An Introduction to Technics: Part 1

Why technology changes us profoundly, and why we need to study it

In these deeply polarizing times, there's still one thing that seems to unite people from every ideological camp. And that is a common feeling of encroaching dread, and eventual acceptance of, the radical technological transformations that we are all living through. These changes are sometimes constructive, often disruptive and destructive, but almost always visible and accelerating. Whether it is the aggressively polarizing algorithms that send you down bizarre, confusing, rabbit holes at breakneck speeds, a complete re-engineering of social interactions and community caused by a decade of social media, an internet "economy" where everything is either funded by sports betting ads, soft-core pornography, or the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, there's a real sense of unreality to our modern economy. Everyone can feel it, even if they can't quite put it into words.

There's a section of the society who have taken to this new world like a duck to water, and you can find them boosting the newest token currency or get-rich-quick scheme or employing bots to do the same in the comments' sections of completely unrelated YouTube videos. There's also a two-letter word where all the money in the economy currently seems to be flowing to as of October 2025, but I don't want to date this article by mentioning it.

Instead, this article is about our ability as a society to understand these transformative changes. To put them, and their impact on us, into words, into categories and definitions. So we can better talk about them, and make changes in our life to adjust to them.

To do so, we need to go back to a field of study that first emerged in the 19th century - the century of Hegel, Marx, Carlyle, Bentham and Ruskin. It is the century that created the world we live in today, for better or worse. Most of the language, definitions, terminologies and epistemologies that we are familiar with in today's politics, find their roots in this century. But there's one concept - one field of study - that seems to have been lost to time, despite the fact that it by all logical rights, it should be more required today than ever. The field I'm talking about is the field of Technics.

To introduce Technics in an ELI5 manner: It was a field of study that aimed to understand how technological forces can make irreversible and permanent changes to human behavior itself. This was a deeper claim than the ones made by many modern thinkers (like Marx) about the impact of technology on economic, social, and historical forces. Technics claimed that the impact of technology is even deeper. It changes who we are as human beings, our very nature, and our ability to interact with others, at a fundamental level. This is such a simple point, and is, in some ways, accepted by modern man almost implicitly - as he struggles to navigate the streets of his home town without a mobile GPS guiding him - as self-evident. And yet, I would argue that modern man has almost no vocabulary to capture the full extent to which he is being changed by the technological forces around him. This is why I want to make the case in this article that Technics as a field of study desperately needs to return to prominence in our time.

A very German Idea

As I started researching and exploring the history of the concept of "Technics", I observed a curious pattern. And that is the fact that Technics is a more "German" idea than an Anglo idea, and that this is probably a big reason why it is no longer prominently used in the 21st century, which is the era of post-Anglo victory. We all know the (well-acquired) allergy that Anglos have to German ideas, especially 19th-century German ideas. The 19th century was, as I've already alluded to, a period of rapid technological and social change. We are very familiar with the two schools of Liberal Anglo thought that went from:

• Bentham → Modern Utilitarian Liberalism (best represented by the Republican Party in the U.S.)

• Carlyle → Ruskin → The Fabians/Labour in Britain + Mugwumps/New Republicans/Progressives in the U.S. → Modern Egalitarian Liberalism (best represented by the Democratic Party in the U.S.)

These two trends of thought broadly act as the two poles of the modern Anglo Overton Window of "liberalism" and "conservatism".

But the Germans in the 19th century were … all over the place. There was Hegel, Marx and Engels, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and many, many more. And it would not be an exaggeration to say that these thinkers and their ideas are just as important to understanding the modern world, especially as the early-20th century German also has a prime position in the mythos of the post-1945 world as the primary antagonist and heel. Technics as a field was birthed by this ideological fermentation in 19th century Germany, and shaped by the struggle of then-modern man to try and understand what technology was doing to him. Later on, I would argue that the torch of Technics was also picked up by various French scholars, particularly in the Marxist school, and finally found its radical, accelerating extreme utterance in the form of a quirky, oddball late-20th century Anglo writer.

We start our historical understanding of this field with Johann Beckmann, who can be considered as the founder of the field of Technics, or "Technologie" as he said in the original German. Beckmann was a university professor in Germany, and is considered the first modern thinker to teach "technology" as an academic subject. He was guided by an almost-Enlightenment level obsession (what the modern internet would call "autism") with teaching and understanding the objective history and current status of different professions. His book "Beiträge zur Geschichte der Erfindungen" (translated as "The History of Inventions, Discoveries and Origins") tried to capture and document the "origin, history and recent condition of the various machines, utensils, etc., employed in trade and for domestic purposes". Technology was, for the first time, attempted to be codified and studied like an organized, formal body of knowledge by Beckmann. And for this, he deserves credit as the originator of this body of ideas.

