Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmj | Hacker News Reader

I've read a handful, and agree that he truly understood the effects of technology and Modernity. It's worth reading the French sociologist/theologian Jacques Ellul, too (they were contemporaries).

View on HN

I like Ellul unfortunately he is much more cloudy in his statements and analysis, it takes much more energy to decipher (even in French) and make your own what he's saying.

I'd rather recommend reading basics stuff like Guy Debord (Society of Spectacle), André Gorz (Métamorphoses du travail), Schumacher (Small is Beautiful), Kohr (The Breakdown of Nations). A little bit of Bourdieu cannot hurt either

Mumford and Postman also expand that list.

Of Illich I've only fully read "Tools for Conviviality", which I'd say is a manifesto for Humane Technology of a kind.

Thank you for the recs ! Would you have one book per author to rec ?

And indeed Illich is not anti-tech, he's not a luddite

For Lewis Mumford [0] maybe "Myth of the Machine" - with his concept of "megatechnics" - is more readable than the earlier "Technics and Civilisation", but his earlier insights seem ever more relevant.

For Neil Postman [1] the standard reader is "Technopoly", but for me "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is a real treat. It was literally a description of social media and modern "performance politics" 40 years too early.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman

Luddites were not anti-tech, you're thinking of the Amish

I think it would be also worthy of note they were also both Christians, albeit quite unorthodox in their thinking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com