Rewrite The technical milieu and its evolution: Uexküll, Kapp, Cassirer, Simondon as a headline for a science magazine post, using no more than 8 words

Yet other writers on technology and being disagree, arguing that it is not in the distance created between subject and object that is important, but in how these are combined in new ways by technological means, in their knottedness that returns humans to this unified state of being, particularly in regards to information technologies. Reticulation is one of Simondon’s key terms in the latter stages of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017), first published in 1958. Reticulation is a netted pattern, a lattice or mesh. The world is meshed into key points of influence, of moments and places that dominate the terrain surrounding it, delimit it and, in Simondon’s words, govern it. The mytho-symbolic world, that which Cassirer calls the magical world, is a network of interlinked power and place, of key-points bound together in a reticulation:

In such a network of key-points, of high-places, there is a primitive lack of distinction between human reality and the reality of the objective world. These key-points are real and objective, but they are that by which the human being is immediately bound to the world, both in order to be influenced by it and in order to act upon it; they are points of contact and of mutual, mixed reality, places of exchange and communication because they are formed from a knot between the two realities (Simondon, 2017:178).

This sentence is critical for how we may think about the knotted nature of physical and digital information and its communication networks, of the meshwork of significant places and moments existing both virtually and on physical servers, within infrastructures, in networks both real and electrical, composed of symbols and structures, technical ensembles and human beings who form powerful connections in places both on and offline, through interfaces, programmes, and bodies. Here we see the mutual, mixed reality that is the nature of digital information architectures individuated by associated milieux which enable new ‘theatres of individuation’ (Barthélémy, 2012) in hybrid realities, points of contact between humans, and humans and machines. In our online lives we see this heady lack of distinction between the reality of the objective world and our human, subjective realities. These mixed modes of existence are so beguiling for this very reason. They are not places where we forget the body and become pure mind, a vision Silicon Valley cybernauts tried to sell us (Turner, 2006). Rather, they are intoxicating because they return humans to the magical mode of existence before any caesura between the world of objects and subjective selves, where the power of flux and intermingling sweeps us into the reticulated nets of being with the world as an indissoluble meshwork. This is part of the co-evolution of homo digitalis (Montag and Diefenbach, 2018) with information technologies.

For Simondon there is no true opposition between human and machine, between technics and culture.^{Footnote 14} Technical objects are the mediator between ourselves and the natural world. If the machine is foreign and strange, inside this strangeness the human remains imprisoned, misunderstood and enslaved. The unbalancing of culture results from this misunderstanding that relegates technical objects to the sphere of utility, as assemblages of matter alone and not partners in the deep symbolic symbiosis which crafts our ontoepistemological reality. The fear of relegation of the human under the aegis of automation likewise stems from the fear of a machinic perfection that does not exist. The indeterminacy, the very openness of the machine, allows for it to be receptive to information, and this sensitivity to information likewise allows the creation of the technical ensemble. Through their degree of indeterminacy machines exchange information and construct ensembles. The open machine with a high degree of indeterminacy results in more efficacious actions and interactions, with us as their living interpreters akin to the conductor of an orchestra. The machine and human are not separate from one another; humans exist among the technical. Technical objects are the crystallisation of human reality, of human gesture, transformed into the working structures which compose and modify that reality.

Hoel and Van der Tuin (2013) argue, however, that we must be careful to also avoid essentialising the relationships between technicity and human being. Cassirer and Simondon conceptualise technology as a transformative ontological force. By giving ontological priority to technicity, they view technology not as a passive tool but as an active, world-shaping dynamic.

Where Cassirer incorporates technology into his philosophy of symbolic forms, Simondon focuses on the genesis and evolution of technical objects, emphasising their capacity to shape themselves and their environments through dynamic processes of self-regulation and refinement. Technical objects are co-evolving entities. Humans do not impose form on nature. Nature and human beings evolve alongside technology in ongoing processes of mutual transformation. Both view technology as a participant in the formation of new realities rather than a neutral mediator.

