Alienation From Technology

Simondon argued that Western culture suffers a specific and deep alienation — not the Marxist alienation of the worker from the product of labor (though it overlaps with that) but a more fundamental alienation of human culture from technical reality itself. This alienation is not a side effect of industrialization. It is the conceptual precondition that made industrialization destructive rather than liberating. A culture that understood its technical objects — that grasped their internal logic, respected their mode of existence, and integrated them into its understanding of what it means to be human — would not have produced Manchester's satanic mills or Detroit's assembly lines. It was precisely because Western culture had already expelled technical objects from the domain of meaning that it was able to treat them as mere means to economic ends, and to treat workers operating them as mere extensions of the machines they served.