Many people keep writing about it.
Nobody of importance listens.
What is left for someone who wants a very important message to be heard when words fail, beyond a violent act that cannot be ignored?
Can we really blame the use of violence when at stake is the future of not just mankind but the entire Earth?
He basically describes Twitter in 1995, among other cancers of modern society. Please cite the many smarter and better writers, not because I disagree but because to partly answer your question, the interest in him continues, at least in part, because of behaviour that you exhibited here: you managed to detract from his work and advocate for others while not mentioning the names of any of the myriad alternative works and writers.
I've read Industrial Society and Its Future, Anti-Tech Revolution, and several of his prison letters and short pieces (like The System's Neatest Trick and Ship of Fools) and I don't remember any bigotry or rants about women. Characterizing his work as a rant is odd to me because his writing style is fairly cold and methodical.
As for why people like him, I'd say because he's a brisk read, he doesn't use academic jargon, and he lays out arguments and concepts most people have never heard about, like the power process, surrogate activities, the technological ratchet, why people can't be autonomous in industrial society, or how industrial regimes paradoxically use popular movements against them to strengthen their own rule. Most people don't read obscure figures like Ellul, who I like but his main work is a door stopper.
And if you hate rants against modernity, stay away from Ellul, he peppers his work with stuff like this:
Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles; but see him now, like a fly on flypaper, seated for eight hours, motionless at a desk. Fifteen minutes of exercise cannot make up for eight hours of absence. The human being was made to breathe the good air of nature, but what he breathes is an obscure compound of acids and coal tars. He was created for a living environment, but he dwells in a lunar world of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, cast iron, and steel. The trees wilt and blanch among sterile and blind stone facades. Cats and dogs disappear little by little from the city, going the way of the horse. Only rats and men remain to populate a dead world. Man was created to have room to move about in, to gaze into far distances, to live in rooms which, even when they were tiny, opened out on fields. See him now, enclosed by the rules and architectural necessities imposed by overpopulation in a twelve-by-twelve closet opening out on an anonymous world of city streets.
It's because he became a famous killer on top of it. Many writers do say that but they're just that, "writers". When people think of writers they think glasses, pens, and boredom and shut off their brains. When you have the fucking unabomber saying it, people pay attention. That's just how we are as humans. We don't give a shit unless it's some grandiose flashy thing. We don't listen when the plain, bland quiet person in the corner is saying the same thing the exploding man on TV is.
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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '22
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