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While it’s true that I’ve been doing some deeper ethical investigations, I’ve had a hard time applying it to livelihood; it’s always felt like there is no way to get everything to align, so I would have to just pick one part that I liked, and optimise for it. There’s a world where your worldview starts where the workday ends; but that seems like a terrific compromise, doesn’t it? I think by and large, people don’t really have to worry too much. Whether or not you choose to be a stenographer probably won’t make the world worse; law and medicine have better and worse ends for their means.¹

I think in technology, though, you’re essentially building lifestyle through infrastructure. The leverage is immense, and so it’s either you’re doing something deeply experimental with zero stakes out on the periphery, or you’re in KPI world where you have to really start skimming the salami of attention load, disposable expenditures, business supplements. The industry is organised around a sort of massive Bell Labs approach via enormous networks of venture capital funding smaller labs of promising eclectics; and de facto oligarchies of private equity firms and tech conglomerates to optimise the rest.

I was inducted into my career at a time of irrational, even decadent optimism – capital had been getting more and more cheap in America, and so startups were often founded, even thrived on the vibes alone; this is not a term of denigration. In this sense, en masse one was trying to magically induct a world organisation through aesthetics and storytelling. Take from the past, from the future, try to paint something exciting about how to organise peoples, to make secret societies. After all, we have, and will continue to have, many incubating technologies that could be used for human expression and interconnection that we can use to then reify the spell. At the same time, it’s been fifty years since then, and we’ve found that instead human expression and interconnection have been catalysed into various fail states; the spell fades, the companies quietly fold, and the new world never comes.

Thus newer companies arrive, trying to alleviate the catalysis with alternative catalyses, some other sort of systematisation, some other sort of interconnected system between human and machine. The current phase, and one that I think will begin to sunset, is within this particular product stack of language models and computer APIs;² founded upon the idea that “we use computers too much and our attention is hijacked,” we instead mitigate the catalysed information flows of the internet with filters and summarisers, leaving us free to …

I find myself a bit disheartened by this stage; it essentially invents “don’t use the computer” as a panacea, which is an optimistic way of admitting massive failure. But I did believe in computers, in human connection and expression. In fact, I found myself so optimistic thinking about what we could do when everyone became “user-developers” that when I lost hope in one version of this vision, I’m not sure I believed in anything else again.

Theology and technique

Recently in a search for a new formulation, a new cause, I turned to Jacques Ellul, whose work I’ve been increasingly pilfering from; his particular formulation of Christian anarchism has seemed very compatible with my intuitive worldview and has structured it, given it additional resources, additional perspectives.

In his posthumous book, Theology and Technique, he tries to apply a Christian ethics to operating within the fabric of a technological society.

It’s important to note first that Ellul’s description of “Technique” specifically refers to the replacement of the fabric of nature with the totalising mediation of technologies – the City being its predominant home, but the technical system, this technical society, encompasses the desert of natural exploitation as well. There is no real “going back” for him.

Specifically, though, in Theology and Technique, he slowly builds out a thesis of non-power, which he takes to both practical and pedantic ends:

Non-power means being able and not being willing to do it. It is choosing not to exercise domination, efficiency, choosing not to rush toward success. It is relinquishing power. It is then attesting that the dimension of power and success does not have the final word, does not have the right to judge human life, is not the final word of our human condition. […] Starting from this decision about non-power, normally the whole hierarchy of human values unfolds. And this ethic of non-power, from there, inscribes itself at all levels: thus in the use of technical means, the way we use devices that may be “of power”; not seeking to surpass others, to be the first, to drive one’s car at maximum speed; not to have one’s TV or stereo blare; and not to seek to constantly profit and to dominate others by the function one exercises, through apparatuses, etc. But it is also within institutions that we must attempt to insert it: all institutions that tend to develop power, placing competition at the basis of social organization, are to be rejected. ³

He characterises Technique as constituting the spirit of power and the spirit of deceit; and the spirit of power is itself a vaccuum, an “always more, always further,” that destroys any and all other value systems.⁴ Instead, it masks our relationship between each other as Persons in favour of a general objectification:

