This book is still worth reading by anyone interested in the things that orthodox mass-media advertisements for progress don't tell us about technology, but you have to steel yourself for an uncompromising and bleak perspective. If you think of this book as a forecast of the late nineteen nineties, written by a visionary of the 1950s, it's more than enough to give you the willies. It helps to understand that Ellul is talking about a way of thinking and doing that is necessary for what most of us think of as technology, but is invisible and not necessarily connected to machines. Technique , as Ellul describes it, applies to governments as well as artifacts. The printing press is technique.
Slavery is technique.
The alphabet is technique. Government is technique. Steam power is technique. Ellul claims the key characteristics of technique are rationality, artificiality, automatism of technical choice, self-augmentation, monism, universalism, and autonomy. He re-wrote and expanded The Technological Society into The Technological Bluff , published in 1990 by Eerdmans Publishing Co. Grand Rapids, Michigan.