What is Technique?

Technique is a broad concept intentionally enveloping broad parts of human society and daily life. This was not always the case, but over time it has become so. From my own experience, thinking about technique seems to have a mainly continental European origin, and so it has often been mistranslated to English as technology. This is an infuriating mistake made worse by the fact that technique is a perfect translation; technology is merely a manifestation of technique, but technique has many other forms. It has also been given the following names:

• Capitalism
• Socialism¹
• Taylorism
• Rationalism
• High modernism
• Effective Accelerationism
• Cybernetics

This is not an exhaustive list, far from it actually, but it should help give you an idea of technique if you are familiar with some of these concepts. Some of them, especially capitalism, are often blamed for a great number of ills in the world. But all of the above share a belief in the enlightenment idea of progress as both a means and an end in and of itself.

Technique has been present in human civilization for as long as we can remember, simple stone tools are a sign of technology and therefore technique — a tool created for a specified purpose. But it has only been in the historically recent past that technique has come to dominate our lives so intensely. Human society has been fundamentally transformed numerous times in the last three hundred years, and is exponentially changing more and more as time goes on. This has been driven by more and more technical development.

Technique is only ever interested in expanding. It has nothing to gain from decreasing. It will only strive to increase efficiency, but often increase consumption through Jevon’s paradox. It seeks to consume more, at higher performance, to produce more. It impacts our thinking by forcing us to do what is optimal at all times, and punishing us either materially or mentally if we do not comply.

It seems to me that those who witnessed and lived through the second world war, who saw what came before and what followed, were the most aware of this phenomenon. Most famously is perhaps the french philosopher Jacques Ellul, who wrote the book he would be most famous for in 1954. But others who commented on this were Heidegger, and perhaps most eloquently the Nazi minister of Armaments Albert Speer, whose final statement at the Nuremberg Trials is well worth reading.

Being able to recognize technique is valuable in almost every field. It is even useful in recognizing the forces driving you in daily life. But I will share some clear examples so that one can easily recognize how technique manifests itself in the world.

1. How the clock controls our lives instead of our bodies deciding when we rest, eat, play, or work.
2. How the environment is being plundered and extracted for ever-increasing production, and how the solution seems to be more production in different ways².
3. How states are continuously working for increased centralization and control over its population, even when striving for nominally democratic values.
4. How programmers are forced to use LLM tools to create code faster, even when that comes at the cost of long-term sustainability. This then creates more work, requiring more labour (or capital).
5. How public schooling has created a standardized system of spelling and grammar that one is shamed for misusing.

Technique is always interested in solutions, but it does not care for what problems those solutions create. Instead, new problems are only opportunities to apply more techniques, expanding it in the process.

One of the more famous people raging against the advance of technique was Ted Kaczynski, an American mathematician, primitivist, and terrorist. His work The Industrial Society and Its Future advocated for violent revolution against the technical world.

The issue with this approach is that Kaczynski was directly using technique to promote his agenda. Those who make use of technique will always have the upper hand as they are able to foster more resources more intensely, out-competing those who refuse to use technique.

Another example is the degrowth movement that seeks to reign in GDP growth and to instead redirect preëxisting resources toward improving living standards. Even if noble on a first glace, this will not succeed due to technique’s inherent need for expansion. One recent example of priorotizing living standards over GDP growth was the COVID-19 pandemic, but even that was a technical decision.

The question posed in the subtitle is actually a trick; wanting to do something is itself a technical solution. A purely atechnical solution would be to not do anything at all about anything. Fighting against it is really to accept defeat as fighting requires the employment of several techniques.

But this does not mean a total nihilistic despair is one’s only option. A reading of Ellul for example is incomplete without including his religious writings on how to life faithfully in the world — something that is atechnical for the most part.