Cassirer and Simondon both emphasise technicity as a dynamic and emergent process (Hoel and Van der Tuin, 2013). Simondon’s notion of concretisation refers to how technical objects evolve through differentiation and self-integration, becoming more complex and integrated with their surroundings. Cassirer, meanwhile, focuses on technology’s formative power, emphasising its role in actively shaping reality, much like language and symbolic systems. Both argue that technology’s essence is found in its functioning and efficacy, not in its material form, and also critique traditional metaphysical views that treat technology as a mere object. Instead, they argue that technology has ontological force, meaning it actively shapes reality and generates new possibilities. Cassirer emphasises that tools and symbols have a formative role in shaping human perception and experience, while Simondon highlights the role of technical objects in creating new environments and realities through their functioning.

What, Simondon (2017) asks, do technical objects mean to our being-in-the-world? The manifestation of technical objects engenders a definite mode of existence that affects other human productions. Yet the creation of this definite mode of existence, of technicity, is one of many modes of existence. It is not the originary mode but part of a larger process of genesis, which must be understood as implicating both objects and non-objectified realities in which technical genesis is only one smaller part of the geneses existing between humans and the world. In order to understand technicity, then, we must understand human relations with the world, the subjective world and the world proper, through our powers of acting and of creation. To understand technicity and the philosophical importance of the genesis and use of technical objects, a broader scope, a deeper understanding of relations with the world is paramount. By genesis he means the process of general individuation. Individuation occurs when a system comes into being in an oversaturated environment rich in potential but internally incompatible forms, which resolves into a newly compatible structure.^{Footnote 15} Evolutionary selection works both on the level of species and technical series to bring closer adaptation to environmental pressures, including organism and tool:

‘Nature’ for Cassirer and Simondon is not a fixed category. The human has no direct access to the form of nature, nor does she impose this form by her mind. Instead, the form of nature must be actively searched for and secured in different ways. Likewise, ‘the human’ for Cassirer and Simondon is not a rigid notion. Since nature is not a stable agent, it does not keep a firm hold on the human. Instead, the human is seen as deeply entangled with nature, engaged in ongoing processes of co-formation (Hoel and Van der Tuin, 2013).

Technicity evolved as a solution to our being-in-the-world, yet the solution itself becomes problematic when technical individuals evolve into technical ensembles and the technical universe is oversaturated. Technicity always belongs to a system and carries with it this capacity to evolve. It is a mediator between the body and the world. A shovel mediates the world differently from a telephone, but both emerge from this evolving technical sphere (Ihde, 2001). Technicity is acted upon simultaneously by forces of convergence and divergence, through splitting and coming together depending on levels of saturation. When technicity becomes oversaturated by incorporating the reality of being into itself, it splits into theory and praxis where theoretical knowledge gives us the ground of technicity and praxis the schemas for its action in and on the world.

Individuating alongside technological objects, human beings are shaped by technicity especially in early life. This is a significant component of the epigenetic systems that make modern human beings what they are. Technological objects for Simondon are autonomous agents of cultural change and transmission. Like Heidegger, he draws attention to the fundamental changes in human consciousness that technology has brought about. However, unlike Heidegger, who seems at times to hanker back to an ideal pre-technological state of human development, Simondon’s programme takes us onwards to a fuller understanding of the co-evolution of biological and technical systems (Pickering, 2024).

To understand technicity, we cannot seek only to analyse the objects themselves but to be aware of the deeper rivers of technicity running beneath all individuation and concretisation. Humans experience the universe as a milieu, in Simondon’s term, that is, as an Umwelt. An environment for meaningful behaviour, dwelling, survival. The ground of our being, of significance, of significant action, and of information. By approaching the study of technology and history from the ground of ethological being and understanding, the gap between life and non-life, between human and machine, begins to close.

To what end?

