Down the Halls of Mental Health, part 1: Modern Technology Is Not the Problem, But the Place Where the Problem Becomes Visible
Technology as the Site of Crisis examines whether modern technology is truly responsible for our sense of alienation, or whether it simply reveals a deeper crisis in how we understand ourselves and the world. Drawing on Crawford, Husserl, Heidegger, and Simondon, and others, I discuss how technology is not the cause of our predicament. Instead, it is what allows for the notice of the modern way of knowing. What often appears to be a technological problem is, more fundamentally, an epistemological one. This is to say there is no experience outside of knowing.
Note: Some might wonder why are we going down a “hallway” of mental health toward a site of technological crisis. Well, because it might not seem apparent how this philosophical discussion about technology might be linked with mental health. This is a three part essay, and this is Part 1.
Our Engagement with Technology Can Seem like a Crisis in the Making
Modern discussions of technology often begin from the assumption that our increasing reliance upon machines, digital systems, and abstraction alienate us, from each other, reality, and ourselves..
It should be thought of as no mere coincidence that one of our earliest classic films, Metropolis, was about people’s relationship with technology. And of course, the portrayal is not good.
Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft“, together with Timothy Mooney’s phenomenological reading of Crawford, develops a strong version of this general argument: our relationship with technology is causing problems. Crawford discusses how skilled manual work is intellectually, morally, and psychologically valuable, but that modern society has wrongly downgraded it in favor of abstract “knowledge work.” Mooney extends this idea into more traditionally academic philosophy, arguing that craftsmanship is valuable because it develops practical intelligence, autonomy, and meaningful engagement with the real world, not just technical skill, that humanity is losing something by its promotion that hands-on skills are less important than intellectual skills.
However, I say that while they do discover something genuine, the significance of their discovery lies elsewhere.
The technology is not the source of the crisis. Rather, it is the place where the modern phenomenological subject encounters itself, where we find the object that we call the subject.
Technology as the Site of Crisis
Matthew Crawford’s defense of craftsmanship is compelling because it names something that nearly everyone notices given a minute. Modern society seems to have steadily devalued practical skill in favor of abstraction. We increasingly regard manual competence as secondary to intellectual erudition, repair as less significant than innovation, and maintenance as an afterthought to production. The result is not only a workforce detached from the material world, but a civilization that discards rather than preserves, replaces rather than repairs, and consumes without much regard for the accumulated labor embodied within the things it uses, let alone the the material refuse itself. Crawford is right to argue that a renewed appreciation for skilled work, care, and repair would improve both our lives and our relationship with the environment.
The difficulty, however, lies not with Crawford’s observations but with the philosophical interpretation that accompanies them. Mooney (2026) develops Crawford’s argument through the phenomenological traditions of Husserl, Heidegger, and Simondon. Together, these thinkers identify something genuine in the modern relationship to objects.
Nonetheless, I say what they discovered is not fundamentally a crisis of technology, craftsmanship, or material things themselves. Rather, the technological object is the place where the modern phenomenological subject encounters its own completion. By technology an epistemological juncture becomes able to be noticed. It is not the cause of the crisis; it is where the crisis becomes intelligible. When we include in the estimation of real things this intelligence, of layperson as well as the intellectual, their positions and actions, their ideas, of repair, maintenance, value, and crisis, this distinction is significant in understanding what is actually happening. The prevailing interpretation of modernity, and the crisis, assumes that we have somehow lost contact with the world. Science has become too abstract. Technology has mediated our lives. Digital systems separate us from material reality. Manual skills disappear as screens replace workshops. The common conclusion is that we ought to recover a more immediate relation with things themselves.
There is nothing wrong with this assessment, of course, but the conclusion quietly assumes the very philosophical orientation it hopes to overcome. It presumes that our relation to objects has deteriorated, as though the objects themselves have somehow become more distant. But objects have not withdrawn. Our engagement with them has not ceased. If anything, technology has woven itself ever more intimately into every aspect of our existence. The question, then, is not whether we remain connected to things, but what is happening as the encounter with things.
Husserl’s diagnosis of the crisis of the sciences remains indispensable. His concern was never merely that science had become mathematical and abstract. Rather, scientific method had gradually come to identify reality with what could be represented mathematically, relegating the lived world to a secondary status. The lifeworld, populated by the things we fashion, handle, repair, admire, and inhabit, appeared increasingly derivative of an idealized scientific reality. The representations of things became more associated with what is important, valued, and real, and the practical, experiential world of the person itself became suspect precisely as the calculations became more central to knowing how to count experience. The objects themselves were succumbing to be replaced by the systems of ideas about them. Husserl recognized the consequences of this reduction. He insisted that the lifeworld is no less real than the mathematical abstractions constructed by science. The issue, then, does not remain in the issue he brings up because his proposed corrections remain internal to the same phenomenological movement. It is a paradox in one instance, a contradiction on another, and an irony on still another. So it is the battle front remains as the crisis inherent this orientation is still understood as something requiring reconciliation between scientific abstraction and lived experience. The question remains how consciousness regains its proper relation to the world.
This is where I depart. The crisis does not arise because consciousness has become detached from reality. Nor does it arise because technology has separated us from nature. The crisis appears because the modern phenomenological orientation has reached the point at which it can encounter its own organization. Technology is the situation in which this encounter occurs.
