The Technological Society, a book that, decades after its publication, feels less like a historical analysis and more like a chilling prophecy unfolding before our eyes. It’s a book that forces us to confront a profound truth: We are not just using technology; we are being used by it.

The common fear is that of robots rising up, or machines taking over, but Ellul points to a far more subtle and insidious threat: the rise of “Technique.” This isn’t simply about machines or gadgets. It’s about the principle of efficiency becoming the dominant force in all human endeavors. Technique, in Ellul’s view, is the search for the “one best means” to achieve any given end. It is the relentless pursuit of the optimal, applied not just to industrial production, but to politics, education, medicine, even our personal relationships. Think about it: data driven decisions, algorithmic recommendations, metrics to measure everything from happiness to productivity. This is Technique at work.

Anything that slows down the process, anything that deviates from the optimal path, a moment of spontaneous creativity, a lengthy conversation that isn’t productive, a decision based on intuition or empathy rather than data, becomes an inefficiency. Something to be minimized or eliminated.

Was discussing this book in a different post earlier I’ve always wanted read it but never had a chance.

Definitely seems relevant for a lot of reasons.

To be fair, he was probably the youngest and most vulnerable participant, and the experiment lasted 3 years. He started attending Harvard at 16, and was probably around 16/17 when the study began.

They used psychological warfare on a kid who was already socially reserved on top of feeling alienated from his peers due to his age, and likely stressed due to being away from his family and home for the first time in his young life. During a developmental period that we now recognize is probably the most critical window for young men in particular to develop a mental illness like schizophrenia, they did this:

Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were given to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition. Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.

Like holy shit…

True, and I didn’t mean it in a necessarily derogatory way in terms of judgment for his mental illness, but for his actions. I know I should be more careful about saying things like that, and didn’t mean to imply anything negative about people who struggle with mental illness.

It’s complicated. Nobody should have had to go through what he did, but something awful somebody went through can’t be used as a justification for them doing something awful to somebody else. It can be the reason they did it, and it may arguably make them not fully responsible for their own behavior, but it also doesn’t make them an innocent.

This dude was a pos bc he hurt so many people for no real reason, but when you read about the stuff he was worried about, it’s eerily accurate. It’s like he crawled inside Peter Thiel’s head, got a glimpse of his plans, and that’s what set him off the deep end.

Editing to add, he was already in a very vulnerable state mentally when he decided to drop out of society, very likely related to an unethical psychological experiment he “participated” in at Harvard.

The Technological Society is the book he read while living in the wilderness that actually seemed to inspire his writings.

Ellul argues that modern society is being dominated by technique, which he defines as a series of means that are established to achieve an end. Technique is ultimately focused on the concept of efficiency. The term “technique” is to be comprehended in its broadest possible meaning as it touches upon virtually all areas of life, including science, automation, but also politics and human relations.

I mean…

I mean this is why you have different security clearances. Nobody working in the social security administration should have full access to my speeding tickets from 20 years ago, or find out if I was on Medicaid at some point in my life with a single click.

This is very different than making a formal documented request. It enables people to discriminate on information that they shouldn’t know in the first place, and keeps anyone from holding them accountable for it.

Not to mention, if it’s used the way other people have used it, it allows the government to discriminate against other people for just having a loose connection to somebody else.

Oh you grew up poor? Your parents were divorced? The algorithm has determined that makes you high risk, now those things that weren’t even in your control will influence everything you do for the rest of your life.

Data is Destiny

Occam’s razor says too much ketamine and Twitter, but maybe he tried to undo the damage with a chip

Works on contingency. No money down.

Works on contingency? No, money down!

I mean I don’t believe there is anything that makes it worth that value, but there are people who will fall prey to the hype. Maybe less so now that Elon has destroyed his Brand and can’t even move Teslas, but it is concerning that he was given this FDA certification and also seems to have potentially been kind of rewarded to keep quiet and disappear from the administration.

The economy is absolutely in the toilet right now, then suddenly the same day he and Trump break up, somebody invests $600M in his shitty biotech that can’t even stay glued in place?

Not to mention, this seems to have happened within days of a competitor company announcing they will be launching their own neural chip by the end of the year

Yep, I bought one like 10 years ago bc I thought it was cool. The fact that people are letting Elon musk insert a fucking chip in their brain to achieve the same tech that’s been available for over 10 years is just 🤯

Might also explain why they’re the only ones that seem to have all this knowledge of a population crisis that no one else is aware of.

Thank God for the technocratic elite, and their foresight to know their plans for greatness will almost certainly wipe out the entire U.S. population. Hazard of being part of the unwashed masses, I guess.

Glad they are doing all this while they simultaneously argue that a loss of our personal liberty is a small price to pay for their protection. If they weren’t keeping us safe from… ::gestures vaguely:: China(?) then who would?

Well, what are we 'aposta do?!

Strangle these defenseless corporations with the same kind of regulations we continue to create and impose on small businesses? Do you even know who their father is?!

Well you need someone to control the narrative, so if there’s no one being tasked by an administration to actively spread a conspiracy, it’s harder to get people to embrace it.

