Here’s Jacques Ellul on state funding of research:

The state demands that anything scientific enter into the line of “normal” development, not only for the stake of the public interest but also because of its will to power. We have previously noted that this will to power has found in technique an extraordinary means of expression. The state quickly comes to demand that technique keep its promises and be an effective servant of state power. Everything not of direct interest to this drive for power appears valueless.

I mostly skimmed this book, and I would have some quibbles with it if I got more into the details, but I found it really good. Musical theater is far, faaaar outside of my research interests, but this book articulates a fascinating “theology of voice” within Mormonism that will be helpful as I look to write something on Ellul and Mormon Studies.

Reading this through an Ellulian lens is interesting. In the 1950s, he was expressing concern about the valuing of (applied) technique over (basic) science. In this article, though, it’s clear how often that basic science is still described and defended in applied/technical terms. pushing the boundaries of knowledge seems to only be valuable if it “sow[s] practical spinoffs and breakthroughs” or helps the U.S. in its geopolitical competition.

Gift link.

Ça fait plusieurs mois que je m’intéresse aux écrits de Jacques Ellul comme base théorique pour comprendre les techniques et technologies de nos jours. En fait, j’ai déjà écrit en février au sujet de l’intelligence artificielle générative et combien l’œuvre d’Ellul semble utile pour les critiques de l’IA malgré le fait qu’Ellul a vécu et écrit bien avant l’ère de l’IA comme nous la connaissons aujourd’hui.

Je suis en train de lire son livre posthume Théologie et technique (bien lentement, il faut l’avouer—j’avais commencé le livre en mai avant de devoir recommencer il y a quelques jours), et je trouve qu’il y a plusieurs passages qui me semblent utile lors des débats actuels au sujet de l’IA générative.

Don’t know what to say here except that I don’t like any of this. Reminded of two arguments from Ellul:

• First, that an effective ethics of technology considers systematic effects, not “good” uses vs. “bad” uses,

• Second, that “because it exists” is not sufficient justification for adopting a technology.

Anyway, here’s the gift link.

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 Ellul’s Théologie 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 à l’homme de changer les pierres en pain. Et il est bien content. Mais il ne comprend pas pourquoi il n’est pas encore dans le Paradis après ce miracle. Il n’a aucune idée du prix qu’il a déjà payé pour y arriver.

Abstraction—and especially the abstraction of humans and their lives—has been on my mind a lot lately. It comes up in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (though I need to read the print version so that I can take better notes—I have fond memories of the audiobook but can’t recall the exact details of his argument). It also comes up a lot in Jacques Ellul’s writing, which I’ve been consuming a lot of lately.

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: “You could have hurt yourself!” The son’s response? “But I didn’t!” Sure, the action had been potentially dangerous, but the landing had been a success, and the son didn’t see what the big deal was.

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.

I’m glad I found this book through the UK library. I had read that it’s foundational for the ideas Ellul would explore through the rest of his career, and that pans out. I don’t agree with everything, and I think he overreaches sometimes, but I did find this book compelling, and a good addition to my Ellul studies.

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 Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World over breakfast.

I continue to be pleasantly surprised by how relevant Ellul’s writing feels for today. Presence in the Modern World was first written in 1948, and even if you consider that the translation I’m reading is based on a 1988 second edition, that’s still enough time to earn the description “prescient.” (I’ve been reading Ellul in a mix of translated English and original French, depending on what’s more practical for the book in question.) Here’s a passage that particularly stood out to me this morning:

Okay, buying this Order of the Stick collection was worth it for this panel alone.

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 I’m reading a lot of his work right now, and I wouldn’t keep referencing his work if I didn’t find it relevant in some way. I’m particularly pleased that Ellul’s 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. I thought that I would spend my PhD researching games and learning, and even though I’m happy with my decision to pivot to social media research, I kind of miss some of those ideas I was playing around with at the time, and I’m glad that reading Ellul is helping bring them back.