Now, when power is brought to bear on a man, it inevitably produces a radical effect: man becomes an object; he is reified (which is something different from alienation). Man is viewed by power as the object on which it is brought to bear, if he can then be led, manipulated, transformed; he is stripped of his human quality in order to become a function, at best a parameter of power. It is thanks to reified man that the latter will be able to reach its full potential. There can be no power that is respectful of man. This would be a contradiction in terms. A power that would view everyone as an individual case, that would seek his worth and the meaning of his life, would thereby renounce being a power and even exerting it. Since psychology and psychoanalysis have invaded courtrooms, courts have in reality given up on judging. From the moment when the accused becomes more of a unique, singular human being, whose behavior can be explained and whose face is the expression of a complex story, it is impossible to condemn him. Power loses its very reality. For the reality of power is the absence of humanity of the one who exercises this power, but also of those upon which it is brought to bear. It is the tragedy of Hegel’s Master and Slave.^{5 6}

Whereas the spirit of deceit, a “passing for” nature, manifestation, the creation of symbols – indeed, the very model of idolatry:

Technique is now before anything else a set of positive appearances aimed at erasing, hiding, or erasing from memory the negative, the annihilating, the dissolving, the destructive that it is in its practice. The spirit of deceit appears as soon as Technique is evaluated in terms of positivity. […] It is this distance that iconoclasm is called upon to harshly reinstate, given the extent to which the technical system draws its life from a set of illusions that make it their idol. These include: the illusion that Technique is neutral, that man is its master; the illusion of that the material and the spiritual coincide, that if we raise the standard of living, we will make man good and intelligent; the illusion that through Technique we attain happiness; the illusion that Technique resolves all problems; the illusion that Technique is scientific and rational, the illusion that we can have and hold concurrently all advantages (virtue and power or wealth, for instance); the illusion that means of communication create genuine relationships between men, that the multiplicity of information produces an informed type of man, present to the world, and that globalization translates as the creation of an open and liberal mind; the illusion of indefinite growth, of the natural environment’s potential for limitless recovery, of that environment’s infinite wealth, of the possibility for man to grow indefinitely, and that there will always be room; and finally, the illusion of progress. We need not repeat these. ⁷

Crucially, though, I don’t think Ellul points to a sort of anarcho-primitivist solution; Technique is the creation of man, and it only has moral relevance in relationship to how man utilises it.

Technique before God has no reality in itself; it is only relative to man. It is good insofar as it produces good for man. It is bad insofar as it produces evil for man. It is good insofar as it is an exaltation of God’s creation. It is bad insofar as it expresses man’s hubris, his spirit of power, his search for his own glory. And the two qualifiers “good,” the two qualifiers “bad” are in exact relation one to the other. This technique is viewed by God only in its relation to man. This means that because God loves man above all expression, because he has decided to save him at the price of his own abandonment, at the price of his own death in Jesus Christ, then also he loves man with his works, because man—man beloved of, saved by God—is not the naked being, shorn of his history and of his works. It is the man produced by this history, the bearer of all his works (not just moral ones!), who is loved, saved, destined for eternal life. God’s love for man with all his works includes Technique too, as a major work of man. ⁸

If this seems less of an explication than a full unpacking of the thesis of the work – it is simply that the work’s thesis has a lot of components and nuance. Ellul is trying very hard not to make a blunt and impossible ethical imperative; there is a tightrope to walk, a “right way” to utilise our individual tools and participate in the broader system and for him it stems from putting something in front of Technique, something bigger than Technique for Technique’s sake, a limit, a sacred.⁹

That means on the individual, the corporate, the political level: something must come before efficiency; something must come before the application of power over another man. There must be something that cannot be given up. Whether that means not working on Sunday. Whether that means not raising venture capital. Whether that means doing anything to escape the continual drive for endless growth.

I’ve struggled with this a few days, now – what could it be to not do that? In a sense, I suppose an industry of cottage-sized artisanal technologies? A world full of privately-owned, patently “sufficient,” smaller teams servicing well-designed products for a specific, loyal demographic?¹⁰

I think it likely starts from the personal and works outward from there. Whether that’s personal boundaries about when to work, or what to work for. Something has to come before endless growth; something has to be a line that cannot be crossed. Something has to stand in front of the power and deceit that haunts our tools.