One more SUNDAY night

I wonder frequently about the horror of not putting words into fiction-eh-reading Ellul AFTER COVID written though before 1990

The Technological Bluff by Ellul.

The tremendous initiative that the state has at its disposal in regulating technique brings increasingly to light the tension between the complexity of its operations and the rationality of its decisions. Industry and the scientific community have such influence in directing technical research that the impartiality of the government has little credibility. We have seen many examples. Technical decisions are also made within administrative structures and by procedures over which individuals, as citizens, have no control. The issue in the debate between Habermas and Luhman (as recalled by Salomon) is whether democracy is possible in the most decisive questions and their economic, technical, and social implications (e.g., the elimination of peasants). For Luhman it is a peripheral and provincial idea to think that individuals can influence the state in areas which are beyond their competence and in which the process is autonomous and contingent. Luhman rightly refers to the growing autonomy of the apparatus of government. Habermas talks about the dependence of the government on the interests of the better-organized groups, the weightiest of these being the technicians and scientists. Thus the combination of political administration and the technostructure results in the total elimination of individuals. But the character of the combination and of the power of the state is strange, for the state less and less directs the economy. Its planning is for itself alone. Unemployment brings to light its total powerlessness (in spite of the omnipotence of its decisions!) and the multiplying of the victims of modernization (peasants, workers, etc.). The modern dynamic has basically gambled: on the one side, the priorities of profitability, productivity, efficiency, and competitiveness, and on the other, as effects, the turning of the countryside into a desert, unemployment, the manufacturing of useless goods, and the reducing of consumption to banality, all with an appearance of ease, comfort, and health! But we must not ignore the fact that the system seems to rest on a consensus.

In spite of the repeated failures of the politico-technical conception—as Chesneaux put it, “the calculated See J. Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), partially translated in Toward a Rational Society, tr. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1971), pp. 50-127; idem, Legitimation Crisis, tr. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1975). 2. See J.-J. Salomon, Prométhée empétré (Paris: Pergamon, 1981), pp. 92ff. 3. Cf. the works of J. Habermas cited in n. 1 above, and Luhman, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder ‘Sozial-technologie’ (Frankfurt, 1971). 304 THE TRIUMPH OF THE ABSURD plan opened up an abyss before being a failure” —the same policy has been triumphantly pursued by both left and right. The state and big business have an uncontested monopoly in the field of great technological advances, the only qualification being that a large part of French production (about 20 percent) is now controlled by foreign capital. The left can do nothing about it. In spite of protestations, it has kept up the nuclear power program and the expansion of high-speed trains. The state is the prisoner of the technique that it thinks it directs.

Yeah stuck inside San Francisco with dem Christmas Blues again.

From the “things that make you go “hmm” files - the COVID ‘vaccine’ contains cesium-137, all of the manmade viruses, like HIV and SARS-CoV-2 have their own IP addresses so do vaxx ingredients

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