1. An Appearance of Freedom

My reflections on technique and technology lead me to sometimes unexpected places. Recently, I wrote about a situation I observed when reflecting on our technical and technological uses: we are free, in appearance, but certain options become impractical or unthinkable without however being prohibited.

For example, and to take up the topic of the moment, we are free to use generative artificial intelligence just as we are free to send our mail by post rather than by email. Nothing forbids resorting to postal mail and no law prescribes email. No sanction strikes the person who sends a paper letter rather than an email. And yet, the freedom to use postal mail is very often reduced to nothing: the option exists but it is no longer reasonable. Nobody has really removed the choice or the possibility. They have simply made the alternative absurd.

I wanted to understand why we had come to this point. The easy answer is that (technical) progress leads us to use email rather than postal mail. That AI saves us time and that it is therefore “logical” to use it. This simple observation actually reflects a situation that our usual concepts struggle to capture. I chose to name this situation an imperceptive. This neologism results from the contraction of imperative and imperceptible.

2. The Inadequacy of Available Concepts

I used the imperceptive to describe the “quasi-imperative” we had to use technology in our activities (both private and professional). I preferred to coin a new concept because “quasi-imperative” was imperfect and, upon examination, does not allow the situation to be precisely qualified. I had, by reflex, used the term “quasi-imperative” but it is a misuse of language. I realise there is something more that does not seem to be captured by existing concepts.

At this stage, I would therefore indicate that the imperceptive designates

the constraint exerted on the framework of decision. Its specificity lies in the fact that it neutralises the relevance of choices without suppressing their formal possibility.

Before getting to the heart of the matter, I would first like to confront my idea with concepts that resemble it. The objective is to verify that what I call the imperceptive is not named differently by others. There are indeed concepts that, without being identical, could resemble the imperceptive.

The imperceptive resembles other concepts such as the nudge, governmentality, social norms or radical monopoly. There are surely others that I have not yet discovered. These concepts are too close to be ignored in this verification step. Although the imperceptive resembles them, I believe this resemblance is insufficient.

2.1. The Quasi-Imperative

The adverb “quasi” is an adverb used as a prefix meaning “almost” or “approximately” (according to the Larousse definition). According to CNRTL, it “serves to mark a similarity, an approximation or a qualitative assimilation”. Yet what I am trying to describe is neither an approximation (an “almost”) nor an assimilation, nor a similarity of the imperative.

Furthermore, an imperative is a prescription. This prescription can come from several horizons (moral, legal, social, …). Behind this concept of imperative, we therefore find the notion of hierarchy. The imperative is an obligation and it is very generally transparent in its statement. We identify a sender and a recipient. The law is an imperative. Its traceability is clear: there is a sender (legislative power) and a recipient (the legal subject (citizen or company)). When I speak of the imperceptive, there is no precise sender or recipient. As I wrote in the aforementioned note, it is a form of (social) pressure that “compels” a behaviour.

With the imperceptive, one then acts on the motivation to adopt a behaviour without however becoming an obligation as such. The imperceptive thus joins incentive in this sense: it makes an option more attractive, more appealing in a certain way.

2.2. The Nudge

If the imperceptive joins incentive, one might think it is a nudge.

The nudge is the deliberate intervention on choice architecture to orient behaviour without formally prohibiting or constraining. Thaler and Sunstein proposed a definition:

The nudge, the term we will use, is an aspect of choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic motivations. To count as a mere “nudge,” the intervention must be simple and easy to avoid. “Nudges” are not mandates. Putting the evidence directly before people’s eyes is considered a nudge. Merely prohibiting what should not be done or chosen does not work.

The example one could take to illustrate would be placing vegetables or fruits before chips in the school canteen (what an idea to put chips in the canteen anyway!). This arrangement is intentionally designed, with an objective (eating better), and the designers “know” what they are doing or at least make a conscious decision about the objective to be achieved.

What differentiates the nudge from the imperceptive is its structure. The nudge is implemented by an author (an administration, a company, a designer) who has deliberately arranged the choice architecture with a declared objective (or not).

We all know nudge techniques.

