"Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity"
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Ellul isn t warning that machines are getting better; he s warning that they are getting sovereign. The sting of this line is its refusal to treat technology as a neutral toolbox. For him, modern technology is a "total phenomenon": not a sector, not a set of gadgets, but an environment that rewrites the rules of living. The real provocation is the last clause, where "efficiency" stops being a preference and becomes an obligation. That shift turns a managerial virtue into a moral regime.
The subtext is that technique does not merely serve human ends; it quietly selects them. Once efficiency becomes the default measure of value, institutions reengineer themselves around what can be optimized, quantified, and sped up. The costs are predictable: ambiguity looks like waste, tradition like friction, and deliberation like delay. Human activity gets forced into templates that machines and bureaucracies can process, while anything stubbornly unmeasurable (care, contemplation, dissent) is pressured to justify itself in the language of output.
Context matters. Ellul writes in the long shadow of World War II, industrial bureaucracy, and the postwar boom, when technological systems proved they could mobilize entire societies with terrifying competence. His phrase "new social order" is doing political work: it implies we are not choosing this world so much as being organized into it. The line reads like a diagnosis of soft compulsion: no one needs to ban alternative ways of life when the efficient way becomes the only viable way to participate.
The subtext is that technique does not merely serve human ends; it quietly selects them. Once efficiency becomes the default measure of value, institutions reengineer themselves around what can be optimized, quantified, and sped up. The costs are predictable: ambiguity looks like waste, tradition like friction, and deliberation like delay. Human activity gets forced into templates that machines and bureaucracies can process, while anything stubbornly unmeasurable (care, contemplation, dissent) is pressured to justify itself in the language of output.
Context matters. Ellul writes in the long shadow of World War II, industrial bureaucracy, and the postwar boom, when technological systems proved they could mobilize entire societies with terrifying competence. His phrase "new social order" is doing political work: it implies we are not choosing this world so much as being organized into it. The line reads like a diagnosis of soft compulsion: no one needs to ban alternative ways of life when the efficient way becomes the only viable way to participate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|---|
| Source | Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (La Technique). Original French 1954; commonly cited in the English translation (1964) — passage describing technology as a "total phenomenon" (translation variants exist). |
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