Bernard Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler (1952–2020) was a French philosopher who argued that human life and consciousness develop through technics, especially technologies that store and transmit memory.

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Technics: The practical knowledge and technical means through which humans transform their surroundings and themselves. Stiegler treats technics as constitutive of humanity, not merely as external equipment.
Technical individuation: The formation of individuals and groups through relations with technical objects and inherited practices. Stiegler frames individuation as a process shared between people, technical supports, and societies.
Martin Heidegger: A German philosopher whose work examined being, technology, and human existence. Stiegler revises Heidegger’s account of technology by making technical memory central to human becoming.
The Technics and Time: Stiegler’s multivolume philosophical project on technics, temporality, memory, and human evolution. This series develops his account of technics as a condition of human existence.
Technological unemployment: Job loss or displacement caused by the adoption of labor-saving technologies. Stiegler asks how automation can destroy employment while also creating possibilities for meaningful activity.
Technological mediation: The shaping of perception, action, and social relations through technical artifacts and systems. His philosophy rejects any account of human experience untouched by technical mediation.
Transindividuation: The collective formation of shared meanings and identities through communication and participation. Technical media can enable or obstruct the collective processes that produce shared knowledge.
Edmund Husserl: A German philosopher who founded phenomenology and analyzed the structures of conscious experience. Stiegler draws on Husserl’s analyses of memory and temporal experience.
The Disorientation of the World: Stiegler’s book examining globalized capitalism, industrial media, and the loss of shared orientation. It applies his theory of technical memory to contemporary social and political crises.
Proletarianization: The loss of knowledge, skills, or control over work and everyday life. He uses the concept to describe how industrial systems strip people of practical and intellectual capacities.