[D66] Against the Kingdom of Technique

[René Oudeweg]

Against the Kingdom of Technique

The defining power of our age is not capitalism, not the state, not 
ideology, and not even science. It is technique—the totality of methods 
rationally developed for absolute efficiency, elevated from a tool of 
human action into the sovereign principle of civilization. Jacques Ellul 
warned that technique is not merely machinery or technology, but a 
self-augmenting system of means without ends, a civilization that no 
longer asks why, only how faster, how cheaper, how more. Today, the 
techno-industrial system Ellul described has not merely matured; it has 
metastasized.

Technique has become autonomous. It no longer serves human values; it 
redefines them. What can be done must be done. What can be automated 
must be automated. What can be measured must be believed. What cannot be 
optimized is discarded as irrational, inefficient, or obsolete. In this 
system, human judgment is not merely devalued—it is an obstacle.

Ellul insisted that technique recognizes only one absolute: efficiency. 
Not truth, not beauty, not wisdom, not justice. Efficiency. And because 
technique is self-justifying, no moral critique can halt it. Ethical 
debates are tolerated only insofar as they can be converted into 
technical problems with technical solutions. Pollution? More technology. 
Alienation? Better interfaces. Surveillance? Smarter algorithms. Each 
“solution” deepens dependence and tightens the system’s grip.

The techno-industrial system presents itself as neutral, inevitable, and 
progressive. This is its most effective lie. Technique is not neutral—it 
imposes a total worldview. As Lewis Mumford observed, modern technology 
reorganizes not just labor but life itself, producing a “megamachine” in 
which human beings are reduced to interchangeable components. The system 
demands conformity to its rhythms, its speeds, its abstractions. 
Anything slow, local, ambiguous, or unquantifiable becomes a defect.

Human beings are increasingly shaped to fit machines rather than 
machines shaped to serve human flourishing. Education trains 
adaptability, not wisdom. Medicine treats bodies as mechanical systems 
rather than lived realities. Work becomes data flow, supervision by 
algorithm, performance reduced to metrics. Even intimacy is reformatted 
into profiles, signals, and optimization strategies. We are not 
dehumanized by cruelty but by rationalization.

Martin Heidegger diagnosed this condition as Gestell—enframing—the 
transformation of the world into standing reserve, where everything that 
exists is understood only as a resource to be optimized and extracted. 
Nature becomes “natural capital.” Human attention becomes “engagement.” 
Relationships become “networks.” Thought itself is pressured to become 
calculative, instrumental, and productive. Contemplation, once the 
highest human activity, is now seen as unproductive idleness.

The triumph of technique also annihilates freedom, though it claims to 
expand it. We are offered infinite choices within systems we cannot 
question. The freedom to customize replaces the freedom to refuse. As 
Ellul observed, modern humans are less free than ever precisely because 
they mistake technical necessity for destiny. The system does not coerce 
brutally; it conditions. It produces needs, habits, dependencies, and 
fears that make resistance appear irrational or impossible.

Technology also destroys responsibility. Decisions are outsourced to 
systems too complex for any individual to comprehend. When harm occurs, 
no one is accountable—only procedures failed, models erred, data was 
incomplete. Hannah Arendt warned that such systems enable a new form of 
moral collapse: not evil driven by hatred, but evil produced by 
obedience to process. The bureaucratic-technological order dissolves 
conscience into workflow.

The techno-industrial system is hostile to limits. Ivan Illich argued 
that when tools exceed a certain scale, they become counterproductive, 
undermining the very purposes they were meant to serve. Beyond that 
threshold, speed produces congestion, medicine produces illness, 
education produces ignorance, and communication produces noise. Yet 
technique cannot stop. It knows only expansion. Limits are seen as 
technical challenges to overcome, not moral boundaries to respect.

What is most devastating is that technique colonizes the human spirit. 
It reshapes desire itself. We come to crave efficiency, novelty, 
acceleration, and control. We grow impatient with silence, boredom, 
suffering, and depth. We fear dependency on one another but accept total 
dependency on systems we cannot understand. We lose the ability to 
imagine a good life outside technological mediation.

Ellul rejected the comforting fantasy that technology can be guided by 
democratic control or ethical oversight. Technique absorbs all such 
attempts and converts them into additional layers of management. 
Regulation becomes another technical domain. Resistance becomes a market 
niche. Even critique is monetized, algorithmically circulated, and 
neutralized.

The techno-industrial system does not collapse societies dramatically; 
it hollows them out. Culture becomes content. Politics becomes 
administration. Nature becomes simulation. Human beings become 
operators, users, and data points. Meaning becomes a personal hobby 
pursued in the margins of optimized life.

To be against technique is not to reject tools, but to reject the total 
domination of efficiency over all human ends. It is to insist that not 
everything that can be done should be done, that not everything valuable 
can be measured, that not everything meaningful is useful. It is to 
defend slowness, fragility, locality, tradition, and mystery against a 
system that recognizes only throughput and control.

Ellul knew this was a losing battle. Technique does not retreat; it 
conquers. But to name the enemy is already an act of resistance. To 
refuse the lie of inevitability is to reclaim moral agency. The 
techno-industrial system wants obedience, not belief. Its greatest fear 
is not sabotage, but refusal—the quiet insistence that human life is 
more than a problem to be solved.

And so the task remains: not to perfect the machine, but to remember 
what it was built to serve—and what it can never replace.