West Kirkwood and Wetherby (2018) argue that the humanism Kapp demonstrates is a posthumanism. Why? Because Kapp demonstrates the inseparability of information and matter, of use and being in the duality of technology and bodies. Technologies therefore become the epistemological grounding for the human itself. Technological essence, technics, lies in how it works and how it is entangled in human being. Being is a dialectical process between subject and object, between information and materiality, an exteriorisation of knowledge that produces the possibilities of the human. Simondon, likewise, demonstrates a decentring of the human in order to evade technological subjugation. Yet Blok (2024) argues that post-humanism, in its radical form, leads to a loss of human agency and responsibility. By blurring the boundaries between humans, machines, and the environment, posthumanism undermines the distinctiveness of human actions and decisions. This has significant ethical and political implications, particularly in areas such as environmental responsibility and technological governance. It also has significance in terms of instrumentality and human being. Blok, in line with Cassirer’s emphasis regarding escape from absorption, argues that it is critical to maintain this distance, rather than allowing the entanglement to subdue human life:

Human life requires an asymmetry between our experience of the world and the world itself. The reason is that in order to see and hear ourselves or the environing world, a distance between ourselves as the ones who experience and the environment that we experience is required. If we are completely enmeshed in the hybridisation of machines, human life and the environment, experience is no longer possible, and if we cannot experience anymore, we are dead, i.e., there is no ‘I’ anymore who can experience. It is in this sense that we need to acknowledge an asymmetry beyond the acknowledgement of the symmetric World in which technology, human life and the environment are interconnected and interdependent (Blok, 2024).

This distance is important when we consider the ethical implications of these blurred boundaries and how we can maintain this distance. ‘Technogenesis’ is Stiegler’s (1998) term for the process of coordinated dynamic adaptation between humans and technics. This is not a static Darwinian scenario of stable environment and mutable species. Both transform together. Technologies and the environment are a part of this mutual transformation or evolution. From philosophy’s beginnings, Stiegler argues, in the first part of his Technics and Time trilogy, technics was separated from episteme and technical knowledge devalued as inferior. Beings and objects suffered an irreparable sundering into biology and mechanics. In between these two artificially opposed islands, the work of Simondon (2017), Gille (1986) and Leroi-Gourhan (1993) reconceived the technical object as the focus for disparate forces and socio-technical development, a process of concretisation. Industrialisation and instrumentality overtook both the world and the sciences, leading to their amnesiac state through the cult of calculability.

Philosophical reflection was now faced with such widespread technical expansion that all forms of knowledge were mobilised by, and brought closer to, the field of instrumentality, to which science, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status shifting accordingly, became more and more subject. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars (Stiegler, 1998:2).

Through its technicalisation via calculation, science as technique itself suffers amnesia, forgetting its origins, a crisis of which not only the sciences but the world suffers. The twentieth century wars that engulfed the world in technologically powered slaughter resulted in the greater technicalisation of the world, in its computerisation and digitisation, the tightening mesh of human and machine through calculative rationality, with the latter dominating the byways of the former. Science, technology, and calculation won the war, and so the United States rose to its dominant sociotechnical apex. The configurative changes that occurred in this historical moment are still being thrashed out in the digitisation of human behaviours and relationships, particularly in the case of AI and algorithmic data technologies, where reason (ratio) is usurped by calculation. Technical power is inverted through rationalisation which extends into all domains of society, resulting in the industrialisation of work but also an invisible system of domination. Where before societies were based on communicative authority, Stiegler argues, now they are dominated by a technoscientific rationality seeping into all spheres of social behaviour. When technics and science thus become inextricably linked, a technocracy results which is not a system of technicians wielding power but the domination of technicians by that power of the rational cause to preserve and extend the system.^{Footnote 16}

The Umwelt concerns not only the biological and the natural. Machines have a milieu (Simondon, 2017) but not an Umwelt. They have an increasingly ‘smart’ environment but not a world, not yet. Yet such mechanic milieux, including their political, social and economic bases, are integrated into human Umwelten, interpolated into the functional circle that creates human being-in-the-world and its anthropogenic evolution of the human itself. Technical objects, operating within their own milieux, mediate between bodies and environments. A technical milieu is a crucial addition to the body-environment dyad. Technical forces and technologies cannot be separated from the human Umwelt. From the first stone grasped as a tool to mediate the environment, human being-in-the-world became inescapably triadic. So too for other tool-bearing creatures. The raven exists in the triad of body, environment, and tool. This is an ineluctable part of its corvidity as our humanity is ours. The Umwelt, while the ground of being, is experienced as a world of phenomena, ideas, history, culture, background, experience, chiastic flesh (Merleau-Ponty, 1968) acting on the world and growing in and with and through the world, through its own powers and the powers of its technical inventions, through tactility and sensual engagement with media. Phenomenal and ethical investigations of digital, algorithmic, and informational technologies must therefore consider taking an ethological approach in order to fully grasp the modes of mediation such technical objects perform between a body and its environments. This is especially true when we consider the increasing interpenetration of the machinic milieu into human decision-making and environmental scaffolding, particularly as machine-machine communication rapidly outpaces other forms:

Within cognitive assemblages as a whole, machine-machine communication is growing exponentially faster than human–human or human–machine communication…As machines communicate more with each other than with us, the intervals and pervasiveness of machine autonomy increase – areas where machines make decisions that affect not only other machines but also humans enmeshed in cognitive assemblages with them (Hayles, 2021).

Hayles (2021) argues that a general ecology of cognitive assemblages, including both machine and human, offers a framework for identifying existing connections and exploring opportunities to create more linkages across various scales. For this ecology to be effective, it is crucial to develop a language that addresses the interconnections between humans, nonhuman entities, and computational systems. This must preserve key distinctions while also recognising shared characteristics.

These characteristics also raise concerns about environmental surveillance and datafication of such cognitive assemblages, where human behaviours are tracked and exploited for profit.

Lecomte (2023) explores the ethical implications of so-called ‘smart environments’ through the lens of Uexküll’s Umwelt theory. Smart environments, which integrate technologies like IoT, AI, and augmented reality, mediate interactions between humans and their surroundings, raising critical ethical concerns related to freedom, agency, and the commodification of human interactions with digital spaces. At the core of any ethical discussion, therefore, is the concept of the human Umwelt. In smart environments, human Umwelten are increasingly customised through pervasive, data-driven technologies. While this enhances personalisation, it also introduces ethical challenges, including manipulation, control, and diminished user agency.

Interactions in such environments are often pre-scripted by algorithms, limiting spontaneity and constraining freedom. Such commodification of Umwelten reflects a broader trend in environmental capitalism, where human interactions and perceptions are treated as resources to be harvested for profit. This phenomenon aligns with Zuboff’s (2015) surveillance capitalism, where technologies optimise user experiences to serve commercial interests rather than individual autonomy. This shift raises questions about the balance of power between technology providers and users.

Lacomte proposes an Umwelt ethics based on principles of neutrality, interconnectedness, and non-objectification, emphasising the need to avoid undue interference in human perception, preserve social and environmental connections, and prevent the commodification of human experiences. This ethical framework is rooted in values such as autonomy, dignity, and transparency, and is a useful framing for ethological analyses of power, information and technological assemblages. Blok (2024) proposes a dualist materialist framework that introduces the concepts of conativity and responsivity. Conativity, the principle of self-assertion in material entities, is a universal characteristic found in both living and non-living systems. Responsivity, on the other hand, is a subset of conativity and is characterised by the ability of material entities to respond to each other. This distinction is crucial because it allows for a materialist perspective that acknowledges the symmetry of the posthuman world while maintaining an asymmetry that prevents the total loss of human agency. This framework recognises the interconnectedness of machines, human life, and the environment while ensuring that humans remain responsible for their actions. For instance, in the context of climate change, the dualist materialist perspective emphasises that while humans are part of a larger, interconnected system, they retain the responsivity to make choices and take actions that can mitigate environmental degradation. This approach is particularly important because it avoids the pitfalls of both radical posthumanism, which might lead to a loss of human agency, and traditional dualism, which maintains rigid boundaries that do not reflect the reality of hybridisation.

Yet returning to the Umwelt now, the case for wider Umwelt ethics has also been made by a number of Umwelt-oriented scholars (Koutroufinis, 2016; Tønnessen, 2003), accounting for the individual members of bio-ontological entities to their species to the environment of the earth as a whole:

Given an Uexküllian framework, all of these must be understood as bio-ontological entities. A culture, for example, can be defined as a certain common-Umwelt that allows for a certain total Umwelt. The fact that the flourishing of human life rests on the flourishing of concepts should result in political and cultural tolerance. As for ecosystems and inhabited landscapes, one could probably reach a bio-ontological definition by way of the concepts of contrapuntal relations and total Umwelt. A habitat might be regarded as the subjective space, or perhaps Heimat (home), of an individual or population (Tønnessen, 2003).