The next German author in this field is Ernst Kapp, who wrote a book called "Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik" (Elements of a Philosophy of Technology) in 1877. This is a fascinating work, and continues to be immensely, and perhaps even more, relevant to this day. Kapp's most interesting new observation is that technology and the tools used to utilize them are, and can be seen as, extensions of human organs into the world. The simplest way to think about this is that all the tools and technologies we use today with our hands to increase our capacity and productivity, like a kitchen tool to help cut our vegetables better, can be seen as an extension of our hands themselves. In a literal as well as metaphysical sense. The obvious consequences of this idea in the modern age are that the average individual today has become so reliant on technology to perform his daily tasks, that he can be seen, in many ways, to be more technology than man.

How many of us could survive a day in the modern world without a smartphone or a smart device? Kapp's formulation of this relationship between man and tool has significant and aggressive ramifications for who we are now as a species and a group of people, and instead of running away from these questions, we should be trying to grapple with them seriously.

Another equally important and fascinating point was made by Friedrich Dessauer, in his 1927 book Philosophie der Technik: Das Problem der Realisierung (Philosophy of Technology: The Problem of Realization). Desseur digs even deeper than Kapp, making the claim that technology is not just a set of tools. Rather, it is an act of "creation", and a way for human beings to fully realize who they are. Dessauer zeros-in on the process of the creation of this technology. In his formulation, any newly created technology starts from the act of the invention itself. In this process of invention, man takes the seeds of an idea, works to narrow-down and crystallize the idea, and then use the natural resources around him to create the tool that becomes the vehicle of the technological change. For Dessaeur, the very act of identifying a problem, thinking through how to solve the problem, and then to come up with the invention that finally "plugs the hole" is the part of technology which is a deeply human essence and practice. For Dessaeur, this act of "creation" can be seen as what imbues technology with its "humanity". As can also be implied with the focus on "creation" in his ideas, this process mapped out by Dessauer also loops in an element of the Divine. For Dessaeur, humanity must tap into the Divine, as the latter is the only force capable of such intelligent creation.

We then come to the two authors, who within a period of three years, wrote the two most well-known books (at least in the English-speaking world) on the field of Technics. I'm obviously talking about Oswald Spengler's "Der Mensch und die Technik" ("Man and Technics") (1931) and Lewis Mumford's "Technics and Civilization" (1934).

Spengler's book, as can also be said of his two-part epic "The Decline of the West", is a landmark work in the field. Spengler is a well-known pessimist about the fate of the "West" as he saw it, in the early-20th century, and "Man and Technics" is no different in this the attitude he brings to the table.

As one navigates through Spengler's claims in his book, one realizes that he takes the definition of "Technics" already established by authors like Kapp and Dessauer, and goes even further than them. In line with his grand theory of every people/nationality/race having its own sovereign "spirit", Spengler sees technology itself as a manifestation of man's desire and ability to impose his will on the natural world. In particular, Spengler associates Technics with the Western, "Faustian" Man, and his ushering in of Modernity - of society organized at an Industrial scale, with mass production, mass information, and mass consumption. Through industrial society and mass information, Faustian Man was able to fulfill his instinct and desire to impose himself on the natural world. But Spengler, ever the pessimist, sees this adoption of industrial society and scale, as the very thing that will eventually lead to the downfall of western society and Faustian Man.

In making this claim, Spengler touches on an idea that is at the very heart of Technics - the proposition that man does not remain unchanged in his nature, when he adopts technology at this scale. According to Spengler, organizing society at this industrial scale, focused on mass production and consumption, and given a sense of "reality" by mass information, will undoubtedly lead to a transformation of human nature and behavior itself. After all, human beings across the world have had to go from a paradigm where they lived in small societies with significant local economic self-dependence, and with localized "truths", to the complete opposite kind of human organization - one of large societies, interlinked economic dependence across tribal and national boundaries, and mass information and mass "truths".

How can this not change what human beings are?

For Spengler, the consequences of this transformation are obvious. It will lead to a society that subsumes the individual - his instinct, his capacity to create and generate - into the larger "machine" of mass organization. It would thus lead to the death of the "creative" spark within the individual, to be replaced with a machine-like "progress" brought about by mass organization. Spengler also then ruminates on the exact consequences of these changes on the future of Western/Faustian Man. While that is not entirely relevant to this article, I'd invite the reader to investigate that part on their own terms, as in some ways, nearly 100 years after Spengler's writings, we are all Faustian Men/Women!

Technics leaves Germany

We now move on from the esoteric German Prophet of Doom, to a comparatively more boring American intellectual. Lewis Mumford, as one can see from the history of "Technics" so far, is a bit of an outlier. All the other authors we've considered so far were German authors and can be seen as continuing the same tradition of thought from the late-19th and early-20th century. But Mumford is different. While Victorian Anglo authors like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin grappled with the transformative consequences of free-market utilitarianism (what Carlyle called "The Dismal Science"), they never used the term "Technics" or singularly focused on the technological aspect of the changes.

