In this environment, technique almost resembles an independent force of nature like gravity
"If you wish to escape," says Technique, "you are welcome to try."
The Digital Revolution Was the Means for Locking Us in The Matrix
What a mistake the geeks made for humanity.
“Our” “Democratic” “Government” Has Imposed Mind Control Upon Us
Are people too insouciant to realize that they are on the blue pill?
https://americanmind.org/salvo/beheading-leviathan/
“Political theorist Eric Voegelin, who studied the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century, noted that the common feature of all such regimes was not concentration camps, or mass surveillance, or secret police—as horrifying as all these things are. The common feature of all totalitarian systems is the prohibition of questions. These regimes begin by monopolizing what counts as rationality—what counts as acceptable public knowledge—and then place any dissidents outside the pale of rational conversation. Surveillance of dissident thoughts and behaviors and censorship of dissenting opinions then expand together.
“In Milton’s Paradise Lost, when Satan reaches the gates of hell on his way to tempt our first parents in Eden, he meets two grotesque monsters guarding the exit. The first monster, Sin, explains that he sprung from Satan’s own head; this monster subsequently delivered the second specter, Death. Just as the former by necessity birthed the latter, so also the post-9/11 Surveillance State was destined to eventually birth the Censorship Leviathan. These two beasts now guard the gates of permissible public discourse. The seven-year-old Censorship Leviathan cannot be slain unless we also reign in the 20-year-old of the Surveillance State, which gave birth to it.”
Ellul says, "The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional, personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself be the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect, he has no freedom of choice"
-In presenting the naked lunch Lingering Sanity is enabling the taste of the reader to come into play. As an information chef I am not the best at what I do, no no no, I am the only one who does what I do.
https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
At the end you say “Ellul says”. This is the most succinct summation of the crux of the issue I’ve run across. I meditate on this, also, almost daily. It’s a question of “is it better to die on your feet, or live on your knees”. Echoes of ghost dances and iron shirts. It is quite clear to me that to stand against, in any meaningful way, is to suffer defeat. The power differential is almost unfathomable. I recently traveled through Diné land. The whole time I had a sense of seeing people who had been living this dilemma for generations, and persist anyway. I would not blame them in any way, at all, for not sharing their hard earned wisdom with the moderns slamming face first into the same dilemma.
In a documentary I watched on Native lives in Canada, a very old man could be heard to say that once they separated people from nature, we were broken. Our separation from nature (illusary though it is) began even longer ago than the computer age, probably the industrial age (roughly 1750-1850) and the post industrial age that followed, where we were driven into cities in search of money, essentially. I don't know what to call the age we are in now except for post apocolyptic with a dash of new agrarian as some people flee 'back' to the countryside, those that have the means. A long power outtage and pop goes the weasel.