A strain of recent research also demonstrates a clear trajectory away from purely human-centric models toward more inclusive, ecological approaches that recognise distributed agency and emergent properties in digital environments (e.g. Olteanu and Campbell, 2023; Campbell and Olteanu, 2024; Bellentani and Arkhipova, 2022; Ghazvineh, 2025; Anderson and Bisanz, 2019). This shift reflects a growing understanding of the complex interplay between human users, digital technologies, and the broader ecological context in which these interactions occur. Research into human-digital technology interactions demonstrates how biosemiotic principles play a central role in understanding animal-human and ecological relationships alongside the development and use of digital technologies (Schwarz, 2018).

Meaning emerges in digital environments through the interpretive activities of both human and non-human agents, demonstrating how digital technologies create and shape subjective experiential worlds.^{Footnote 17}

But when we think about an Umwelt-based ethics we must also remember the lessons Haraway teaches us in A Cyborg Manifesto:

Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women worldwide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalisations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other (Haraway, 2013).

As Barad (2007) argues, apparatuses are not passive observing instruments but part of the productive nexus of phenomena, enacted material-semiotic configurations of reality, material arrangements that embody the ideological concepts they exemplify. Reality is not made up of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena. Reality is enacted as a dynamic materialisation of phenomena in their intra-activity. This relation of being, this engagement and entanglement, gives rise to phenomenal existence. Bodies, objects with determinate boundaries [relata], do not pre-exist relation but become bounded through this intra-active engagement.

Agency is not something bounded by discrete forms actuated from within, agency is a flow through mattered bodies structured by and structuring reality through their becoming in spacetime. This brings us to an ethics which is entangled with matter and meaning:

Ethics is about mattering, about taking account of the entangled materialisations of which we are a part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities – even the smallest cuts matter (Barad, 2007:384).

What does this matter for our being-in-the-world with technologies, with animals, with people? Agency is a flow. Flows forms knots. Knots when cut through create difference, new lines to tangle. To tie. This is the entanglement of the sensual, sensate body-object with our perceptual subjecthood without discrete boundaries. Through entanglement with others, subjects are individuated. Personhood is a process of continual becoming in which a subject is externally defined by intra-active flows. It is how they respond, how they direct those flows, which is important. How they cut and tie them. How they bind them. Being-with is an ethico-onto-epistemological matter. It is how humans choose to be-with and the connections they highlight over the divisions dividing them from animal kin, the natural environment and one another.

Western epistemology, Barad argues is a process of mediation, a lens to view culture, consciousness, technology, language and labour, all of which hold nature out of reach ‘generating and regenerating the philosophical problem of the possibility of human knowledge out of this metaphysical quarantining of the object world.’ (Barad, 2007: 374–375). It is this artificial quarantining between nature and human subject-objects, between ourselves, our animal kin and our shared biota, that must be overcome to renew our philosophical engagement as subjects with technologically mediated Umwelten on the one hand and interspecies Umwelt- engagement on the other. To continue to focus on human difference is to cut us adrift. Even the smallest cuts matter, Barad says. But so do the smallest knots. If we cut without tying, everything human appears to be rootless. Humans seem as if we were formed uniquely. And we mourn it.

Uexküll’s ethology teaches us humans are not uniquely formed. That we are biosemiotic creatures like any other and that an ethics of technological understanding should be embracive not reductive. Our tool use defines us to a significant degree, as does our dwelling, our structuration of form, language, culture, and the broader technical forces underlying evolution. But as Simondon argues, these technical objects are never finished but always changing, generating new forms in the flows of technics through time. Language is a world-shaping technology which never stops changing. That which forms is never finished. Completeness is a myth. Containment is a myth. Absolute difference is a myth. We have focused too long on the being-in and not on the being-with. Becoming and being-with is the story of the universe. Of our kin, human and otherwise. This is the openness of the triadic human Umwelt and why it demonstrates the plasticity of perception linked with the mytho-symbolic nature of technics alongside its more practical uses.