WORK
The Technological Society
Ellul's 1954 masterwork — <em>La Technique ou l'enjeu du siècle</em> in the French original — that introduced <em>la technique</em> as the defining phenomenon of modern civilization and established the framework this volume applies to the AI moment.
The Technological Society argued that twentieth-century civilization was governed not by its ideologies, its governments, or its economic systems but by a deeper logic — technique — that operated across all of them and conditioned all of them. The book catalogued technique's operation in economic activity, governance, human biology, and the inner life of the individual, demonstrating at every level that the logic of efficiency had colonized domains previously governed by other values. Its reception in the English-speaking world was shaped by Robert K. Merton's 1964 introduction, which framed Ellul as a sociologist of modernity rather than a theologian, and by the Cold War context in which its analysis of systematic rationalization spoke to readers on both sides of the ideological divide.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's argument was revolutionary for its refusal to treat technology as a neutral instrument. Where contemporary accounts assumed that the same machine could produce different outcomes depending on the
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