"The Technological Society" by Jaques Ellul

You're reading this on a screen. You chose to read it. But when was the last time you went an hour without checking a screen, not because you decided to, but because you genuinely didn't feel the pull?

Jacques Ellul thought that question was more important than it seems. In The Technological Society, published in French in 1954 and translated into English in 1964, he argued that modern technology isn't a neutral set of tools we pick up and put down at will. It's an autonomous system, a totalizing logic of efficiency that reshapes every domain of human life, including the domains we think of as free.

In the video, I covered the core of Ellul's argument: technique as the drive toward absolute efficiency, the way technology reshapes us rather than the reverse, the colonization of leisure, and what Josef Pieper's concept of genuine leisure offers as a counterweight. In this post, I want to fill in a section I had to skip: Neil Postman's Technopoly, which takes Ellul's insights and applies them with surgical precision to the information age. I'll also recommend some further reading for anyone who wants to go deeper.

The Core of Ellul's Argument

Ellul's key term isn't "technology." It's technique, which he defines as the totality of methods rationally arrived at, aimed at absolute efficiency in every field of human activity. Technique isn't your phone. Technique is the reason your phone is designed to be addictive, the reason your employer measures your productivity in metrics, the reason your school grades you on a curve, and the reason you feel guilty for doing nothing on a Saturday.

The argument has several layers. First, technique makes efficiency the supreme value. Not one value among many, but the standard against which everything is measured. Once a more efficient method exists, choosing the less efficient one becomes irrational. You don't have a real choice. Second, technique doesn't just serve human purposes; it reshapes human beings to fit its requirements. TikTok didn't respond to your short attention span; it created it. GPS didn't supplement your sense of direction; it replaced it. By the time you're "choosing," the technique has already restructured the environment so that there's only one rational choice.

Third, even leisure (the domain we think of as the escape from technique) gets absorbed. Your rest is scheduled. Your vacation is optimized. Your meditation is tracked. Productivity gurus sell you "strategic rest" so you can work more efficiently tomorrow. The machine doesn't stop when you clock out.

And that's where Josef Pieper comes in. In Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1952), Pieper argued that genuine leisure isn't "time off." It's a spiritual and philosophical attitude: an inner receptivity, a willingness to simply be rather than to produce. The ancient Greeks understood this. The word "school" comes from scholē, which means leisure. True leisure (contemplation, wonder, worship, play for its own sake) is precisely what technique cannot absorb, because there's no efficiency to optimize. You can't A/B test wonder.

The Missing Section: Neil Postman's Technopoly

If Ellul is the prophet, Neil Postman is the journalist who shows you the prophecy coming true in your living room.

Postman, a professor of media ecology at New York University, acknowledged The Technological Society as a major influence on his work. His 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology takes Ellul's framework and applies it specifically to the way information technology restructures thought, culture, and institutions.

The Three Stages

Postman identifies three stages in the relationship between culture and technology. The first is tool-using cultures, where tools serve the existing culture. A plow helps a farmer farm, but farming was already happening. The tools don't change the structure of belief or social organization. Think of the medieval period: clocks existed, but the monastery bell still governed the day. The tool served the institution.

The second stage is technocracy, which Postman dates roughly to the Industrial Revolution. Here, tools begin to challenge and reshape culture. The clock stops serving the monastery and starts governing the factory. Efficiency becomes a social value. But in a technocracy, older sources of meaning (religion, tradition, family, community) still push back. There's a tension between the old world and the new.

The third stage is technopoly, and Postman argues that America crossed into it in the late 20th century. In a technopoly, technology doesn't just challenge older sources of meaning. It eliminates them. Every form of authority, every institution, every domain of life submits to the sovereignty of technique. There is no counternarrative. The culture doesn't just use technology; it is defined by it.

Information Glut and the Loss of Meaning

One of Postman's sharpest insights is about information. In a tool-using culture or a technocracy, information is scarce and therefore valuable. Institutions (churches, universities, governments) serve as gatekeepers, filtering and organizing information into meaningful frameworks. You didn't just receive data; you received it within a context that told you what it meant and what to do about it.

In a technopoly, information becomes a flood. And the old gatekeeping institutions lose their authority. The result isn't more knowledge; it's less meaning. You know that the rainforest is disappearing, that a civil war is happening in a country you can't find on a map, that a celebrity got divorced, and that your friend had a sandwich for lunch. These pieces of information arrive with equal weight, stripped of context, and you have no framework for deciding which ones matter. The sheer volume of data creates a kind of cultural noise in which signal is impossible to find.

This is Ellul's point about technique applied to information specifically. The technology of information production and distribution has become so efficient that it overwhelms the human capacity to process it. And we respond not by questioning the technology, but by inventing new techniques to manage the overload (algorithms, feeds, recommendation engines), which only deepen the problem, because they optimize for engagement, not for understanding.

