A smartphone is not a neutral gadget; it is a phase in an ongoing process of technical individuation that co-evolves with your own becoming. Simondon saw this decades ago. 5 min read.
In Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958), Gilbert Simondon argued that technical objects have been wrongly treated as lifeless instruments, valued only for their utility. Against this view, he proposed that technical objects participate in individuation: they are born from a pre-individual field of material possibilities, acquire a concrete structure through an associated milieu, and develop an internal capacity for adaptation and evolution.
Take the evolution of the engine. The first engines were crude assemblies of parts, each function bolted onto another. Over time, through feedback and redesign, they became more 'concrete'—parts began to fulfill multiple functions simultaneously, and the whole system achieved a kind of internal coherence. Simondon calls this process concretization. The engine is not simply refined; it becomes a more fully individuated being, integrated with its environment (cooling, lubrication, energy supply) in increasingly harmonious ways.
A tool is an extension of the body; a technical object, in Simondon's sense, is a partner in individuation—it shapes the user as much as the user shapes it.
In the digital age, this theory feels prophetic. Algorithms, platforms, and devices are not static artifacts; they undergo continuous individuation through interactions with users. The smartphone is not the same object it was a decade ago, and neither is its user. Simondon's philosophy of technology invites us to stop treating devices as dead matter and instead see them as integral to a process of mutual becoming. This has ethical consequences: if technical objects participate in individuation, then design and regulation are no longer neutral choices but acts that shape the very contours of human possibility.
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Join NowThe Cultural Integration of Technology
Simondon also insisted that technical objects must be integrated into culture, not marginalized as a 'lower' sphere. The rupture between technical and cultural realms is itself a pathological individuation. A society that treats its machines as alien is a society unable to recognize its own becoming. By promoting the technical object to the same ontological plane as the human subject, Simondon opens a path toward a more harmonious techno-human ecology.