Reuters reported last summer that the Pentagon had a campaign to spread online disinformation about China’s vaccine Doesn’t really seem too far fetched to think something similar was used against Americans by the same people that would now benefit from Americans being blissfully unaware of how dangerous it is to put one of these chips in their brain. After all, it has an official breakthrough tag now, and if it was really so dangerous “why would the FDA approve it?”

Not sure if you remember, but we were also one of the only countries that tried to downplay the effectiveness of people wearing masks during the earliest days of the pandemic. That was one I never could figure out back then, but now I’m suspicious that was also part of a targeted disinformation campaign.

March 2020 White House seeks assistance from tech companies in fight against coronavirus

The White House on Wednesday asked the tech industry’s top players to help the government in the fight against coronavirus, tapping the expertise of companies like Apple, Facebook and Amazon to help beat back falsehoods and use artificial intelligence to glean new insights into the fast-spreading virus.

In a phone call, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios implored the companies to help out with an “all-hands-on-deck effort” to fight the new coronavirus.

According to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, top tech trade groups and companies participated in the call, including Apple, Cisco, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, the Consumer Technology Association, the Information Technology Industry Council and others.

The meeting revolved around how the tech industry can better coordinate with the government to get out authoritative facts about the coronavirus while cracking down on the spread of bunk cures and conspiracy theories spreading online.

So with all those people and their resources controlling the narrative, why would we then be spreading misinformation about masking? Why would anybody care if large numbers of Americans were covering their face to stop the spread of disease?

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I do feel like the public should be more aware that Trump’s former CTO and current science advisor, the guy who was also tasked with preventing online disinformation being spread during COVID, was also tirelessly promoting deregulated facial recognition technology long before anyone was considering that masking in public would be common in the U.S.

Nov 2019: Trump CTO Addresses AI, Facial Recognition, Immigration, Tech Infrastructure, and More

Yeah, I wrote about that and in particular hope more people will pay attention to what Michael Kratsios is doing.

Kratsios stays pretty quiet, so most people aren’t aware of him, or the fact he and Thiel were behind most of the ideas everyone currently associates with DOGE during Trump’s first administration.

Lol for a min I thought you were talking about Aaron Schwartz and I was legit trying to figure out what he had done lol

“Totally not a narc, inc.”

Interesting thing is that rich people also have a lot to lose from AI data takeover. Pretty sure the only reason Marsha Blackburn is opposed to the state AI ban is because her wealthy supporters in Nashville are going to be fucked by losing copyright control of so much material

The same reason this administration does all the things they point their finger and accuse everyone else of doing. They’re traitorous scumbags and hypocrites.

I mean, I learned it a while back when I lost my account of 10 years. I only use Reddit to try to warn people in my community about the insane information that is being suppressed right now even at a local level

I’m hoping more people from LA move here. The Nola sub has gotten insanely right wing, and is mainly just a business advertising platform. It got so ridiculous that r/Louisiana actually became the more progressive sub. I have my suspicions about why, especially bc several of the users have been there a very long time.

When the WaPo story about mass surveillance came out, I posted about it and the Palantir/New Orleans contract. I was here the whole time it was going on, but didn’t know anything about it until the WaPo story came out.

Anyway, the city wide ban on facial recognition tech was put in place afterwards, and then in 2022, Cantrell (while under investigation for her own BS) asked the city to lift it and replace it with an ordinance that contained all kinds of crazy surveillance shit (that once again, I completely missed).

Mayor Cantrell moves to reverse bans on facial recognition, predictive policing and other surveillance tech

Definitely not the most concerning of everything in there, but this part caught my eye bc the New Orleans subreddit specifically has taken this weird pro Landry slant, and accounts seem to swarm/get sooo weirdly aggressive if you point out it’s weird bc that is not how most people in the city actually feel about Landry:

Lastly the proposal would allow the city to use “social media or communications software or applications for the purpose of communicating with the public, provided such use does not include the affirmative use of any face surveillance.” The Lens asked Tidwell and Green why this was included and what it was meant to allow, but neither responded.

I’m like 90% sure that a lot of the accounts on that sub are on duty police, and I’m absolutely sure the state police and/or ice are using it to snoop for information or get people to incriminate themselves. To be fair it could be true of any social media, even here bc it’s a pretty vague thing to include.

Lately that sub has been filled with all these posts that are practically like “I’m trying to commit fraud with government assistance, can anyone tell me all the locations in the city that can help me accomplish this? Many thnxx” 🙏

Also, there was a post where I was concerned ICE could be using Reddit to try and locate someone for deportation, and when I brought up that it wasn’t a good idea to give people information like that, this right wing account was like “WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU!!111!1 U R UNHINGED!!1111”

Looked back at the post several weeks later the day the WaPo story came out. Someone else had commented something like “omg that is me thank you so much!!” and the OP was like “no problem so glad I could use Reddit to help!!” 😊 and then neither account ever had any activity again afterwards lmao

There are two in my state alone. Yesterday a list of U.S. nuclear power plants with the highest number of safety violations was released, and the two in my state were #1 and #3 for most violations…

I’m not opposed to nuclear energy but absolutely do not buy for one second we should be further allowing deregulation of licensing and other safety precautions.