How Do We Make Technology Livable

When we speak about technology today, we usually ask the wrong kind of question. We ask what technology is: what kind of object it is, what it does to us, whether it is good or bad, human or inhuman. We look for answers in devices, platforms, machines, or systems, as if technics were simply a collection of things that surround us and act upon us.

For philosopher Gilbert Simondon, this framing misses the point. Technics is not primarily an object at all. It is a way of making things function together: the organization of materials, energies, gestures, and relations into a coherent operation. A tool, a machine, or an infrastructure matters less for what it is than for how it works, how it regulates itself, how it transforms forces and information, and how it enters into relation with other processes. What concerns Simondon, then, is how we understand technics, evaluate it, and live with it. From this concern emerges the idea of a technical mentality: a distinctive way of thinking, perceiving, and judging that develops alongside technical operations themselves.

Simondon argues that such a technical mentality is not yet fully formed. It is a way of inhabiting the world that takes shape together with technical objects, but has not yet found a stable cultural or ethical expression. When this mentality does develop, technology no longer appears either as a threat to be feared or as an innovation to be worshiped. It becomes something intelligible, livable, and meaningful.

At present, however, we lack a shared emotional and ethical vocabulary for living within technical regimes. As a result, technology is often experienced as cold and inhuman, or as something that must be controlled, tamed, or neutralized. We have technical infrastructures everywhere, but no corresponding form of life capable of giving them a human shape.

To make technology more “human” does not mean softening it or placing limits upon it. It means learning to understand it in its regimes of operation, that is, in the concrete conditions under which a being actually functions and maintains itself. For Simondon, a technical reality is not defined by its inert structure, which tells us very little about it, but by its entelechy, by the level at which it crosses a threshold and enters into effective operation. Below that threshold it may remain stable yet dormant; beyond it, it can lose coherence, drift, or begin to fail in ways that are no longer intelligible from its design alone. Only within a certain range does it truly exist as a technical individual. Regulation, feedback, equilibrium, resonance, accumulation, threshold: these name not abstract properties but recurrent modes of activity that appear in digital systems no less than in machines and organisms, in platforms and infrastructures as well as in ecosystems and social systems. Technical knowledge therefore cuts across the old divisions between nature and culture, the organic and the mechanical, not by identifying what things are in essence, but by grasping how different realities enter into comparable regimes of functioning.

Simondon argues that we can already see this mode of understanding at work in cybernetics. Faced with systems that cannot be fully predicted in advance, engineers developed mechanisms capable of correcting themselves while operating. Feedback becomes the central principle. Information returns to the system, compares actual states with desired ones, and applies corrections in a continuous loop. The system no longer merely executes commands; it adapts. Cybernetics thus shifts our attention from the question of what a thing is to the question of how it behaves under certain conditions.

A Diagram by Simondon

We often romanticize a return to simpler times, to personal relations, to the hand, the touch, the ideal of “human labor.” Simondon warns against this nostalgia. The transition to industry has indeed produced alienation, but its source is structural, not moral. He describes it as the separation of energy and information. In artisanal work, both are concentrated in a single body. The worker supplies force and knowledge, gesture and judgment. Industrial production separates these sources - energy comes from nature, from steam, electricity, fuel. Information comes from elsewhere. And the machine mediates between them.

This split produces two figures at once: the alienated worker, reduced to repetitive gestures, and the unhappy inventor, who designs systems without building, operating, or inhabiting them. Nostalgia for craft emerges as a response to this fracture. But Simondon is uncompromising here. A return to craft is an illusion. Modern societies require volumes of energy, production, and transformation that the human body alone cannot provide.

The solution is not to flee industry, but to deepen it. Only by understanding technical regimes more precisely can we reconnect information, energy, and human presence in less alienating ways. A technical mentality must become conscious of itself.

This is why Simondon insists that technical objects should not be conceived as closed monuments, as if they were self-contained organisms to be accepted or rejected “as a whole,” once and for all. A technical object is made to be examined, tested, maintained, repaired. It is constructed under the idea that its parts have a relative detachability, that subsets can be replaced or modified without treating the whole as sacred and indissoluble.

At the same time, no technical object exists in isolation. Its reality is inseparable from the milieu in which it operates: infrastructures, networks, environments, social practices, and patterns of use. A technical being becomes fully technical only when it is integrated into such a networked context and allowed to operate within real conditions rather than abstract designs. Understanding technics therefore requires attention not only to internal mechanisms but to how they are embedded in and transform the environments they inhabit.

For such relations to be possible, technical systems must also be legible. This legibility is not reducible to usability or interface clarity. It concerns the intelligibility of operations themselves: where decisions are made, how processes unfold, where points of failure or modification lie. Not everything must be exposed at all times, but what is essential is that those who wish to understand how a system works are not structurally prevented from doing so. Technical mentality demands that understanding remain possible.

Finally, a technical mentality does not treat systems as fixed solutions, but as sites of exploration and invention. Technical objects should invite experimentation, play, and creative engagement with their operations. In this sense, the aesthetic dimension of technics is not decorative but vital. It is through expressive engagement, through modification, repair, tinkering, and even misuse, that technical systems recover a living relation to those who inhabit them.

Such an object embodies a technical mentality. It expresses a balance between dependence and autonomy among its parts, between stability and openness, between integration and transformability. It is defined not by its form alone, but by its operational regime. In this sense, technics is not opposed to humanity. It is a way of articulating relations between humans, machines, and environments.

To speak of a technical mentality today is to recognize that we are still learning how to live with what we have built. Like Enlightenment for Kant, technical mentality is not a state we have reached but a task we have inherited. It calls for patience, generosity, and critique at once. Not the mastery of technics, but the courage to understand how it works, how it binds us together, and how it might yet be given a human form.