Ellul strikes again

I began my sudden but immediately sustained interest in Jacques Ellul about a year ago now, and I’ve found his work to be terribly influential on my personal thinking and my professional work. I’m currently working on a manuscript that makes the argument that Ellulian thought is useful for drawing our attention in certain ways when considering artificial intelligence in education. I see theory as serving an analytical and rhetorical purpose for the way that it makes suggestions that a certain phenomenon works in certain ways and invites us to consider whether or how that is true.

One of the consequences of all of this is that I tend to see things through an Ellulian lens right now, asking myself what in such-and-such a news story corresponds with arguments he made about technology (or, more accurately, technique). If you scroll through the “Jacques Ellul” tag on my website, you’ll see that that’s happening a lot recently.

This post is sparked by a microblog post that someone wrote over the weekend about the Moltbook “social media platform for AI agents” that’s been in the news a lot lately. Here’s the text that stood out to me:

I’m not saying it’s good or bad… Value judgements don’t even matter right now.

This is a remarkably Ellulian turn of phrase—or at least one that he attributed to others and then critiqued. Here he is in a 1980(!) book chapter, “The Ethics of Nonpower”:

Technique itself has become a value. Technical progress appears to the average Western person as the guarantee of the future good and happiness, and technology assures him of the necessity of the kind of behavior favorable to this progress. Technique carries our hopes (thanks to technical progress, cancer will be conquered). Here it gives life a meaning. And the usual attitude, whenever there appear to be drawbacks in the use of technique, consists in declaring that it is not technique that is to be blamed, but rather man, who does not know how to use it. This means, by implication, that it is man who produces evil and that technique therefore stands for good.

He writes more on this in other sources as well, but a lot of it comes down to this: That technological development is seen as a self-evident good that somehow transcends considerations of good and evil. I don’t want to read too much into a single microblog post, especially since I respect its author even when I disagree with his takes, but it’s remarkable to me to see the attitude that Ellul was criticizing reproduced so faithfully 45 years after Ellul wrote that paragraph.

• Jacques Ellul
• artificial intelligence
• theory
• technique
• Micro.blog
• Moltbook