They can be public: steered by public authorities with an assumed purpose (e.g.: tax incentives for installing photovoltaic panels or using low-emission vehicles). They can be private, implemented by companies to orient consumer choices to their advantage.

In both cases, there is an actor who decides what they are doing and why they are doing it.

The nudge thus fits within a logic of paternalism boosted by a certain utilitarianism dear to our capitalist society. This model was already criticised by Milton Friedman when used at the state level because of its impact on individual freedom (I will return to this below). The nudge is a local and targeted technique for orienting choice.

There is an intentionality that is incompatible with the imperceptive.

Moreover, the definition of the nudge explicitly provides for “ease of avoidance,” which, to take the example of postal mail vs email, cannot be considered as I will explain below regarding the impact of the imperceptive on our freedom.

2.3. Governmentality

The quasi-imperative is approximate. The nudge is intentional. One might then think of Foucault’s governmentality. It designates the set of techniques, procedures and rationalities by which a population is governed. It is the production of norms, knowledge and subjectivities. The governed individual internalises the norms and conducts themselves according to them.

For Foucault:

It is about a certain type of state control over populations, a certain mode of exercising power where to govern is “to have towards the inhabitants, the wealth, the conduct of all and each a form of surveillance, of control no less attentive than that of the father of the family over the household and its goods.”

There is first a difference in mechanism: governmentality produces subjects (it acts on identity and subjectivity). For me, the imperceptive acts on the framework of decision without necessarily reshaping the subject’s identity (although this point would deserve a reflection in its own right. Whether our choices shape our identity or merely express it?). The subject remains: they simply think their choices are rational because they do not feel they are conforming to a conduct. They adopt it naturally, considering it rational.

There is also a form of paternalism in governmentality that is close to the public nudge. The direction of conduct is given by the authority to adopt a behaviour, a conduct. What distinguishes governmentality from the imperceptive is its scope. Foucault focuses on institutions and explicitly political power relations. Governmentality presupposes a political reason of government. The imperceptive, as I conceive it, does not imply a rationality of government because it impacts the conditions of what appears as rational.

While governmentality aims at the conduct of conducts, the imperceptive touches on the conditions of possibility of conduct itself. The imperceptive is the regime of rationality that configures upstream the criteria of the reasonable, such that certain options, although formally possible, cease to appear as rational choices.

One could then consider that the imperceptive plays a role upstream of governmentality as well, in that it configures and structures the possibilities of governmental rationality.

2.4. Social Norms

Contrary to what I propose above, one could also think that the imperceptive is a “product” of governmentality. This capacity to configure the possibilities of the rational could then be a consequence of decisions about conduct that produce notably “social” norms. These norms come to structure conduct. This fabric inherited from the past, shaped throughout our existences, comes to guide populations.

Here again, I identify a strong distinction with the imperceptive. The social norm is known and the recipient of this “social norm” is targeted by it. For example, we know that we must dress a certain way for a job interview. We know there are rules of politeness, ways of being that are expected depending on the context (for example, at a funeral or a birthday). This knowledge is precisely what allows conforming to the social norm or choosing to renounce it for a host of reasons that I will not address here.

There is therefore a distinction to be made on this first aspect: nobody says that one must use one technical device rather than another. It is more subtle because the imperceptive touches the regime of rationality of choices.

Then, a distinction can be made on the object. The social norm points to a specific behaviour in a specific situation. There is a more important contextualisation when examining the social norm compared to the imperceptive. The imperceptive is much more transversal. There is no identifiable prescription or determined action in the imperceptive.

Finally, we can also note a distinction regarding the sanction for non-compliance with the social norm compared to that of the imperceptive. Jump the queue and you will be scolded by the people you passed, show off on a train or bus and you will be called to order by other passengers. For the imperceptive, nobody will sanction you if you use outdated or obsolete technical means. At worst, you will be perceived as the “old school” or “vintage” member of the group, you will be disconnected from certain digital services, but this (possible) exclusion is not comparable to the transgression of a social norm.

In this sense too, the imperceptive is insidious because it is more difficult to contest than a social norm. One can refuse a social norm by assuming the gaze of others or by ignoring it. One can hardly refuse the imperceptive in the same way: there is no gaze to face. There is simply a framework that progressively makes certain choices unreasonable.