Technology Reveals the Structure of Human Knowing
Accordingly, there is no projection occurring here, or more precisely, projection is a phenomenological maxim, an imperative, if you will. It occurs where phenomenology informs experience. Yet, outside of this modern mode, the object itself is not a passive screen upon which anxious subjects cast their existential concerns; when oriented in the phenomenological ideal, however, it sure is, as it withdraws from its manner of knowing (see Graham Harman). Such phenomenalist language preserves precisely the inner-outer distinction inherited from Cartesian philosophy. What we find now is, instead of continuing to point away from the cite of experience to verify the Cartesian paradigm, the object is the phenomenological situation itself. It is through the object that the modern subject discovers the organization of its own knowing. The either/or manner of knowing is itself discovered to be the nature of an object itself, hence, its manner is not as significant for what it actually is because we have an opening to understand what is actually happening is the entirely of meaning.
This explains why so many twentieth-century philosophers converge upon technology despite beginning from remarkably different questions. Husserl worries over the mathematization of science. Heidegger describes enframing (bracketing) and standing reserve. Simondon analyzes the individuation of technical objects. Crawford defends craftsmanship and repair. Although their vocabularies differ, each arrives at the technological object as the decisive site of philosophical reflection because it is not doing anything separated from the experience informed by the modern method. Only their being oriented toward the phenomenological horizon derives subjective opinions as though they are making different arguments, which, in effect then, will al suggest the idealism that we can never know the object in-itself, a.k.a. the Kantian, phenomenalist, constructivist maxim; the question really for all of them is what are they talking about. This convergence is not accidental, nor does it indicate that technology has somehow become humanity’s greatest problem. Rather, the significance of our moment is that technology has arrived at its proper epistemological juncture. It is where the modern subject encounters itself (see my discussions on Artificial Intelligence and subjectivity).
Seen this way, the machine nor the person is neither culprit nor victim. It neither alienates nor redeems. The repaired engine, the handcrafted table, the computer algorithm, the electrical grid, and the smartphone each occupy the same philosophical position. They are objective situations through which modern reason becomes available to knowing itself, that is, the object of the subject.
Why Craftsmanship, Repair, and AI Matter
This point becomes especially important when Crawford distinguishes manual craftsmanship from increasingly abstract forms of technological work. Certainly there are important practical differences between rebuilding an engine and writing software. One engages metal, tolerances, wear, and physical resistance and the other manipulates symbolic systems. Yet both remain technological activities. Indeed, thinking is a kind of technology, when we encounter the use-value of anything we know. A programmer maintains systems every bit as genuinely as a mechanic maintains engines, just as an armchair academic. They all repair, all diagnose failures, all inherit designs they did not create and learn through error rather than certainty.
The distinction, therefore, cannot simply be between manual and virtual work; the very idea of practicality here belies a kind of orientation on things that is loaded with epistemological presumption. Because the kind of engagement with technology I am describing is practical, but it may not seem so to some people, it serves to verify its meaning, ironically. Such a distinction of practicality already presupposes that physical contact somehow grants a privileged access to reality. But by what means would such privilege be established? The answer cannot simply be “because one uses one’s hands.” Again, thought itself is technological because reasoning is itself a manner of engaging with the world. Language, measurement, classification, geometry, software, and mechanical repair all belong to different technological configurations through which reality becomes available.
Simondon recognized something approaching this when he argued that technical objects are never closed systems. Their significance lies not merely in their material constitution but in their relations. Technology does not isolate human beings from the world. To him, rather, it mediates the relations through which the world continually becomes intelligible. If this is true, then the crisis cannot consist in technology’s distancing us from objects or from our distancing ourselves. Technology is already one of the means by which objects become present at all. If we understand him for what he is really saying over what we think he means or what he is trying to argue, then, oddly, there is no mediation.
What Crawford correctly discovers, then, is not a deterioration of objects themselves but a transformation in the phenomenological situation through which objects appear. But then he does not make the total move because the phenomenological situation is the embodiment of a specific kind of change, and the notion of transformation merely suggests that things have stayed the same —again ironically when we bring in Heidegger’s same. They are retaining a privilege of a specific object of time in phenomenological essence. So it is, repair matters because it discloses something about the organization of knowledge, failure humbles mastery, maintenance reveals dependence, and so on, such that every polemic and opposition is a subject which calls the subject back into its semantic orbit. By locating this orbit, so to speak, we find the object itself. Crawford cannot see his ends; practical skill continually interrupts the conceit that ideas alone govern reality because the idea is a practical skill necessarily by its occurrence in universe as life. Mechanics, physicians, and engineers all learn that the object resists conceptual certainty, but they do not continue to its ends because of the way the must engage with reality for this living and livelihood. Reality insists upon itself regardless of theory.
But this disclosure is not yet the crisis. The crisis emerges when the modern subject interprets this encounter as though it were primarily about the object. The concern for craftsmanship, environmental degradation, planned obsolescence, and disappearing skills is genuine. Yet these concerns arise because the technological object has become the point where modern phenomenology reaches its own limit. The object has not become problematic, rather, it has become the place where the organization of modern knowing is finally disclosed, and the modern subject resists its disclosure. This is the modern way.
Technology Is Not the Crisis
Technology therefore occupies neither only an ethical nor merely only an economic position within experience. It occupies an epistemological one. Once restored to this proper juncture, it no longer bears the impossible burden of explaining the condition of humanity. Instead, it becomes the objective situation through which the condition of the modern subject can be recognized for what it is: an unmediated universal object.
Coming soon: Down the hallway of mental health, part 2.