first researcher, and theory has always been one of my weak areas. This is not to say that I dismiss the importance of theory: I appreciate danah boyd and Kate Crawfordâs critique of Chris Andersonâs âthe numbers speak for themselvesâ in their 2012 paper Critical Questions for Big Data as much as I appreciate Catherine DâIgnazio and Lauren Kleinâs similar critique in their book Data Feminism.
hoopla and other apps that make digital books worse than physical ones
I have mixed feelings about the digital library app hooplaâwhich offers access to ebooks, electronic comics, and other media that my library doesnât necessarily carry in physical formatâbut itâs so dang useful that I keep using it despite some hesitations (see this post for some recent complaints). Tonight, though, as I tried to wrap up the introduction to the English translation of Jacques Ellulâs ThĂ©ologie et technique (which I ought to just buy in French-language physical format, since its publishing house offers 5⏠shipping to the U.