Confronting the Technological Society
On Jacques Ellul’s classic analysis of technique
One of the most encouraging political developments of the last ten years is that many American parents and lawmakers have come to believe they are duty-bound to shape how technology affects their families, communities, and nation. It falls to the everyday people, we have realized, to do what was once thought impossible: to constrain the technological powers that harry us and our families. And this realization has been effective, fueling dozens of laws nationwide to make technology safer for kids.
What we are confronting, however, is so intrinsic to modern life that it can be difficult to see in its totality. Put simply, we live in a society dominated by what Hannah Arendt calls homo faber, man the fabricator, man the inventor, man the engineer. Social media, smartphones, app stores, and infinite-scroll porn are just some of the tools homo faber uses to reengineer our children, our marriages, our kinship and social networks, our erotic drives, our communities, our politics, and our innermost thoughts.
The concept of homo faber has roots in Roman antiquity, where we find it said that Homo faber suae quisque fortunae, which means, “man is the maker of his own destiny,” or, “every man is the craftsman of his own future.” The idea was then rediscovered by Renaissance humanists, who championed it over the passivity of medieval contemplation.
In her classic book The Human Condition (1958), Arendt describes how early modern thinkers privileged instrumental reasoning over the contemplation of ends, placing more confidence in the reality of fabricated products than in the given objects of nature and supernature. The pragmatic assertion that man, as Arendt put it, “can only know what he makes himself” became the bedrock of early modernity. Accordingly, men became rigorously trained in refashioning nature, and those who were particularly gifted at these arts were given the highest seat of honor.
Today we are witnessing homo faber at the height of his technical, social, and political powers. With artificial intelligence, homo faber is looking to create “agents” to make the labor of human beings useless, surpass the human mind with superintelligence, and carve up our social lives with human-like AI, replacing lovers, friends, teachers, pastors, parents, husbands and wives.
This is an audacious project. Some have called it transhuman, post-human, and even anti-human. Whatever we call it, its metaphysical character should not distract us from one key point: it advances and retreats by the same rules as any other social project. To fully assert itself over society, it must win a culture war and capture political power. But the reverse is also true: without the state’s favor, it can be beaten back.
What does it mean to live in a society dominated by homo faber? It is a kind of subjugation. The patterns of our lives are provisional — obliged to give way to new technologies imposed upon us from the outside. To free ourselves, we have to learn how to say no to homo faber’s projects, or to reshape them for the common good.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of Theuth, the inventor, and Thamus, the Egyptian king. Theuth, Socrates recounts, came to Thamus
and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them.
“O most ingenious Theuth,” Thamus declared, “the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them.” Silicon Valley has yet to be taught this lesson.
The ruler with the authority to say yes or no to technology is, admittedly, very strange to us. But history is replete with princes wielding authority over technologies to preserve the common good. A few examples:
Actions like this were standard in pre-industrial Europe. As historian Carl Benedikt Frey writes in The Technology Trap, “resistance to technologies that threatened workers’ skills was the rule rather than the exception.”
All this changed with the Industrial Revolution, which was, chiefly, a political revolution in which the inventor was given preeminence over the worker. Since then, Thamus has mostly disappeared from history, but we still see traces of him. For example, obscenity, which at first proliferated due to the printing press, was for a long time strictly banned. So were contraceptives. Under President George W. Bush, federal funding for research on new stem cell lines was blocked; under President Barack Obama, a moratorium on gain of function research was imposed.
We have also seen instances where a preexisting technology was reoriented toward the common good. In the early days of the American republic, for example, the U.S. Post Office was required to be a common carrier to uphold the principle of free speech. Nuclear disarmament was pursued through international treaty, as was the banning of biological weapons development. And of late, age verification has been applied to social media. These examples are admittedly few. The works of Theuth are everywhere. Modernity is the age in which the state almost always says yes to invention, and even hitches its power to ceaseless technological change. As economic historian Joel Mokyr writes, “Britain’s edge during the Industrial Revolution did not lie in the absence of resistance against technological change, but in its government’s consistently and vigorously siding with the ‘party’ for innovation.”
