Awake in the Abstraction Machine
“A machine is anything that reduces human effort. Anything.”
— Rancho Chanchad, Three Idiots
“Technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life.”
— Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1
We live immersed in technologies. Not just tools and gadgets, but in the vast networks and infrastructures that shape how we work, learn, remember, and imagine. But what is technology, really? Is it a set of machines? A neutral instrument? A danger? A savior?
For French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, the answer was deeper, and stranger. He urged us to look past narrow definitions of “technology” as something separate from us. Instead, he gave us the concept of technics — the idea that tools, language, images, even software, are not afterthoughts to humanity but its very condition of possibility. We are technical beings, shaped by the supports and systems we build, just as much as we build them.
Technics, for Stiegler, are memory made durable. They are how we extend ourselves across time — in the form of a hammer, a musical score, a hard drive, or a story. We do not simply use tools. We think, feel, remember, and become through them. This philosophy might feel heady, even abstract — until it meets a different kind of wisdom in a seemingly lighter moment from the 2009 film Three Idiots. In one memorable scene, the student Rancho challenges the rigid pedagogy of his elite engineering college. When a classmate recites a textbook-perfect definition of “machine,” Rancho interrupts with something simpler, and much more radical: “A machine is anything that reduces human effort. Anything.”
To the most of his other devoutly studious classmates and his immediately irritated professor, it sounds silly. But in fact, Rancho is pulling off something quite profound: stripping away jargon and returning to first principles. His is a kind of intuitive phenomenology of technics — a way of asking what machines do in the real world, and how they relate to human life. Just like Stiegler, Rancho is opening a door. He’s saying: let’s not just memorize the systems — let’s understand the human effort, purpose, and imagination behind them.
Stiegler’s work draws from earlier french thinkers to explore how technics precede, accompany, and transform human development. The flint blade wasn’t a late-stage add-on to Homo sapiens — it was a step on the path to becoming Homo sapiens. Our tools are not neutral; they shape the arc of our species’ becoming. This idea might sound coldly deterministic, as though we are merely effects of our technologies. But Stiegler doesn’t see it that way. He sees technics as a site of care — where we inscribe intentions, where we transmit culture, where we externalize dreams. Tools are not just ways to get things done. They are how we remember what matters — and how we pass that on.
Which is why the stakes of today’s technology are so high. When memory is stored in silicon, when language is generated by algorithms, when learning is outsourced to systems we barely understand — we must ask: what kind of world are we building? What kind of humans are we becoming? Rancho’s rebellion in Three Idiots is not just against rote memorization. It’s against a view of technology devoid of context, devoid of care. He wants students — and perhaps engineers everywhere — to reclaim a more soulful relationship to the machines they create and use.
This brings us to a crucial point — one often lost in today’s hand-wringing about automation, surveillance, and AI: Technics are not the enemy. They are not inherently alienating. They are not simply tools of control. Yes, they can be dangerous. But they can also be luminous. Enlightening. Even loving. Stiegler called technics a pharmakon — a Greek word that means both remedy and poison. What matters is how we use them, and how we think with them. Do we allow technology to automate away our thought? Or do we harness it to amplify our capacities for reflection, imagination, and care? Rancho’s definition of a machine — anything that reduces human effort — becomes even more radical in this light. It’s not anti-intellectual. It’s a call to honor the why before the how. To see technology not just as a means to an end, but as part of the web of meaning-making that makes us human.
So what does this all mean in the context of us and now — in an era of generative AI, ambient data, and software that seems to anticipate our every move?
It means we have a choice. We can accept technology as something that “just happens to us.” Or we can engage it as a site of thoughtful intervention. We can design systems that deepen understanding instead of flattening it. We can build machines that remember with us, not for us. We can shape tools that reflect our better angels — that help us become not just more efficient, but more human. This is not utopianism. It’s a wager: that technology, when approached philosophically and playfully, can be a light-bearing force. That technics, as Stiegler saw, are not a detour from the human condition — they are the condition.
If you haven’t seen 3 Idiots, I highly recommend it. Rancho is a cerebral protagonist for the ages. I’ll end with another of his quotes in the film: “Why cram definitions when you can ignite understanding?”
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3 Idiots: Rotten Tomatoes
Bernard Stiegler: Technics and Time, 1