Name: La technique
ISBN: 9780812906103

What Hacker News says

awaythrow999May 2024

Upvoted even I vehemently disagree with the analysis. It is because every reason cited in the review for why it's a "must read" is actually a reason for not reading it and instead reading Jacques Ellul's "La Technique" (in English "The Technological Society").

The damage these "system thinkers" inflict on humanity and the planet can never be undone.

https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...

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bwbmrNov 2023

Ehhhh- Mastering the Art of French Cooking though opens up with "This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals, the parent-chauffeur-den-mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat."

Today we tent to view Mastering the Art of the French Cooking as fussy (and her forward does acknowledge that ones schedule must be free), in no small part due to works like Julie & Julia, but the opening lines in the forward are counter to that (Key phrase being "servantless American.")- on the contrary _not_ fussy but demonstrative of good foundational technique. Pepin's La Methode and La Technique are comparable, if not more formal, though of course very much aimed at a different audience. Both chefs published more casual, everyday recipes later in their career.

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pseudotrashAug 2023

If you think your job isn't BS you probably haven't read enough adversarial content.

0) The Conspiracy Against The Human Race

1) The Machine Stops

2) The One Dimensional Man

3) A City Is Not A Tree

4) Influence

5) La Technique

6) anything from James C. Scott

7) ...

Figuring out the links is left as an exercise to the reader.

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pseudotrashAug 2023

Couple thus with the expectation of everyone carrying a phone at all times:

1 in Italy booking a train ride without providing your phone number, email and tessera sanitaria, proved a challenge last month

2 civid required us to carry our green pass everywhere (I'm not anti vaxx)

3 get stopped on some countries (like US) at a border and unable to present a phone for search might deny you entry.

The whole affair was predicted already 50-70 years ago. Jacques Ellul's La Technique is a great comprehensive read on this idiocy

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DyslexicAtheistJun 2023

thanks for posting and sorry for your loss.

I've heard the name TK first when reading Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us".

15 years later I was burnt out and increasingly aware that Tech was not a force of good. I went on a 3 year journey trying to understand what made TK chose violence. It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly, however hard that is. I started by studying his manifest. I dissected it like a surgeon, then read every book/reference that he gave. What would happen if I read every book he read. How does a bright young man go from reading philosophy and science conclude that men can't be saved.

How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse. TK was an accelerationist who believed the means justifies the end. TK felt that it was a necessary evil to collaborate with those he disagrees with (fascists, neo-nazis etc) as long as they can help bring down the current world order.

One dominat figure that kept popping up repeatedly when going through TK ramblings was Jaques Ellul, a French philosopher, not too well known outside France[1][2]. Ellul must have left quite the impact because even his manifesto is a homage on Ellul's biggest work: The Technological Society (La Technique)[1].

Ellul doesn't just talk about Technology but the whole domain of what we today call Systems Thinking. And he opens your eyes about edge cases and the victims of this thinking in ways even heavyweights like Nassim Taleb will seem like a rookies in comparison.

Ca 2018 I've read everything Ellul wrote and also read multiple times what TK wrote. I was depressed, like really really bad. There is no way out. I still wasn't criminally insane though. There had to be more than just "self-radicalization by information". Something was missing. It was isolation!

So I went on to teach myself bushcraft living off grid for a year in a similar way as TK. "Living off the land" as we call it in infosec (only it's the literal land :)). And this made me understand why TK had so much hate for civilization. It's the same hate the Sentinelese people must have for those visiting their shores[3].

Although I had no guns to feed myself with game meat as TK did. And I did not spend the same time out there. But after a few months without human contact I did understand what humanity has lost and how our connection to mother Earth has been severed.

While I never turned criminally insane and always disagreed with violence, I managed to understand what radicalized TK. It was being isolated. It happens in less severe ways to all of humanity via algorithm and screen time.

If you really want the full TK experience I implore you to live in the woods for a decade and see how you feel about humanity. No laptop instagram or electricity. Will you have any empathy left for the rest of society upon your return?

Jacques Ellul is not an easy read when you're vulnerable and searching for answers. Ellul will push you off the cliff of society and do something that today is unthinkable: to question technology and technological progress itself.

TK is not comprehensible to anyone functioning and depending within society because he hated society and he believed it needed to be destroyed. It's pretty hard to have any empathy with this. Because he caused a lot of pain and suffering he robbed himself of leaving a legacy or a lesson.

[1] The technological society https://archive.org/details/TheBetrayalByTechnologyAPortrait...

[2] https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Ellul%2C+Jacqu...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2019/08/01/747368557/the-story-behind-jo...

Edit: yes heavily edited, lots of typos, lots of context cleared up. It still has potential to be misunderstood ofc

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throwawaaarrghMay 2023

Lol, we're so pampered today.

Watch Tasting History with Max Miller (https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ). Every old recipe used to leave out salt, not explain any technique, times, temps, types of ingredients, and barely had proportions. People who cooked recipes were usually professionals who just knew how to cook things. It was around the end of the 19th century that cookbooks for home cooks came out, and they too didn't explain much.

If you are really interested in cooking, either take a class, or buy a book that teaches you how to cook. La Technique and Mastering the Art of French Cooking are excellent instruction manuals. If you learn better from video, Jacques Pepín did a 3 hour video of cooking mostly everything in La Technique.

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