Listened to Jason talk about this story on the 404 podcast while doing dishes last night (interspersed with watching clips of Moneyball, which I’ve never seem), and so I came back to skim the original article.

I don’t really care about baseball, so maybe I’m not allowed to have this opinion, but this all seems like a hellscape that Jacques Ellul’s technique explains pretty well.

I’ve repeatedly referenced 20th century French technology scholar Jacques Ellul on my blog(s) since the beginning of the year. While my interest in Ellul’s work is also personal and political, I wrote back in February that one of the main reasons I’m reading a lot of Ellul right now is to add a stronger theoretical foundation to my scholarly work.

With that context in mind, I’m happy to share that my first Ellul-inspired article has just been published in the Journal of Computing and Higher Education! After I wrote this post on what Ellul had to say about the value of research, Stephanie Moore was kind enough to invite me to expand my thoughts there into a contribution for a special issue of that journal that she was putting together on “The Research We Need” in educational technology.

I spent a lot of the morning anxious about generative AI after reading about other professors’ struggles with how the technology has upended how we teach. It’s 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.

Ça faisait plusieurs mois que je voulais lire ce livre, et j’ai été content de pouvoir en commander un exemplaire—surtout avant la folie actuelles des taxes douanières. Je dirais pas que le livre m’a deçu, car il y a plusieurs passages qui m’ont impressionné. Pourtant, il me semblait peu organisé et trop concentré sur des « preuves » que la Bible est un livre anarchiste. J’aime assez bien les inteprétations qu’Ellul a proposées, mais toute insistence que la Bible doit forcément dire telle ou telle chose m’agace. J’aurais préféré une attitude qui soulève la possibilité d’une telle interprétation.

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. It’s not so complete that I’ve ever actually seen Star Trek V (though I hear I’m not missing much), but it’s 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 “what does God need with a starship?”

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, let’s quote some more from Jacques Ellul, whom I referenced in the last post (and whom I’ve just been referencing a lot in general recently). Right before the passage I quoted in last week’s post—a passage from his 1980 essay The Power of Technique and the Ethics of Non-Power, he had this to say:

Bon, je regrette pas avoir commandé un livre depuis la Suisse juste avant l’annonce des taxes douanières, mais j’espère quand-même qu’il arrive avant la prochaine folie américaine.

I hate doing anything that seems to give Skinner any credit—especially after seeing how critical of him Ellul has been—but associating cleaning off our breakfast bar with lighting a scented candle has worked some behaviorist magic on me.

I don’t know that “inevitable” is the right word to use in the title of this post. What I’m trying to evoke is that specific argument about generative AI that now that it’s here, there’s 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 there’s no going back—that the genie is out of the bottle so we might as well harness it.

I recently finished an audiobook of Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society and have been finding other things to listen to now that I don’t 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 drama—adapted by Brian Daley—while cleaning up the kitchen, and I continued listening on the way in to work today. The radio drama is interesting in so many ways! For one, it expands a two hour movie into a nearly six-hour radio serial, and so it crams in a lot of material that isn’t present in the movie (or even—as far as I can tell—the original script).

This is an ambitious book—probably overambitious, and I don’t agree with all of the claims, especially with 60-70 years for Ellul’s ideas to marinate in continued technological development. Yet, his ideas are valuable and prescient—I don’t buy his claims as an ontological argument, but I think they make for a compelling theoretical framework for making sense of lots of what’s happening today.

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. I’m continuing to read—or, rather, listen to—Ellul’s The Technological Society, and I was interested to find a passage that brought together these two ideas. Here’s 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. The state is not disinterested any more than private capitalists, but it is concerned in a different way. The state claims to represent the public interest and hence to have the duty of being a “good manager,” dispensing the public revenues only on condition that they mean something, that they pay off. Disinterested activity on the part of the state is inconceivable. Some may such that such activity should not be impossible; but in fact it is impossible. Neither individuals nor public opinion nor the structure of the state is oriented toward the acceptance of the kind of culture pure scientific research would represent.