The Technological Society

An examination of the growing influence of technical efficiency over modern society

Originally published in French in 1954 and later translated into English, The Technological Society examines the transformation of modern life through what Jacques Ellul calls Technique. For Ellul, technique is broader than technology in the everyday sense. It describes the systematic pursuit of efficiency, organisation, measurement, and optimisation across increasingly large areas of human activity.

The concern, then, is not simply that societies will acquire more machines. It is that the logic used to develop machines may gradually become a logic used to organise society itself. Once efficiency becomes the dominant measure of success, activities that were once governed by tradition, judgement, ethics, or human relationships can increasingly be approached as technical problems requiring technical solutions.

Ellul examines this process across economics, politics, education, work, communication, and everyday life. Technology becomes less something that society simply uses and more an environment within which social decisions are made.

This makes The Technological Society and important work for DCRU. It asks us to look beyond individual technologies and examine the system, assumptions, and values that surround them.

A question that begins with “What can this technology do?” can therefore be followed by another:

”Why have we decided that this is something that should be optimised in the first place?

That distinction becomes particularly relevant as technologies increasingly measure, automate, predict, and optimise activities that were once considered matters of human judgement.

Ellul’s work predates the personal computer, the Internet, social media, and artificial intelligence. Yes, its subject is not any particular technology. It is the relationship between technical efficiency and the organisation of human life.

The Technology Society is included in the DCRU library because it gives us a vocabulary for examining technology at the level of systems rather than individual tools, and for asking what happens when the pursuit of efficiency becomes one of the organising principles of society.