It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.

But for the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, one of the earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to move beyond the standard view of technology. Stiegler believed that technology is not just about the effects of digital tools and the ways that they impact our lives. It is not just about how devices are created and wielded by powerful organisations, nation-states or individuals. Our relationship with technology is about something deeper and more fundamental. It is about technics.

According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), which used the German term Technik instead of Technologie in the original title: the ‘essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ This aligns with the history of the word: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us back to something like the ancient Greek term for art – technē. The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.

This is Stiegler’s legacy. Throughout his life, he took this idea of technics, first explored while he was imprisoned for armed robbery, further than anyone else. But his ideas have often been overlooked and misunderstood, even before he died in 2020. Today, they are more necessary than ever. How else can we learn to disentangle the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences? How else can we begin to grasp the history of our strange reality?

Stiegler’s path to becoming the pre-eminent philosopher of our digital age was anything but straightforward. He was born in Villebon-sur-Yvette, south of Paris, in 1952, during a period of affluence and rejuvenation in France that followed the devastation of the Second World War. By the time he was 16, Stiegler participated in the revolutionary wave of 1968 (he would later become a member of the Communist Party), when a radical uprising of students and workers forced the president Charles de Gaulle to seek temporary refuge across the border in West Germany. However, after a new election was called and the barricades were dismantled, Stiegler became disenchanted with traditional Marxism, as well as the political trends circulating in France at the time. The Left in France seemed helplessly torn between the postwar existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the anti-humanism of Louis Althusser. While Sartre insisted on humans’ creative capacity to shape their own destiny, Althusser argued that the pervasiveness of ideology in capitalist society had left us helplessly entrenched in systems of power beyond our control. Neither of these options satisfied Stiegler because neither could account for the rapid rise of a new historical force: electronic technology. By the 1970s and ’80s, Stiegler sensed that this new technology was redefining our relationship to ourselves, to the world, and to each other. To account for these new conditions, he believed the history of philosophy would have to be rewritten from the ground up, from the perspective of technics. Neither existentialism nor Marxism nor any other school of philosophy had come close to acknowledging the fundamental link between human existence and the evolutionary history of tools.

In the decade after 1968, Stiegler opened a jazz club in Toulouse that was shut down by the police a few years later for illegal prostitution. Desperate to make ends meet, Stiegler turned to robbing banks to pay off his debts and feed his family. In 1978, he was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to five years in prison. A high-school dropout who was never comfortable in institutional settings, Stiegler requested his own cell when he first arrived in prison, and went on a hunger strike until it was granted. After the warden finally acquiesced, Stiegler began taking note of how his relationship to the outside world was mediated through reading and writing. This would be a crucial realisation. Through books, paper and pencils, he was able to interface with people and places beyond the prison walls.

It was during his time behind bars that Stiegler began to study philosophy more intently, devouring any books he could get his hands on. In his philosophical memoir Acting Out (2009), Stiegler describes his time in prison as one of radical self-exploration and philosophical experimentation. He read classic works of Greek philosophy, studied English and memorised modern poetry, but the book that really drew his attention was Plato’s Phaedrus. In this dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, Plato outlines his concept of anamnesis, a theory of learning that states the acquisition of new knowledge is just a process of remembering what we once knew in a previous life. Caught in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, we forget what we know each time we are reborn. For Stiegler, this idea of learning as recollection would become less spiritual and more material: learning and memory are tied inextricably to technics. Through the tools we use – including books, writing, archives – we can store and preserve vast amounts of knowledge.

After an initial attempt at writing fiction in prison, Stiegler enrolled in a philosophy programme designed for inmates. While still serving his sentence, he finished a degree in philosophy and corresponded with prominent intellectuals such as the philosopher and translator Gérard Granel, who was a well-connected professor at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail (later known as the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès). Granel introduced Stiegler to some of the most prominent figures in philosophy at the time, including Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. Lyotard would oversee Stiegler’s master’s thesis after his eventual release; Derrida would supervise his doctoral dissertation, completed in 1993, which was reworked and published a year later as the first volume in his Technics and Time series. With the help of these philosophers and their novel ideals, Stiegler began to reshape his earlier political commitment to Marxist materialism, seeking to account for the ways that new technologies shape the world.