Technical Culture

In the AI Story

The split operates through a specific mechanism. The humanist treats the machine as a black box: something that takes in resources and produces outputs, whose internal functioning is irrelevant to questions of human meaning. The technician treats the machine as an assemblage of components to be optimized according to engineering criteria. Neither understands the machine as what it actually is: a participant in human-technical co-individuation, an entity with its own mode of existence that is neither reducible to human purposes nor separable from them.

The result is a culture that oscillates between two impoverished attitudes. Uncritical enthusiasm for technical progress sees only what machines can do. Uncritical anxiety sees only what machines might do to us. Both attitudes share the same blindness — both treat the machine as fundamentally other. Neither grasps the more unsettling truth: that the machine is already inside, already participating in the process by which we become what we are.

Simondon imagined technical culture being transmitted through education, through new forms of apprenticeship that would teach not just how to use machines but how to understand them. The large language model does not replace the need for this technical culture but dramatically lowers the barrier to its acquisition. A person with no programming background can now engage in a sustained conversation with an AI system about how neural networks learn, what attention mechanisms do, why transformer architectures produce the kinds of outputs they produce. The conversation will not make the person an engineer. But it can make the person a culturally literate participant in the technical reality that is reshaping their world.

Technical culture requires a specific disposition — what might be called attentive participation. It does not mean treating the machine as an equal, attributing consciousness to technical objects, or sentimentally anthropomorphizing appliances. It means understanding the technical object as a participant in a shared process of individuation — recognizing that the machine has its own mode of existence, its own trajectory of development, and that productive coupling requires attending to these features rather than ignoring them.

Origin

The call for technical culture runs through Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958) and is elaborated in Simondon's later writings and lectures, including Sur la technique (published posthumously, 2014). Simondon saw the creation of technical culture as a civilizational task comparable to the invention of literary culture in the early modern period.

Key Ideas

Modern culture is split. The humanist-technician divide has left the machine culturally orphaned for three centuries, and the split persists in contemporary AI discourse.

Both alienated attitudes are wrong. Neither utilitarian reduction nor apocalyptic elevation grasps what technical objects actually are.

Technical culture is integrative. It connects knowledge of technical objects with understanding of human individuation, bridging domains that have been kept apart.

AI can mediate its own cultural integration. For the first time, the technical object can participate in the discourse about itself, translating its internal logic into human language.

Partnership, not mastery or enslavement. Simondon distinguished three possible relationships to technical objects — enslavement to, mastery over, partnership with. Only the third is adequate to what technical objects actually are.