For the past decade or so, lawmakers have encouraged Big Tech to act according to its better angels, and like clockwork they end up shocked at the depths to which these companies are willing to descend. The attention economy has minted numerous billionaires, but greed is not the driving force of Silicon Valley’s compulsion to engineer and create. As a community and cultural force, it is spiritually committed to one thing: Making the thing. Bringing it into the world. Unleashing its power.
Silicon Valley has what Matthew Crawford calls “the mindset of do-something-ism.” Crawford sees this spirit operating in full in J. Robert Oppenheimer, who, when he was asked why he helped make the nuclear bomb, reportedly said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you do it.” Oppenheimer, Crawford says, “was referring to the pleasure of solving puzzles, and combining technical capacities in new and exciting ways.” These technical pleasures overrode Oppenheimer’s moral scruples.
That’s not to suggest that Big Tech companies don’t expend tremendous mental and financial resources to convince themselves and the public that their inventions are, in fact, good. When Sam Altman announced the controversial AI video-generation model Sora 2 last fall, he cheerily proclaimed it “the most powerful imagination engine ever built.” In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Marc Andreessen declares that “technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.”
But these messages are themselves driven by the imperative to produce the technically sweet. We keep hearing in the news that the CEO of some big AI company is worried he is making a god, or threatening all life on earth — but the work must keep going. Even the most publicly-minded AI company, Anthropic, cannot quit. The best it can do is commit to study its own progress as it develops technology that its CEO fears will cause mass unemployment, or worse.
Only wise government can constrain home faber, but today homo faber holds almost all the power.
How did homo faber come to rule?
Technical men rose to political dominance through their extraordinary successes solving problems caused by technology. Arendt points to two “alienations” that demonstrate a boomerang effect in which Western society turned to scientists and technologists for succor to save them from technology’s most potent disruptions. Arendt calls these alienations “world alienation” and “earth alienation.”
World alienation began with Europe’s discovery of the Americas, continued with the Reformation, and extended through the Industrial Revolution, all of which deprived large groups of people of the world they knew and made them dependent upon homo faber for the fabrication of a new one. The rise of industrial machinery, for example, led to the collapse of domestic production and impoverished the masses. But in exchange for submitting to the processes, techniques, bureaucracies, and machinery devised by homo faber, laborers could eventually earn the wages necessary to purchase the food, drink, clothing, and shelter homo faber devised.
Earth alienation is the shock that followed Galileo’s use of the telescope to demonstrate heliocentrism. Unaided sensory observation became insufficient for understanding the realities of physical life. Similarly, the microscope revealed strange and hidden parts of natural organisms. The naked eye, always prone to misapprehension, came to be seen as fundamentally faulty and unworthy for direct scientific inquiry. To borrow from Walker Percy, we came to feel “lost in the cosmos.” But just as our senses ceased to be reliable, the experiment — scientific observation by instrument — took its place. Knowledge was saved by the same instruments that caused it to fall into crisis.
But scientists’ presumable admittance to a God’s-eye view habituated them into experiencing their own humanity at a distance. Every fellow human being began to appear as just one more body in motion. Man became “standing reserve,” to use Heidegger’s phrase, taking on the quality of raw material ripe for refabrication and experimentation.
This established the mental conditions that support Silicon Valley’s alien vision of human life. As a concept, earth alienation helps us to better understand the weirdly abstract and frankly inhuman ideas about the nature and destiny of mankind that emanate from the discourse of so many of Big Tech’s most prominent voices. Accusations of being “speciesist,” for instance — that is, being a bigot for preferring a human future over, say, a cyborg one — only have weight in contexts in which we habitually see ourselves from outside of ourselves. Earth alienation ultimately results in a hostility toward human beings.
“If one permits the standards of homo faber to rule the … world,” Arendt writes, then he “will eventually help himself to everything and consider everything that is as a mere means for himself. He will judge every thing” — including his fellow man — “as though it belonged to the class of … use objects.”
Despite all this, Arendt still sees the possibility that a politics might return that governs technology and technologists.