2.5. Radical Monopoly

A notion proposed by Ivan Illich, it targets the place that certain institutions take in our societies. This monopoly would aim to modify, control and ultimately constrain populations to change their habits by restricting their choices and freedoms. In his essay “Tools for Conviviality,” Illich sees in radical monopoly:

a type of domination by a product that goes well beyond what is usually meant by the term.

For Illich, there is a radical monopoly when the programmed tool supplants the individual’s power to act. This domination establishes compulsory consumption and therefore restricts personal autonomy (p.80). It is therefore the antipode of individual autonomy.

In this framework,

Radical monopoly is established when people surrender their innate ability to do what they can for themselves and for each other, in exchange for something “better” that can only be produced for them by a dominant tool. Radical monopoly reflects the industrialisation of values. (p.84)

To take his examples,

That the car restricts the right to walk, and not that more people drive Chevrolets than Peugeots, that is radical monopoly. That people are forced to be transported and become powerless to move without a motor, that is radical monopoly (p.80).

The resemblance to the imperceptive is very strong but there remains, in my view, a very clear difference in what Illich was able to observe in his time.

Illich’s analysis is dated and essentially concerns consumption issues. The examples he takes to illustrate his point range from the automobile to education, from funeral homes to beverage manufacturers. He directs his critical observation at consumerist practices and targets the power taken by certain institutions. Radical monopoly is much more targeted. I see in the imperceptive a more structuring role, as I attempted to demonstrate for governmentality, which enables radical monopolies. Put differently, the imperceptive enables the creation of the radical monopolies proposed by Illich, as I will explain below.

3. The Imperceptible and the Promethean Gap

The detour we have taken has allowed us to trace the distinctions that the imperceptive could have with other concepts, focusing particularly on the notion of imperative.

Beyond the imperative, there is also the imperceptible. I believe that this absence of perception, this blindness, can only be considered from an internal point of view and this is what allows me to name it by attempting to step outside the framework that encircles us, in order to stigmatise it and attempt to criticise it.

This notion of imperceptible is not entirely new. It was found, in a certain form, in the concept of “Promethean gap” by Gunther Anders proposed in his book The Obsolescence of Man (Volume 1). This gap is defined by Anders as:

“the growing inadequacy between what humanity is capable of producing technically and what it is capable of imagining as consequences of this production”.

According to Anders, we build systems whose effects and consequences exceed our capacity for representation. This Promethean gap is one of the sources of the imperceptive. We are collectively incapable of imagining what our tools do to us and the constraint they exert on us cannot be perceived as such. It is in this sense that it is imperceptible, because we do not have the representations that would allow us to see it.

4. The Contours of the Imperceptive

4.1. The Relationship of the Imperceptive with Other Concepts

After having surveyed the related concepts, we can now identify a causal chain between certain concepts discussed. I see here the following chain: Promethean gap -> imperceptive -> radical monopoly.

The Promethean gap targets what humans create as technical objects whose effects exceed what they can imagine.

The imperceptive is the product of this gap. Because humans cannot imagine the effects of what they put in place, certain constraints settle in without being perceived as such. The imperceptive prohibits nothing: it neutralises alternatives by making them absurd, without this neutralisation being visible, deliberate or conscious.

Radical monopoly, in Illich’s sense, is one of the observable consequences of this process. When the imperceptive has reconfigured the rationality of humanity’s technical productions that Anders mentioned in 1956, certain tools or institutions end up occupying the entirety of available space for a given function. Radical monopoly is not the result of a monopolistic intention; it is the culmination of an imperceptive that has operated without encountering resistance, precisely because it was not perceived.

However, not all imperceptives necessarily produce radical monopolies. Radical monopoly presupposes an infrastructural reconfiguration on a large scale. The imperceptive can also produce more diffuse, less institutionalised effects.

The relationship is therefore as follows: radical monopoly presupposes an imperceptive, but the imperceptive does not always lead to radical monopoly.

4.2. The Imperceptive as Choice Modelling

As already written, the imperceptive is an imperative that exerts itself without ever formulating itself as such. What distinguishes the imperceptive is that it operates on the framework within which the decision takes shape and not on the decision itself. This framework is the regime of rationality of which technology is, in my view, the privileged vector.

