Algorithmic Addiction
How Jacques Ellul predicted our TikTok addiction before smartphones existed and what Christian Humanists got right about resisting it
I don’t use TikTok.
I mean, I watch TikTok—I just do it on Instagram Reels, like a self-respecting millennial. You know the drill: one video to decompress, and suddenly it’s forty-five minutes later and I’m somehow invested in the life of a guy who builds tiny houses out of shipping containers in his backyard.
It feels harmless. Entertaining, even. But sometimes I pause long enough to realize: I didn’t choose any of this. I didn’t seek it out. An algorithm handed it to me. I passively consumed what it served.
And if I’m honest, that’s increasingly true of my media, my mood, and my mental state.
That’s not just a quirk of modern life—it’s a warning flag.
Alan Jacobs, in The Year of Our Lord 1943, tells the story of several Christian intellectuals—Lewis, Eliot, Maritain, Weil, Auden—who were trying to reckon with the cultural conditions that gave rise to fascism, communism, and technocratic rule. But what strikes me most is the brief epilogue, where Jacobs nods to Jacques Ellul—a French theologian and sociologist who wrote just a few years later and diagnosed a problem even deeper than ideology.
Ellul’s concern? Technique. Not just tools, but systems of efficiency, optimization, and control that become ends in themselves.
“Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.”
—Jacques Ellul
Ellul warned that the real danger wasn’t that machines would enslave us. It’s that we would willingly shape our entire lives around what machines—and their logic—demand.
And in 2025, that’s not hypothetical. That’s Tuesday.
The New Technocracy Isn’t a Government—It’s a Feed
The Christian humanists Jacobs profiles were already wary of a future where culture was no longer shaped by tradition, imagination, or virtue—but by systems.
Back then, the system was bureaucratic and industrial. Today, it’s algorithmic and invisible.
Instead of party propaganda, we get personalized media. Instead of state-run ideology, we get curated feeds built from our behavior. The result is the same: a passive population, shaped not by reflection or community, but by the quiet hum of convenience.
And that convenience is not neutral.
It conditions how we spend our time.
It shapes what we believe is normal, desirable, or controversial.
It determines what stories rise and what truths disappear.
And most of all, it trains us to be passive—scrolling through life rather than stepping into it.
Ellul’s critique—and Jacobs’ framing of it—isn’t just about how we consume. It’s about how we’re being formed.
Christian humanists like Eliot and Lewis weren’t fighting technology per se—they were resisting the loss of human judgment, character, and imagination. They believed that once we outsource those things to systems (whether political or technological), we lose something essential: the ability to live meaningful lives rooted in virtue.
Today, that fight is even harder to notice. After all, no one forced me to scroll Reels for 45 minutes. But no one helped me form the resistance not to, either.
When culture is mediated entirely by algorithmic platforms—designed to keep us scrolling, clicking, reacting—what chance does reflection have? What chance does formation have?
Three Acts of Resistance
If Ellul is right, and Jacobs is right to recover him, then our moment demands more than media literacy or screen time tips. It calls for deliberate acts of resistance—not just to the platforms themselves, but to the logic that governs them. Here are three small but subversive ways to begin:
Disrupt Your Algorithm: Search for things you don’t agree with. Watch content that challenges your assumptions. Step out of the loop. Not because it’s virtuous—but because it’s freeing. Make the machine work harder to find you.
Recover Slowness: Read a book. Not a summary. Not a Twitter thread. A book. Watch a film that doesn’t resolve in 90 minutes. Talk to someone in person with no agenda. These aren’t aesthetic choices—they’re cultural defiance.
Choose Formation Over Optimization: Don’t just ask: “What’s the best tool?” Ask: “What kind of person does this make me?” That’s the Ellul question. That’s the Jacobs question. That’s the Christian humanist question.
We’ve become used to saying things like “social media is just a tool” or “it depends how you use it.” But what if the tool is using you?
Ellul wasn’t issuing a doomsday prophecy. He was calling for freedom. Not freedom from devices, but freedom from the lie that efficiency is always good, that convenience is always neutral, that culture can be managed by code.
The Christian humanists saw what happens when people abandon the slow, difficult work of cultivating culture in favor of systems that promise results without reflection. And in a world where most people’s culture is handed to them in a feed, we’re there.
The question isn’t whether the algorithm is shaping your life. It is.
The question is whether you’ll let it keep doing so—or start choosing something different.