An Introduction to Technics: Part 2

"Nothing human makes it out of the near-future"

In part 1 of this article, I explored the early trajectory of the field of Technics. We looked at the historical context in which the idea emerged, particularly in its Germanic roots, and how it traveled across the world to arrive in the mid-20th century.

In this second part, I'm going to take us through some of the more radical authors who've attempted to research this phenomenon. To start with, we will be looking at the writings of Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher, and Félix Guattari, a French psychoanalyst and political activist, who offer us a French Critical Theory/Marxist perspective. We'll then move onto exploring a radical and deterministic future, as proposed by the writings of the famous "Accelerationist" Nick Land. We will then end with considering a more recent Chinese perspective on the topic, and then conclude the essay.

Giving the Left its due

When one looks at the thrust of Marxist ideas, it should perhaps not be a surprise that someone from this lineage would have stumbled upon the themes of Technics. After all, the key claim of Marxism is that material forces are the single most important variable that guide the direction of history. From that point, it is not too much of a jump to also make a connection with technological forces and how they shape society. After all, technological forces are very much adjacent to, and an important component of, material forces as a whole.

In fact, Marx himself has some writings that can be considered as a part of the early understanding of Technics. In some of his more unorganized writings, later published in Grundrisse (1857–1858), Marx wrote a section that is often called as the "Fragment on Machines". In this work, he introduces a concept known as the "general productive forces of the social brain" (also commonly called the "general intellect"). The main point made in this section is that for industrial capitalism to be able to grow and expand, the productive capacity of the individual worker is not enough. Instead, this form of industrial organization requires collective, accumulated, and scaled-up knowledge.

He writes:

"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. They are products of human industry; … They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand: the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production…"

There is definitely an element of these writings that can be tied into our overall history of "Technics". At a stretch, one can even see other Marxist concepts like the "alienation of human labor" by capitalism as leaning into the field. Of course, in the larger picture, Marx's ideas focus a lot more on the impact of these material forces on economic, social and political organization, rather than on the impact of these forces on human nature itself. So we won't focus on Marx directly in this essay. I also want to keep the focus of this article narrow, because if we spread ourselves too broadly, I'll want to talk about Marshal McLuhan's ideas on media and communication (as a form of social technology) or even explore how Hayao Miyazaki's movies with Studio Ghibli explore the relationship between humanity and technology.

Considering the content of his vast body of work, I think it is still safe to consider Marx as an honorary member of the field of Technics. In many ways, he was living through and observing the same world and the same transformative changes as thinkers like Beckmann and Kapp were, and it makes complete sense that they saw the same patterns emerge.

However, as we follow our earlier lineage of writers in the field of Technics, I think that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a duo of French Marxists/Critical Theorists make more sense to add to the genealogy of this field. And we will start by trying to understand their idea of "deterritorialization".

At its core, this idea, which might sound scary or complex in its nomenclature, is simple. Its main claim is that in any society, certain practices, codes, forces, traditions, or systems become "stable" and dominant over time. Over years of trial and error, success and failure, some modes of human organization will come to dominate in any society, being a product of many different, often converging, variables. This is what Deluze and Guattari mean by a practice getting "territorialized" in a particular time and place. And this territorialization is what gives these practices their meaning or context.

The simplest example to consider is that in any place where it rains or snows, a lot of houses will naturally develop over time to have slanted roofs, to allow the rain to flow away, or the snow to be easily removable. This practice would feel completely natural in such a place. However, it would feel less natural in a desert or a place with dry, arid climates. It's not that one can't build a house with a slanted roof in a place like the Sahara desert. It just wouldn't … make much sense.

This is what Deluze and Guattari primarily mean by "territorialization". Then, being Marxists, their focus turns towards capitalism. Capitalism, according to them is a "deterritorializing" force by its very nature. That is, through the medium of industrial scale of production and markets, it pulls these forces, practices, institutions, and the very meaning they have developed, out of the "territories" they have occupied, and throws them into a new, completely different context.

To illustrate this, I want us to think of a small wooden basket used by a tribal woman in eastern India. The basket used by this woman is probably made using the locally available wood, is shaped and sized the way it is due to the practical function it needs to perform - being able to store the forest produce that is being collected for local sustenance and commerce.

However, in the modern age, such a basket is now purchasable by a 25-year-old advertising professional at Dilli Haat (or on various platforms online). The buyer of this basket might use it as a decoration in their house, or to store small items, or give it as a present to a friend. Whatever they choose to do with it, the purpose, or meaning, that was imbued in the original item, being used in its original context in the forest, has been completely transformed, and one would say, lost. This is the process of deterritorialization as observed and defined by Deluze and Guattari. The object was first territorialized (in its initial form when being used organically and for its given purpose), then deterritorialized (by the act of being sold in the marketplace, taking it out of its context and meaning) and finally, reterritorialized (bought in the marketplace, and repurposed to be used in a different meaning, often completely unrelated to its original purpose).

