In his article "The Present and the Future" Jacque Ellul addresses what he sees as the problem of technology as a milieu. To Ellul, a milieu represents not only the place a person resides but also the context from which a means of survival is drawn. The modern city presents us with the perfect example of a technological milieu. It is a dead mass of brick, steel, cement and glass; an active shaping and transforming environment, which as humans we must adapt to or perish. Technology as a milieu is fluid and therefore represents an evolving reality that we can never completely adapt to and thus, it becomes a continuing struggle between man and the demands of the changing environment.
According to Ellul our species has known three milieus. The natural milieu, the milieu of society and now the technological milieu. The natural milieu was that of pre-history during which man and nature were one and the same. Man was in constant combat with the elements and the wild animals. Society developed as a defense against this natural milieu. Organized groups of people gradually began to dominate nature and thus this social environment marks the beginning of history and a social milieu. People to some extent remained in nature, technologies were utilized only as means and were not all invasive. Major problems to overcome during this period were; organization, distribution, group cohesion and wars. Gradually a technological milieu has replaced society, alienating man from nature, shaping social groups and interactions.
With the development of a new milieu the pre-existing element is not eliminated but becomes to some extent obsolete. Problems raised by a former milieu are no longer essential or fundamental, therefore today it is more important to solve problems raised by technology than purely political issues. Technology has become our environment and beyond that, a system. A system for Ellul is an ensemble of mutually integrated elements, situated in terms of one another and reacting to one another. Taking this into account it can be seen that any variation of the whole would have consequences for the integrated parts and also, any single part must be understood in terms of the whole. A system obeys its own laws, in other words it is autonomous.
This has tremendous consequences to Ellul, who sees technology as a system with no regulation. We create new technologies to repair problems in the old ones and the system itself determines who makes decisions and who must act. One of the problems that an unregulated system presents, is that it is impossible to predict the future patterns of growth or outcomes. Technological growth in other words represents the growth of chaos. Technology, is symbolic of a cancer which as it grows increases the fundamental danger to its host, in this case society. Technology in and of itself is ambivalent and rational, in sharp contrast to the irrationality of humanity. Ellul decrees that we are faced with a fundamental and serious issue. Politics cannot be the answer because it is synonymous of the old system, we must in essence face this reality as a challenge to be overcome as was the case with nature and society.
The idealism of the technological system has been embraced by third world countries who correlate power with technology and see it as a means to escape the grips of poverty. However for many of these societies the shock of absorbing technologies has absorbed their identity, dealing them the double blow of cultural annihilation and entrance to an alien environment. After all, the west has adapted gradually over a period of two hundred years, how can the third world be expected to pschycologically and sociologically survive?
So, is there no hope? Ellul perceives as positive the ecological and the women's movement. He sees technology as being representative of the extreme male personality, the technological system being the very essence of manhood. A world in which the more feminine traits of spontaneity, sensitivity and intuition were more dominant would restore meaning to the place in which we live and restore goals for living and surviving in a technological world. Overall, the picture Ellul paints is a bleak one and we are left feeling uncertain and somewhat fearful that we have unleashed a monster that is now our master and will perhaps be our nemesis.