The Invisible Ideology

Postman's deepest claim is that technopoly operates as an invisible ideology. Nobody voted for it. Nobody announced it. It doesn't have a manifesto. But it has a set of core commitments that are so pervasive we mistake them for common sense: that measurement is superior to judgment, that efficiency is the highest good, that technical progress is the same thing as human progress, and that if something can be done it should be done.

These commitments aren't argued for. They don't need to be. They're built into the structure of every institution, every app, every performance review, every school curriculum. You don't adopt the ideology of technopoly. You breathe it.

This is where Postman adds something to Ellul. Ellul described technique as autonomous, a force that runs on its own logic. Postman shows you the mechanism by which it becomes invisible: information overload destroys the older frameworks of meaning that would have allowed you to see technique for what it is. You can't critique a system you don't have the vocabulary to describe, and technopoly systematically erodes that vocabulary.

The Medium Is the Message, But It's Ellul's Insight First

Marshall McLuhan famously said "the medium is the message": that the technology of communication shapes thought more than the content it carries. Postman spent his career showing what that looks like in practice, most notably in Amusing Ourselves to Death, where he argued that television doesn't just deliver entertainment; it turns everything into entertainment, including news, politics, religion, and education.

But both McLuhan and Postman were building on what Ellul had already argued in 1954: that technique reshapes the human being to fit its requirements, and that we don't notice because we're inside it. Postman acknowledged the debt explicitly. The line from Ellul to McLuhan to Postman is one of the most important intellectual genealogies of the 20th century, and if you're watching this video on a phone that you check 90 times a day, you're living proof that all three of them were onto something.

Pieper's Answer, Revisited

If Ellul diagnoses the disease and Postman shows you the symptoms, Pieper prescribes the cure. And the cure is almost absurdly simple: stop. Be useless. Do something with no measurable output.

Not "self-care" as another optimization strategy. Not a digital detox that you time with an app. Genuine contemplation, rest, play, and wonder for their own sake. The things that technique cannot absorb because they have no efficiency to optimize.

Pieper was a Catholic Thomist writing from within the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas. Ellul was a Reformed Protestant and a sociologist. They were writing simultaneously (Pieper published Leisure, the Basis of Culture in 1952; Ellul published La Technique in 1954), from completely different traditions, arriving at complementary diagnoses of the same modern crisis. Pieper saw that modernity had become "total work": a world where everything, including rest, is justified only insofar as it serves productivity. Ellul saw that technique had colonized every domain, including the domains we think of as free. Together, they offer something that neither offers alone: a diagnosis and a vision.

Further Reading

If this topic resonates, here are the books I'd recommend, roughly in the order I'd read them.

1. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)

The natural next step after Ellul. Postman writes clearly and accessibly (far more so than Ellul), and his analysis of how information technology restructures culture is devastating. If you only read one book on this list beyond Ellul himself, make it this one.

2. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)

Postman's earlier and more famous book, focused specifically on television. His argument is that we didn't get Orwell's dystopia; we got Huxley's. Nobody needs to ban books when nobody wants to read them. Nobody needs to suppress information when people are drowning in it. Written about TV, but it reads as prophecy about social media.

3. Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1952)

Short, beautiful, and radical. Pieper argues that leisure (genuine contemplative openness, not entertainment) is the foundation of all culture, and that modern society has systematically destroyed it. Pairs perfectly with Ellul. Where Ellul leaves you feeling trapped, Pieper shows you the door.

4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)

McLuhan is harder to read than Postman (he writes in a deliberately disorienting style), but his core insights are indispensable. Every technology is an extension of a human faculty, and every extension amputates something. The car extends the foot and atrophies the legs. The phone extends the voice and atrophies the community. "The medium is the message" is the thesis; this book is the proof.

5. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984)

Borgmann, a philosopher at the University of Montana, offers what he calls the "device paradigm": modern technology systematically replaces "focal things" (a fireplace, a home-cooked meal, a musical instrument) with "devices" (a central heating system, a microwave dinner, a Spotify playlist). The device delivers the commodity while hiding the machinery. You get the heat without the fire. And something human is lost in the exchange. Less famous than Ellul or Postman, but arguably more practical. Borgmann is especially good on what resistance looks like in daily life.

6. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1962)

Ellul's companion to The Technological Society, focused specifically on how technique operates in the domain of communication and persuasion. His argument is that propaganda isn't just a tool of totalitarian states; it's a structural feature of any technological society, because technique requires conformity, and propaganda is the most efficient way to produce it. Unsettling and illuminating.

Conclusion

Ellul wrote The Technological Society in 1954 and it reads like it was written yesterday. Postman wrote Technopoly in 1992 and it reads like it was written tomorrow. The speed at which their analyses have gone from provocative to obvious should tell you something about the trajectory we're on.

The question isn't whether they were right. Look around. The question is what we do about it. And the answer, I think, starts where Pieper started: with the radical, countercultural act of doing nothing useful. Not nothing productive rebranded as "self-care." Actually nothing. Contemplation. Wonder. Rest without an ROI.

The things that have no measurable output are the things that make you human. And technique can't touch them, unless you let it.