On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects
Source: https://archive.org/details/du-mode-dexistence-des-objets-techniques ↗
Simondon argued that the split between culture and technology is a modern pathology — that technical objects have their own mode of existence that deserves the same philosophical attention we give to art or language.
His concept of "concretisation" — how technical objects evolve toward internal coherence — anticipates much of what software architecture now calls "conceptual integrity." The most direct intellectual ancestor of the contemporary philosophy of technology (Stiegler, Hui) and increasingly read by designers and engineers who want a richer vocabulary for what they do.
Central argument
Simondon argues that Western culture has developed a fundamental misunderstanding of technical objects by treating them as mere tools or inert matter, when in fact they possess their own mode of existence governed by internal developmental logic. His central thesis is that technical objects undergo a process of 'concretisation' — an evolutionary tendency toward internal coherence in which previously separate functional elements become synergistic and self-reinforcing, reducing redundancy and increasing integration. This is not a human imposition on matter but an autonomous tendency of the technical object itself. The cultural split between humanist intellectuals and technical practitioners is therefore not a class distinction but a philosophical failure: we lack the concepts to perceive what technical objects actually are.
Critique
Simondon's account of concretisation as a quasi-teleological process — technical objects tending toward greater internal coherence as if by internal necessity — risks naturalising what are in fact contingent sociotechnical choices. The framework has limited tools for explaining why technical lineages diverge, stagnate, or are deliberately fragmented by economic or organisational interests; the theory attends more to the internal logic of objects than to the power structures that shape which objects get to evolve at all. Readers applying this to software must supplement Simondon with political economy to avoid mistaking architectural incoherence for mere immaturity when it may be a structural outcome.
Why it matters for product
The concept of concretisation offers product leaders a precise diagnostic: when a product accumulates layers of disconnected features that each solve a local problem without integrating with the whole, that is the inverse of concretisation — Simondon would call it an 'abstract' technical object still in early development. This reframes debates about platform coherence, technical debt, and modular architecture not as engineering hygiene issues but as questions about whether a product has achieved genuine conceptual integrity — which directly implicates how product, design, and engineering decision-making is structured across teams. It also challenges the common CPO instinct to decompose products into independent surfaces: premature modularisation may freeze a product before its functional elements have had the chance to become mutually reinforcing.