In that sense, it might be accurate to consider Lewis Mumford as one of the first Anglo attempts to study and expand on the field of Technics. Mumford himself was a sociologist and a critic, a columnist in The New Republic, a commentator on urbanization, architecture and city life, and while not explicitly associated with this, it's hard for me not to see him as a great example of the early-20th century American Progressive/Liberal Republican/Mugwump movement and the corresponding strain of thoughts and attitudes that found their ultimate expression in the creation of the modern U.S. State under Franklin Roosevelt.

Mumford's book "Technics and Civilization", written in 1934, can be seen as an interesting one-two-punch with Spengler's 1931 "Man and Technics". In fact, Mumford was aware of Spengler, and is on record as saying that he was "fascinated by Spengler's book" and "impressed with him since 1926". Mumford also called Spengler's "The Decline of the West" as "an audacious, profound [...] exciting and magnificent, one of the most capable attempts to order the annals of history since Auguste Comte". So it would be fair to say that Mumford was at least partially influenced by Spengler's (and through him, the Germanic tradition of Technologie that Spengler built upon) ideas on Technics.

But Mumford offers us more than just an Anglo restatement of Germanic "Technics". Instead, he brings us an additional and fascinating angle on the history of Technics. In true Anglo fashion, Mumford's big contribution to Technics is in the field of further categorization and defining of terms. In fact, he extends mankind's relationship with technology far before the advancements of the industrial age (like the Steam Engine or the Telegraph), and goes all the way back to ancient times, constructing a dialectical history of mankind that proceeds forward due to technological change.

Mumford divides this history into three broad phases:

1. The Eotechnic Era: This era covers broadly the period we colloquially know as the medieval to early-modern era. In this era, man's life was built around the centrality of elements like wind, water, and wood. Simpler, smaller machines dominated man's life, and were used to perform smaller-scale, individual tasks. Interestingly, Mumford sees this era as the period where the clock becomes central to human life and understanding of time (We will circle back to the clock in a bit).

2. The Paleotechnic Era: This era broadly describes the first industrial revolution period. In this era, man's life starts getting dominated by coal, iron, steam, and other elements of the Industrial Age. In the same sense as Spengler, Mumford sees this era defined by industrial technology, mass production and mass consumption, etc. Both Spengler and Mumford see these changes as transforming human behavior from creative to machine-like.

3. The Neotechnic Era: This era covers the "modern world" as existed in front of Mumford in the late 1920s and early 1930s. One big change from, perhaps one driven by the changes brought upon by the Paleotechnic Era, is the impact and presence of mass communication. There are also other changes like electricity, various chemical processes and early automation of various human processes by machines. Interestingly, some of these changes make Mumford more optimistic for the possibility of smaller-scale technologies and human organization.

4. While Mumford's book and research obviously stops at the period of his writing, I would argue that the benefit of hindsight allows us to add one more era to his list. This is an era dominated by silicon, crude oil, and the Bloomberg Terminal. I think an appropriate term for this era would be something like the Metatechnic Era, and we will jump into more details on this later in the article, as it is the era we now live in today.

Beyond his admirable attempt, and Anglo persuasion towards categorization and definitions, Mumford also reiterates a point that Spengler and other authors before him made in their works - that technology is not "neutral" when it comes to affecting human behavior. In fact, over the years, it has changed our behaviors profoundly, to the point that our ancestors from just a few centuries ago would find many of our modern habits and practices to be unrecognizable. In fact, they wouldn't even have the language to describe these behaviors.

Perhaps the most interesting example Mumford gives for this premise is how the simple clock has transformed human behavior and perception of our self. It is an item we so take for granted, that we cannot even fathom a world where it wouldn't have existed. And yet, there was indeed a world like that, and human beings lived in it. For Mumford, the clock is so transformational, that it completely changed how man thought about time. The clock created, according to Mumford, a "temporal regime" - that is, a common reference point in terms of measurement and passage of time that was scalable, universally adoptable across cultures, languages, etc. to the point that the modern world of market-based economic organization and various industrial disciplines and practices that go along with it, would not have been possible without the clock.

It's hard to state just how important Mumford's writings were to bring the till-then mostly-Germanic idea of Technics to the Anglo world. It brought this word into colloquial use in English, and led to more non-German authors, primarily French ones, exploring this idea in their own terms and manner.

One such author is the French esoteric Christian thinker Jacques Ellul. Ellul's idea of "Technique", while pulling from some of the same strands as our earlier thinkers, is actually much deeper, and makes more significant claims. In his famous work La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle ("The Technological Society"), Ellul defines Technique as "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity."