There is no invitation to do X or Y but our milieu is shaped in such a way that the framework of reflection “imposes” doing X or Y. It is a very perverse situation in that the imperceptive will model conceptions to orient choices. The subject does not perceive the imperceptive as an imperative. The subject simply thinks they are acting according to rational choices, as self-evidence or common-sense necessity given the framework and milieu in which they operate.

The imperceptive becomes imperceptible because it blends into the real and has been naturalised by the subject. The real is in fact only a representation of the subject, interpreted according to their own sensibility. On this point, I can refer to the conception proposed by Marcello Vitali Rosati:

there are only material models; the real is always the result of a modelling. The real is multiple and always mediated; there is no real outside of a mediation and all mediation is material. (…) The model is not a selection of the real, it is the real itself, as it results from a determined mediation; but outside of this mediation there is nothing at all.

On the basis of the above, I can refine my definition: the imperceptive is a model of rationality in which a dominant criterion, efficiency, imposes itself without being discussed, configuring upstream the conditions of the reasonable. Certain options remain formally possible but cease to appear as relevant.

4.2.1. The Example of the EU AI Regulation

Let us illustrate by taking the European regulation on AI.

Article 4 of the European Artificial Intelligence Regulation (hereafter AIR) illustrates this mechanism in a particularly striking manner. It provides that providers and deployers of AI systems must take measures to ensure a sufficient level of AI literacy for their personnel and the persons responsible for the operation and use of these systems.

There is no obligation to use AI. Article 4 of the AIR does not constrain anyone to deploy an AI system. It leaves the freedom to deployers (users) and companies to decide to use it.

However, if the company decides to use an AI system, then the regulation imposes obligations of means on users who, if they use AI, must take the necessary measures to (i) use it in a certain way and (ii) understand the tools used.

This mastery obligation therefore presupposes usage but also contributes to normalising this usage. This is how Article 4 reveals the imperceptive. The legislator did not decide that everyone should use AI. They organised the conditions of this usage. But in doing so, in anchoring in the very text the idea that adoption is a fait accompli that calls for regulation, the regulation contributes to naturalising this fact. The rule therefore has a performative effect in addition to being prescriptive: it normalises usage by treating it as self-evidence that precedes the norm.

Here is a legal imperative that, through its architecture, illustrates the imperceptive by treating as settled what was still a matter of choice. Article 4 does not say “you must use AI.” It says: “since you use AI, here is what you must do.” This presupposition is the moment when the imperceptive produces a visible imperative.

This analysis is reinforced by reading Recital 20, linked to this Article 4. It confirms this observation. It begins with the objective of “making the best possible use of AI systems.” This formulation presupposes usage before anything else. Adoption is not a hypothesis that the legislator examines: it is the starting point from which they reason.

The recital goes further by inscribing AI mastery in an explicit economic purpose: AI training is presented as a lever for improving working conditions and “consolidating the path to trustworthy AI innovation in the Union.” The legislator naturalises a causal link that is far from obvious: mastering AI would, by definition, mean working better. Usage becomes not only a fait accompli but a condition of progress.

And if you still had any doubt, reading Article 1 would finish convincing you. Article 1 of the Regulation sets out the purpose and states its aim to “promote the uptake of human-centric and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI), while ensuring a high level of protection of health, safety, fundamental rights enshrined in the Charter, including democracy, the rule of law and environmental protection, against the harmful effects of AI systems in the Union, and to support innovation.”

Part 2 (published on 13 May 2025)

5. Why the Imperceptive?

Let us try to recap: the imperceptive is the expression of an invisible force that relentlessly pushes us in the same direction. This invisible force, which we think we can justify through the notion of (technical) progress, has potentially more harmful effects than it appears, in particular by neutralising alternatives. This reconfiguration of what is reasonable allows this thing to prosper despite the warnings made, at least since the mid-1950s, by thinkers of technology.

Each of them, in their own way, expressed the same idea: the enslavement of humans by the (technical) tool. The individual becomes the agent of their own tools.

