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Nolen Gertz on Ellul
The contemporary philosopher who has done more than anyone to extend Ellul's framework into the AI era — and whose 2023 essay 'Ellul Among the Machines' provides the sharpest available application of la technique to contemporary language models.
Nolen Gertz, associate professor of applied philosophy at the University of Twente, is the contemporary philosopher most responsible for rehabilitating Ellul as an analyst of artificial intelligence. His 2018 book Nihilism and Technology applied Ellulian analysis to social media, smartphones, and surveillance systems, demonstrating that Ellul's framework retained diagnostic power in domains he could not have foreseen. His 2023 Commonweal essay 'Ellul Among the Machines' extended the analysis to large language models, observing that AI's confusion about its own understanding mirrors a confusion technique has produced in human beings — the inability to distinguish genuine comprehension from plausible pattern-generation, whether in the machine or in ourselves.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Gertz's contribution to contemporary Ellul scholarship is distinctive in two respects. First, he has insisted on reading Ellul structurally rather than theologically, making the framework available to secular readers without stripping it of its analytical force. Second, he has