Granted, there are intrinsic characteristics of technology that make it challenging to govern. “Modern natural science and technology, which no longer observe or take material from or imitate processes of nature but seem actually to act into it,” Arendt writes, “seem, by the same token, to have carried irreversibility and human unpredictability into the natural realm, where no remedy can be found to undo what has been done.” Consider video call as a mundane example of irreversibility. When Skype launched in the mid-2000s, the practice of exposing one’s face for a long-distance conversation was extremely uncomfortable, and, in the eyes of many, bizarre. But it became normalized during the pandemic and is now woven into the fabric of our friendships, family relations, institutional practices, and self-understanding.
Genuine politics, for Arendt, will require a shared world of action. The child safety movement is doing the work to call children back from entrapment in digital media into unmediated life. But we need to go further: to reintegrate technology into the human order so it can serve human communities. Such politics would save society from technology run amok and restore to homo faber a healthy orientation toward communal life. The works of homo faber would be, to use Arendt’s term, “redeemed.”
Arendt was a “theorist of new beginnings,” as Margaret Canovan has said. With every new birth and every new generation arises the option of charting a new course. “The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin,” Arendt writes, “is ultimately the fact of natality.”
Inspired by Arendt, lately I’ve been pondering the story of Gen X. One often hears it said that Gen X is the last generation to have experienced an analog childhood. But a longer view reveals something very different: Gen X is the first generation to demand an analog life for children. It is noteworthy that many of the most eminent thinkers and leaders who are campaigning to reformulate how technology shapes the lives of families and kids fall roughly in the age range of Gen X. The social-psychological analyses of Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt have transformed the global discourse on social media and smartphones. The most innovative policies are being driven by Representative Laurie Schlegel of Louisiana, who pioneered the first law in the nation to require age verification of pornography sites, and by Melissa McKay, a mother in Utah who was instrumental in the App Store Accountability Act. Gen X has introduced something new into history that strives against homo faber. And who knows where that struggle will lead?
One must concede, however, that the current politics of tech reform has no interest in or answer to homo faber’s grip on the state. I do not mean to suggest that homo faber faces no opposition from the state. Silicon Valley constantly has to contend with bureaucratic processes. But American technology companies have learned to cooperate with the administrative state and its web of agencies, rules, and grant-making personnel, which have nudged research and development in myriad ways. Some technologists have stood to gain from this arrangement, others not. For a long time, for instance, American bureaucrats have preferred wind and solar over nuclear. That is now changing. But, on basic research, the main spirit has been collaborative, with research dollars flowing from federal agencies toward laboratories, universities, and Big Tech companies. The end result is that, today, technological development is the result of a creative partnership between private companies and federal agencies, with both sides more than rewarded.
This is certainly the case with AI. The biggest AI companies, with their extraordinary computational capacity, unfathomably large datasets, and world-historic financial resources, have taken the technology to new heights of power. But the technology still owes much to the entrepreneurial investment of the state. As Susannah Glickman has written, “federal funding was … essential for the development of AI.” During the Cold War, she explains, AI-related projects were slow and incredibly challenging, and private companies would not fund long-term research in the field. Because of this, funding from federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency were critical for AI research and development. This resulted in significant gains in the development of machine learning and deep neural networks, which form the technical foundations of the generative AI that overwhelms us today.
Now, the AI Action Plan — issued by the Trump administration last July to coordinate dozens of federal agencies to accelerate AI — is the public ratification of this collaboration between tech companies and the state. Unleashing AI without constraint is emerging as the White House’s explicit agenda, as it appears to fully oppose state regulation of AI. This would crush any political resistance to Silicon Valley’s total dominance over our lives. Not only that, it would deepen Silicon Valley’s relationship with the state while reasserting homo faber’s dominance over the social sphere.
We are crying out for something new: a politics of Thamus that befits a government by and for the people. We may be seeing the very first glimpses of it, though it must go further, because if Big Tech gets its way, this rebirth of a politics to govern technology will be strangled in the crib.
Keep reading our
Spring 2026 issue
Happy meals • Ugly cities • Weak families • Powerful drones • Subscribe