In Perspectives
on Our Age (1981), Jacques Ellul points out that living in a society increasingly
dominated by a Global Technological System (GTS) is painful, to a greater or
lesser degree, for all of us humans (48). That’s because the nature of the GTS
differs fundamentally from our own. It is cold, rational, and rigid. While we
humans may occasionally imitate those ways, we remain mostly passionate,
emotional, and spontaneous.
If we are treated more like technological automatons than genuine humans for very long, we grow angry or depressed and seek “compensations” (49). In other words, “we are forced to find something providing satisfactions elsewhere and permitting us to live otherwise” (49).
This need grows increasingly pressing with the growth of the GTS. As the GTS expands, we all increasingly suffer “the suppression of the subject and the suppression of meaning” (49).
