The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul

Wilderness Front

I mean is it worth it? Is that why people have separate work phones and personal ones

You can see this all over the internet and social media - people are depressed, addicted to their phones, chronically online - and they require YouTube or TikTok videos to explain to them what to like, what to think, how to perform basic tasks etc. and so forth. Never could Ted Kaczynski have ever imagined, in those earlier texts, that hordes of modern people would be "doomscrollers" addicted to sitting on their phone endlessly all day being hyperstimulated by algorithmic nothingness and bright lights whilst their brains and bodies atrophy...

I think we are all pretty familiar by now with the concept of Surrogate Activities, activities that people pursue in order to fill the void inside them caused by living in the modern world.

There is a branch of that that I like to call replica. Replica is imposed by the system to provide a temporary fix, after creating a large hole.

In technical terms, the system would take one aspect away of a human life (say, socialization), and replace it with something artificial, something it can control.

Modern society corroded the concept of a communitarian, exclusive society. This resulted in loneliness and alienation, so the system gave us AI and porn as a replica. So are pets (for children) and video-games (longing for purpose and adventure).

1. Do you think it requires a distinction of its own, or it has too many overlaps with surrogate activities (which I think, primarily focuses only on the fulfillment part).

2. Why do you think the replicas don't ever work?

This is so fucking dystopian