Hacker CinemaThe Betrayal by Technology: A Portrait of Jacques Ellul
Het verraad van de techniek
1992 · Film · documentary · 54 min
Directed by Geerten van Empel, Roelf Haan
A portrait of Jacques Ellul, a French theologian/sociologist & anarchist who first became well-known to American readers with the English publishing of his book The Technological Society in 1964. For Ellul, technique represented an entire way of life characterized by life fragmented so that efficiency ultimately rules over all ethical decisions. Ellul warned that technique was having drastic effects on all aspects of modern life. Many Green Anarchists have cited Ellul's work on technique as influential on their thought.
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> Hope you guys over there are not drifting to a surveillance dystopian.
that's not a local problem but a global one. Many EU countries are well on their way into dystopia. The dystopia is an unavoidable side-effect[1] of having technology and categorizing everything in systems (and systems of systems). This argument gets attacked by "BUT everything can be used for good or bad". But Technology is not neutral.
We just pretend it's neutral because we wouldn't know who to hold accountable when dealing with cause/effect in complex systems of systems (emergence). Consider the following[2]:
> In a society such as ours, it is almost impossible for a person to be responsible. A simple example: a dam has been built somewhere, and it bursts. Who is responsible for that? Geologists worked out. They examined the terrain. Engineers drew up the construction plans. Workmen constructed it. And the politicians decided that the dam had to be in that spot. Who is responsible? No one. There is never anyone responsible. Anywhere. In the whole of our technological society the work is so fragmented and broken up into small pieces that no one is responsible. But no one is free either. Everyone has his own, specific task. And that's all he has to do.
> Just consider, for example, that atrocious excuse… It was one of the most horrible things I have ever heard. The director of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was asked at the Nuremburg trials, “But didn’t you find it horrible? All those corpses?” He replied, “What could I do? I couldn’t process all those corpses. The capacity of the ovens was too small. It caused me many problems. I had no time to think about these people. I was too busy with the technical problem of my ovens.” That is the classic example of an irresponsible person. He carries out his technical task and isn’t interested in anything else.
[1] The Technological Society, by Jacques Ellul https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSociety
[2] The Betrayal by Technology, by Jacques Ellul (1993 film), 06:51: https://youtu.be/BOCtu-rXfPk?t=411