When one breaks the above process down, it really seems so obvious. And according to Deluze and Guattari, this is a natural and inevitable consequence of capitalism, and the persistent socio-technological forces it has unleashed onto the world. As they say in Anti-Oedipus (1972), "Capitalism constantly decodes and deterritorializes, only to reterritorialize on money". For them, capitalism throughout its history broke down feudal hierarchies, kinship systems, and sacred codes, but then reconstructed hierarchies through the abstract instrument of money.

It is interesting to look at these ideas nearly half a century later as those of us who live in this modern world are experiencing an endless process of territorialization-deterritorialization-reterritorialization all around us. And it's hard to put into words just how mind-breaking this experience can be for people.

After all, these changes brought about by modernity, only part of which is being captured and explored by the field of Technics, are still relatively new to us human beings. We're not biologically wired to have an awareness of thousands of people in our heads (blowing Dunbar's number completely out of the water). We're not wired to receive terrible news about events happening thousands of kilometers away from us, in the palm of our hands, as they are happening in real time. Our ability as human beings to adapt is impressive, but there are limits to this ability, and those limits are ones of size/scale and speed. And it just so happens that size/scale and speed are the two most defining characteristics of modernity.

This process of deterritorialization is even more important to understand, as it doesn't just affect the physical tools we use. It also has an impact on social technologies - how we choose to organize ourselves as humans, how we treat others, etc.

A great example of this is probably found in the development of what is the ruling political formula of our times - liberalism. Now, liberalism means a lot of things to a lot of people. For some, it is an ideology centered around individual rights and entitlements. For others, it is a complete theory of proper and just social organization. But I think one aspect of liberalism that often gets overlooked is its existence and development as a social technology.

Simply put, liberalism is a social technology that is necessary to enable modern human interactions that are now occurring at breakneck speed and scale. Let's not forget, that for most of our history, we as people have existed in small tribes and villages, with limited social interactions with the modern world. Even interactions that did happen between tribes, cultures, races, etc. (and they surely did) never happened at this size/scale and speed. Human organization at these smaller scales, with localized and self-contained social hierarchies, localized economies and localized justice, was very different at a structural level to what we know and see in today's modern world.

This has been a fundamentally transformative event in human history. Where in the past, local tribal solidarity could be built on the backs of negative consolidation against another tribe/group, this social technology is no longer available in a world where people from every tribe regularly interact with those of other tribes on a large size and scale. Where in the past, you could largely have a localized and self-reliant economy, where most professions and tribes had some sort of meaning and purpose and status, that structure simply cannot be the basis of organization in a world of global, inter-connected marketplaces.

To conclude, while a lot of my readers would probably dismiss Marxist ideas at the outset (for good reason), I think Deluze and Guattari's observations about the structural impact of capitalism/modernity/technological growth can actually offer us a way (and a set of definitions and categories) to better understand the radical forces and headwinds changing our lives. This accelerated churn of modernity, leading to a constant process of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization of tools, methods of social organization, norms, political and economic structures, has the potential to cause massive upheaval and instability in this world. At the same time, it is also true that these same forces can also be the source of unimaginable new opportunities and new developments in political and economic technologies, and it is important to recognize that. But those of us trying to put these drastic and permanent changes into words and categories, would do well to develop a wholistic picture of what's happening.

For my part, I have no hesitation in adding Deluze and Guattari to the canon on Technics. Their observations are profound, and the consequences of their claims are worth examining. In fact, I could write an entire essay on how the deterritorialization process is unravelling the traditional Jaati/Varna system in modern India through the process of urbanization (These hierarchies, still prominent in rural India where social association between groups is controlled and limited, start loosening up when these same people move to urban areas, and interact with people from other groups openly and freely). I would therefore urge the reader to not dismiss this idea simply because it has come from a couple of French Marxists, and instead use it as another ideological "tool" in your attempt to understand the modern world.

Nick Land and Accelerationism

Now, from the Far Left, let's take a sharp turn to the Far Right, and consider the ideas of Nick Land. And while he is today known as someone on the Right, Land is (maybe not surprisingly), someone with a long history on the Far Left. In fact, Land's academic work (our focus today) in the 1990s largely came as a student of the two authors we have discussed above - Deluze and Guattari - and his reputation at the University of Warwick and its "Cybernetic Culture Research Unit" was as a "Hyper-Deluezian" philosopher.