Ellul's observation, one that none of the other thinkers before him had really made, is that "Technique" is not simply a tool or a machine, but a system of rationality that has now come to dominate all forms of thinking about problems in our society. "Technique" demands the “one best way” of doing things be the only way to do things, prioritizes efficiency above everything else, and gradually displaces other human values (ethical, aesthetic, spiritual) in favor of the calculable.

Ellul goes further, arguing that Technique - this way of doing things - has become autonomous, universal, self-augmenting and self-perpetuating. It no longer remains subject to human ends, but instead frames our ends, our goals and actions, in its own logic. As Ellul says in his book, "Everyone has been taught (that) technique is the application of science…this traditional view is radically false…technique comes first".

In his brilliant essay on this topic, the Substack author Kruptos, coming at this topic from a western right-wing perspective, says the following:

"Technique and technical thinking has taken over all of man's activities. It is not just a thing of productivity, or science, or the making of machines and devices, technical thinking is what integrates human beings into a machine society. Technique both paves the way for the machine and integrates humans into the use of the machine. Technical thinking constructs the kind of world that the machines needs.

What kind of world is this? It is world that values efficiency. It wishes to bring efficiency to all human activity. We must be ever more productive. To achieve greater productivity, everything must become more efficient. To become more efficient, every human action needs to be standardized. Humanity is made to fit the world of the machine. Humans become an extension of the machine, an efficient and productive cog in the great technical system. Technique is the model, the ideal, and its attributes are valid once and for all, for everyone".

Ellul thus makes a major jump, and defines Technique as having become the base instinct, the base organizing principle, of modern man and modern society. It has become our go-to instinct whenever we try to solve a problem - whether an individual problem in our lives, or a collective-action social problem that requires group coordination. We instinctively, constantly re-shape our minds and bodies to fit the contours of the Technique, of machine-like efficiency, every day in our lives.

Therefore, we get a much more comprehensive and complete theory of "Technics" from Ellul. This conception of Technics is the first to grant a nature of autonomy, or self-perpetuation to this phenomenon, which is an idea we will see again from other authors in the future. It's the first conception of this process that takes away the primacy of human beings in this process completely. And instead, turns the tables to the point where humans are now the ones in the passenger seat, blindly being driven forward by a set of instincts and mechanisms that they have created.

This idea is pushed further by Gilbert Simondon in his 1958 book "Du mode d’existence des objets techniques" ("On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects"). Simondon, another French philosopher, argues that technical objects are not just tools for human usage. Instead, they are "evolving beings", deserving their own analysis as they were developing and growing, like human beings. In doing so, Simondon introduces the concept of "concretization", which describes how machines evolve from abstract and inefficient in their "youth", to becoming more adapted to their environment, thus achieving greater "technicity" over time. Simondon also argues that while "culture" is often painted as something that is in opposition to technology, this is also not entirely true. In truth, culture shapes the process of "concretization", giving the technological "growth" important context for development.

The final author we will consider in this part of the article is André Leroi-Gourhan, another author who firmly establishes the French upswing in the development of "Technics" as a field. Leroi-Gourhan's ideas, written in the mid-1960s, are more familiar in the context of what we've already explored so far. He focuses on the instinct that man brings into the creation of technology, calling it a "technical tendency". That is, he claims that while creating tools and objects for technological use, man brings his human behavior, and often his physical understanding of himself, into the process. For example, tools created to be used by one's hands cannot be understood without the context of the human hand itself. In doing so, man is involved in a constant dialectic of internal and external change, with his body at one end, and the environment on the other. The tools we create come together to form an "artificial envelope" or "curtain of objects" that have become essential to how we interact with the world.

Conclusion/Intermission

With this, I will conclude the first part of this article. We've already covered a lot of historical ground on the background and understanding of "technics" so far. Having started in Germany, with Beckmann, Kapp, Desseur and Spengler, making a brief detour in the U.S. with Lewis Mumford, we've ended this part by covering the French insights of Ellul, Simondon and Leroi-Gourhan.

All of these authors bring their own flavor, ideological biases and instincts to the understanding this phenomenon that has affected us all, especially in the last 200-300 years. Despite the deficiencies in their ideas or the perceived incompleteness of their analysis, I'm grateful to all of them for doing their best to try to capture a phenomenon that is understandably slippery, and difficult to put into words in a way that the common person can relate to and understand.

And we are not done yet. In part two of this article, I will be covering a more Leftist/Marxist angle into this phenomenon, with Deluze and Guattari's idea of "deterritorialization" at the center of it. I will also be taking a detour into Nick Land, the famous Marxist-turned-Neoreactionary academic and internet blogger, and the father of accelerationalism. I will also cover a Chinese perspective on the topic, with the writings of Yuk Hui, and will end with my conclusions about the history and future necessity of this field of study.

Thank you for reading, and wishing you all a happy holiday season for 2025!

Part 2 of this essay can be found here.