PERSON
Jacques Ellul
The French theologian and sociologist who diagnosed technique—the totality of methods aimed at absolute efficiency—as the autonomous, self-augmenting force that has colonized every domain of modern life, making the AI transition not a novelty but the perfection of a five-hundred-year logic.
Ellul drew a distinction his era missed and ours keeps missing: technology is hardware, but
technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency as their goal—a logic that penetrates education, medicine, governance, and art as thoroughly as it penetrates industry. Writing in 1954, he argued that technique had achieved
autonomy—that it now develops according to its own internal momentum, reshaping human values to align with its imperatives and making that reshaping invisible by presenting its demands as the individual's own desires. The
self-augmenting property means each technical advance produces the conditions for the next: better iron built better blast furnaces, better computers designed faster computers, and now AI optimizes the training of more powerful AI—a spiral with no natural termination. Against
[YOU] on AI's celebration of the collapsing imagination-to-artifact ratio, Ellul insists that the gap between intention and realization was never merely friction—it was a