As a student of Deluze and Guattari, as someone building upon their ideas in the fresh context of the internet and growing automation and artificial intelligence, Land takes us to a place where we should have long expected to go. Because after all, our research into Technics - into what technology does to us as a people and as a society - has so far focused mostly on an objective diagnosis of the phenomenon. What we haven't had so far (at least from what I found in my research) is an author who simply … runs with it … and takes the idea to its logical conclusion.

We've explored all these different ways in which technology can change us. Different ways in which we interact with technology as human beings, imbue meaning and purpose into our tools, change our very own behavior as a result of coming into contact with our tools, etc. But we haven't really seen someone properly ask - where is this all taking us? Where should we want it to take us?

Sure, our tools are transformative instruments. Our very interaction with the natural and human world changes due to them. Sure, we've basically made them extensions of our arms and our brain. But what does a society where these changes - happening at breakneck speed and at an uncontrollable scale - even look like as we charge into the future?

Obviously, there are a multitude of valid answers to these questions. Some people want to slow down technological growth altogether (and are labelled as luddites for wanting this). They claim that we don't even know what these changes are doing to us. We have no idea where we're going as a society, and it is therefore extremely risky to charge headstrong into a tunnel when you have no idea where it exits. Others have a more moderate answer. They think that the fears around these changes are exaggerated. They say that the capacity of humanity to adapt is immeasurable and underrated. They claim that we humans will come out on the other side of these changes, stronger and better than before.

And then, there is the soft-spoken Nick Land, who offers us a scary (and completely plausible) vision of the future. Who tells us that this outcome is so inevitable, that instead of fearing it and working to stop it, we should be actively working to speed up this process. This is best explored, of course, through his (in)famous idea of Accelerationalism.

Accelerationalism's message is simple: Don't pump the brakes on this process. Let it play out as it's happening. And not only that, speed up this process!

But reading about why Land wants us to press the accelerator should give us pause. As a student of Deluze and Guattari, Land accepts their theory of deterritorialization. This process is obviously happening around us, constantly breaking and reconstructing human systems. But instead of Deluze and Guattari's message of cautious resistance to this process, Land wants us to rev up the accelerator. After all, even if Capitalism eventually "reterritorializes" any system it deterritorializes, the persistent and endless nature of technological growth means that whatever is reterritorialized will itself be deterritorialized again (this is quite a mouthful to say!)

There are no breaks on this train. So why bother?

And we have to look back at Jacques Ellul and Gilbert Simondon to get a sense of why Land comes to this conclusion. Like Ellul and Simondon, Land firmly believes that humanity is not the primary actor and mover in the history of technology. Ellul, as we've read before, believed that "Technique" was an autonomous and self-perpetuating phenomenon. Simondon considered technological objects to be their own, evolving beings, deserving of analysis and study in a form independent from simply their association with human beings. Like these two, Land does not believe that humanity is at the center of the history of Technics. Humanity does not "control" Technics. Rather, it is humanity which is a phase in the longer history of Technics, which will be fully realized in the future.

This is where Land goes into deeper, more esoteric ideas of artificial and "machinistic" intelligence. According to him, with the pace of change and development that the world was going through (in the 1980s and 1990s), there would be a very good chance that we humans are actually a small phase in the longer term history of non-human intelligence. We humans are arrogant enough to channel the events of this world into a narrative that puts us at the center of the narrative. However, if the world develops a non-human intelligence capable of looking back at its own history, could it not see human history as a stepping stone to its own development?

Being a "Hyper Deluezian", the Land of the 1990s believed that this is the end destination of the process that started with the development of industrial capitalism. That the revolution of size, scale and technological development has a logical endpoint - the Derritorialization of Humanity itself. In this sense, Land delves into the possibility of a "post-human" future, calling capitalism "an alien intelligence, feeding on (the) human nervous systems". We are the host for the growth of machinistic intelligence, not the other way around! For Land, technics is a teleological process (a “teleoplexy”), driving toward artificial intelligence and a post-human future. We as humans are already in the funnel heading towards this future, building the guillotine that will eventually be used to hang us.

As he says in Fanged Noumena (2011), which is an anthology of his writings from the 1990s,

"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources".

As he speculates about the future, there is definitely a part of Land that is not entirely dooming about this future. After all, human organization is deeply flawed, and limited by our tendencies towards irrationalities - towards nationalistic identity, religious identity, tribal in-group preferences. Maybe it would not be the worst thing in the world for the inefficient governance produced by humans to be replaced with AI, automation and cybernetics, forces that Land believes will be the "the true inheritors of history". As he says in his writing, "Nothing human makes it out of the near-future".

