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The Technological Bluff
Ellul's 1988 final major work on technique, diagnosing the rhetorical operation by which each new technical advance is presented as liberation while its structural costs are concealed — and raising, in terms that now read as prophecy, the question of the screen-mediated life.
The Technological Bluff (Le Bluff technologique in French) extended Ellul's analysis into the late twentieth century, addressing the increasingly sophisticated propaganda that accompanied technical development. The 'bluff' of the title names a specific rhetorical operation: the presentation of technique's expansion as a gift to humanity rather than as an imperative imposed on humanity. The book catalogued how this presentation had colonized not only advertising but journalism, education, and even scholarly discourse about technology. It argued that the bluff had become so pervasive that honest assessment of technical costs had been pushed to the margins of public conversation — a prediction whose accuracy in the AI discourse of 2025 is difficult to overstate.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Ellul's central observation in the book is that technique had become self-legitimating — its advances treated as intrinsically good, its problems treated as temporary side effects to be addressed by