The System-Society
Origin: Personal usage inspired by Jacques Ellul
Definition
The system-society designates the structural logic of contemporary Western societies: a social organization founded on the pursuit of maximum efficiency in all things, which permanently generates new needs to solve the problems produced by its own solutions. It is a perpetual race with no finish line, because each technical solution creates new problems that call for new solutions.
Ellul, as early as the 1950s, identifies this dynamic as constitutive of modern technology: efficiency is not merely one criterion among others — it has become the absolute value orienting all social activity. The system-society is the society in which this logic has colonized every domain.
In my writings
Generative AI is a perfect illustration of this. Its evolution rests on a purely commercial logic: ever more performance, ever more models, ever more use cases. AI system providers are structurally incentivized to produce more, faster, more powerful — not because a specific need demands it, but because the competitive logic of the system-society imposes it.
This race does not produce stability. It produces a continuous acceleration in which the question of what society we want to build is systematically deferred or drowned out. Before deciding which system-society we want to evolve in, we would first need to “form a society” — and this is precisely what the system-society makes difficult.