To summarize, I think it would only be appropriate to discuss an AI-induced dystopia by asking an LLM to provide a simple summary of some of the authors we’ve discussed so far:

Compost for AI, eh? I wonder how ChatGPT "felt" when writing that…

A final opinion from the East

There's no doubt that Land's ideas in the 1990s were the radical and deterministic conclusion that was to be expected by this field of study. There are other, more optimistic views of the AI-built future that are available, but those would be dismissed by someone like Land as simply small-stepping stones to an eventual post-human future, as simply early declarations of victory by humans as they incapable of looking too far into the future. After all, as Land says in Machinic Desire (1992) and Meltdown (1994), capitalism consumes its own opposition — all criticism, resistance, and revolutionary energy against capitalism/modernity become part of its self-accelerating system. As he says directly in Meltdown, "Capital propagates through the soft control of feedback, absorbing every antagonism as a motor of its own intensification".

Land's own life follows a trajectory one would expect from a radical of this nature. He moved to Shanghai as a commitment to his idea of "Outsidedness" and "Exit", while also becoming one of the two most famous authors of the radical right-wing blogosphere phenomenon of "Neo-Reaction". In this avatar, his most famous work is his essay "The Dark Enlightenment", a response to the other famous author in the movement - Mencius Moldbug, now more commonly known by his real name.

And as Land moved to China (perhaps in anticipation of his prediction in Meltdown of "Neo-China arriving from the future"), so we will we. As I wanted this to be a thorough and comprehensive introduction to this topic of Technics, I wanted to mention Chinese author Yuk Hui, whose The Question Concerning Technology in China (2016), Art and Cosmotechnics might be one of the newest works on the topic. Now, I have to confess, I have not actually read this book all the way through, and have not even read detailed summaries as I have for other authors in this two-part series. But I do think a Chinese perspective is important to present in this article as China, along with the U.S., is going to be one of two countries that will have the largest role in shaping our ascent/descent into AI-accelerated worldwide techno-disruption.

And maybe it is because of this importance of China that I have found Hui's premise in his 2021 book to be so underwhelming. From what I could scour on the internet about this book, Hui's big invention in his book is the idea of "cosmotechnics". And the big claim of "cosmotechnics" is simply that every culture will integrate and build-in Technics into their societies through the lens and structures of their own society. In essence, this is a criticism of the universalist claims of Western thinkers of Technics, who perhaps as an example of Spengler's accusation of them being "Faustian Men", cannot help but universalize everything. Hui claims that there will not just one "form" of Technics developing across the world. Instead, there will be a "Western" Technics, a "Chinese" Technics, an "Indian" Technics, etc.

And … maybe? I'm not usually a critic of cultural specificity. I believe that every culture across the world has developed differently (for better or worse) and has different ways of looking at the world. Different assumptions, perspectives, forms of optimism/pessimism. I'm not a believer in flatting all cultures into a homogenous goo that renders them unrecognizable from each other. And yet, this is exactly what technology - in its physical and social form - does! Technology is a massive force of homogenization itself. It forces adoption of "best practices", standardized measurements and rules. It needs these for the global systems it enables to be able to function. Technology by its very nature cuts through cultural specificity like a knife through butter.

Which is why Hui's arguments feel underdeveloped, at least on the face of it. But I'll hold my comments for when I've done a deeper dive into his claims. I just feel that it's worth mentioning him and his book as an important touchstone in the history of Technics, and as a resource for those looking to dig deeper into this subject.

Conclusions

With that, I will conclude my summary of the long history of Technics. It is a fascinating field of study, encompassing various fascinating historical figures. Nearly all of the authors we've looked into across both parts have done their best to put into the words this strange and transformative technological change that we've been living through across the world for at least the last two centuries. In many ways, their attempts have reminded me of the old Indian story of the blind men and the elephant. Like the blind men in the story, all these authors seem to have only captured an aspect of the overall story, one that is in many ways one of the most important changes that have taken place in human history.

As we close out 2025, it is obvious to any thinking person where we're headed. Nearly all the money in the world right now is being invested into a very narrow funnel of the economy, which tells us that the cleverest people in the world have all collectively determined that is where all the economic growth in the next few years is going to come from. In characteristically Faustian fashion, as a world we seem to have decided to dive headstrong into this post-human (inhuman?) future. It's gotten so bad that nearly anyone who dares to question this direction we've adopted is met with a cacophony of being called a luddite. Too many people just have too much money in stocks that depend on this all working out.

And yet, curiosity over what these changes will do to us seems to be at an all-time low. It definitely feels like an avalanche of cleverness, with almost no wisdom to accompany it. In that context, I think it would do as well to look back at the field of Technics, and to use it as a set of tools to try and analyze our coming future. After all, we will need better terms than the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" (which is the best that the current field of "Experts" seem to have come up with) as we pray to our gods that something human does make it out of the near future…