The Collective
It is not a question of causing the human being to disappear, but of making him capitulate, of inducing him to accommodate himself to techniques and not to experience personal feelings and reactions.
Sounds like another iteration of the classic sci-fi theme, doesn’t it? Some power is trying to take over humans and lull them into drones for dark, exploitive reasons: the Borg, or the Matrix, or the Empire, or Thanos. Someone is needed, some hero who has the wisdom and courage to conquer the enemy, and restore freedom and mystery.
But it isn’t sci-fi. It’s from Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (1954), and it simply describes the conflict already apparent, and already gaining momentum even then, between human beings and the systematizing, complexifying impulse Ellul calls “technique.” He defines technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” His book examines the manifestation and influence of technique throughout the civilization of his day.
Reading the book is a process of recognizing a greater fulfillment today of every trend he observed in 1954. Of course digital technology is a powerful manifestation of pure technique, and it’s easy to vilify the tech companies (and I do) for the increasing feeling of powerlessness to live without being in some way connected, dependent, surveilled, locked in to adapting ourselves to the limited choices and processes given us by these business titans. But the truth is that the technical impulse is within us. It’s not that hard to “make us capitulate.” Ellul goes on to comment,
Henceforth it will be wrong for a man to escape this universal effort. It will be inadmissible for any part of the individual not to be integrated in the drive toward technicization; it will be inadmissible that any man even aspire to escape the necessity of the whole society. The individual will no longer be able, materially or spiritually, to disengage himself from society.
Surely we all notice this to be truer and truer — despite the notion that tech-creep works best when we “accommodate” ourselves without “experiencing personal feelings and reactions.” The pandemic only broadened the reach, and strengthened the grasp, of our captivity to our screens to work, communicate, relate, and learn. For a season, it was almost our only way to look at the faces of people we worked with, or see and respond to what was going on in our friends’ lives. It was the way I continued to teach my classes, the way so many businesses tried desperately to adapt their models to survive.
But even before the pandemic, many of us probably noticed how impossible it was to withdraw. Tired of the constant pings and texts and social media updates? Tired of being tracked and targeted? Try getting rid of your computer or iphone. Want to watch a movie? Try finding an alternative to streaming one via some online service or another. Want to swear off Amazon and buy everything locally? Good luck.
One of the places I notice the “tech”-tonic shift brought about by technique is social media. I have a long antagonism toward Facebook, the only social media I’ve ever signed up for. Nevertheless, I’ve activated and deactivated my account a number of times over the years because there seems to be no alternative. There was a time when I had a satisfying number of in-person friends. We talked on the phone, got together at each other’s houses, participated in common activities. But this was disrupted partly by our changing churches, and partly by the rise of Facebook. Friendship, and making friends, has simply changed. I’ve read that social people use social media without experiencing any loss in their in-person relationships, but for those like me, who are not really introverts but who are also not socially confident or outgoing, friendships have dwindled.
When I was reading The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism, I was so horrified by learning of all the data captured by Facebook and Google and any number of smart devices that I erased everything on my FB page, changed all my privacy settings, and logged out for months. This was also motivated by the shocking muscle-flexing of the tech companies during the pandemic, the months of protests, and the 2020 election. But I stopped short of deleting the account. I might need it one day, I thought. For some reason, I didn’t officially deactivate it either, though I essentially abandoned it.
After awhile, I logged into Facebook again because someone said they’d sent me a message there. I felt a certain sadness. There they were, a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a long time. Getting a glimpse of their lives made me aware of how much I missed them. But it’s hard to communicate and stay current without using Facebook, and the idea of having to negotiate my friendships with FB as the invisible third party silently graphing and quantifying and selling and monitoring all of it is just a total no-go for me.
I forged ahead to deactivate my account, and as usual I had to choose a reason. I usually choose “Other,” but just for kicks I checked “I don’t find FB useful” to see what would happen. Immediately a notification popped up exhorting me that I could engage my friends more, and I could “click here” for suggestions. It was darkly funny. For one thing, a Facebook bot was giving me relationship advice. You know it’s bad when that happens! But for another thing, this was an immediate reminder that my activity was being monitored. The bot was right, after all; I hadn’t “engaged” much, since I hadn’t logged in in months. It knew that, and in the totally humorless way of AI it interpreted this and gave me advice. Not surprisingly, following the advice would increase my use of the platform and increase its ability to mine my “behavioral surplus” (Shoshana Zuboff’s term in The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism).
I guess all of that is to say that the technical footprint in my life is large enough now that I feel trapped, and to an extent robbed of some of the joy that resulted from my previous, less technology-mediated, life. Sometimes I even feel like one of those humans powering the Matrix in the movie. I’d like to go backward. But even if I could succeed, I may be the only one in the room. Tech critics’ word for the ever-more-complex system being constructed around us is “the collective.” Like Facebook attempted to do when I was deactivating it, the collective subtly shapes us through tools designed to maximize predictable behavior, and above all a consistent data flow to be harvested and used not just to sell to advertisers, but to further shape our attitudes and actions.
Interestingly, C.S. Lewis uses the same term in his sermon “Membership,” in The Weight of Glory. He speaks of the relegation of religion to “private” life in a time when privacy is being subsumed by the collective — “a crowd of busybodies, self-appointed masters of ceremonies, whose life is devoted to destroying solitude wherever solitude still exists.” And interestingly, the effect is the same: to fundamentally change the fulfilling human phenomenon of membership. Not surprisingly, technology plays a role here as well since the “wireless” functions much like Facebook to intrude itself: “Even when the planners fail and someone is left physically by himself,” he writes, “the wireless has seen to it that he will be — in a sense not intended by Scipio — never less alone than when alone. We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy, and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
I started this post with a quotation that suggests the encroachment of technique is intended to occur without people noticing. But we do. Lewis did. I do. Maybe this is cause for hope?
One can be wired into the collective and be lonely. One can be, these days, many times more fully integrated into “the technological society” than in Ellul’s day, and his observations that human being always loses in these advances in efficiency are being confirmed. It does have an impoverishing effect on the human soul.