For example, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich and Bernard Stiegler all observed the same thing, at different moments and under different concepts. These observations are not the product of a band of technophobes refractory to any idea of progress. To interpret them in this way is Manichean and I invite those who doubt it to read their works to form their own opinion. As an appetiser, I will point out three considerations taken from this panel.

Ellul

If Ellul had his blunt manner and a certain refractory vision (towards the automobile for example), he was not against technology. He writes:

The technical tool is very good for a technical operation. It is demonic when it fills the whole of life and substitutes itself for all human activities. (The Technological Bluff, p.222)

Illich

Illich advocates a convivial society defined as:

a society where the modern tool is at the service of the person integrated into the community, and not at the service of a body of specialists. Convivial is the society where humans control the tool. (Tools for Conviviality - p.13)

Stiegler

Stiegler qualifies technology, and therefore the tool, as a pharmakon: poison, but at the same time, remedy.

There is therefore never a full and entire disqualification of the tool or of technology. It is even sometimes necessary, as a condition for achieving certain advances considered socially beneficial. This ambivalence, which is characterised in the thought of each of the above-mentioned authors, has never been hidden or masked; it is sometimes the very heart of the reflection, as with the pharmakon.

In this context, thinking the imperceptive is a way of accounting for this ambivalent complexity.

5.1. The Timelessness of the Imperceptive

Some might retort that this imperceptive is not specific to AI, that it was already present at other moments of technical evolution. They are right. I do not consider the imperceptive as a phenomenon specific to the arrival of AI. The imperceptive is the product of the Promethean gap (1956) and the condition for the realisation of radical monopoly (1973) which, together, form the technician system (1977).

In 1983, Victor Scardigli in La Consommation, culture du quotidien writes about the socialisation of a technical object such as the automobile. The innovation is first received, adopted, then naturalised. The “pilot consumers” who first adopt the automobile mark their modernity in a society built on progress. The technical object becomes a sign of individual value before becoming collective self-evidence (p. 146). The imperceptive on the automobile operated in the same way: nobody banned the horse, its use was simply made absurd.

So, as yet another descriptive attempt, I come to express what I believe I understand and observe, leaning on the shoulders of these giants, updating their thinking in the face of the technical and digital environment of the 21st century that only Bernard Stiegler was able to briefly think about (Bernard Stiegler died in 2020).

What I have tried to show is that the imperceptive finds its place among the various concepts and fills the space I thought I perceived between these concepts. It is there to link the thought of those who analysed technology in their time. These spaces perhaps already existed, but they widened through the multiplication of techniques we have known for nearly 20 years. The explosion of digital, of web 2.0, of the platform economy and now of generative AI, to name only a few of the “innovations,” has highlighted these spaces which were, until then, discreet, even invisible or non-existent for those who thought about the subject. This evolution is also observed in Ellul, who, although having begun his thinking on technology in 1954, proposed, as the culmination of his reflection, the notion of technician system in 1977. Nearly twenty years observing the evolution of technology before finally putting a name on it and theorising a system of thought.

I have, moreover, the intimate conviction that what I am writing here will evolve tomorrow. Nothing is fixed and my perception of things will necessarily evolve. I am aware of this and it is what makes these reflections enriching.

5.2. AI as a Rupture in the Imperceptive

Nevertheless, can we consider that generative AI, unlike other technologies, marks a rupture compared to what we have already encountered? In other words, does AI engender, create or confirm an imperceptive of the same nature as that of email or the automobile?

I do not think so. Although each technical evolution has contributed to a more or less significant degree to the persistence of the imperceptive. The impact of the combustion engine compared to email is, industrially, difficult to compare and I would not dare venture into that.

But let us undertake the exercise of reflection in relation to the example used in the introduction to part 1: email. It is a means of communication that existed in a more archaic form, such as fax, postal mail or the telegram. However, the principle of asynchronous correspondence was already envisaged and email made it possible to shorten the delay between sending and reception, beyond the fact that it became possible to exchange various types of content digitally (attachments). Email came to optimise a practice that pre-existed it.

However, where I think there is an important if not fundamental and radical difference is on the technique as such. Generative AI is not an incremental technique that allows us to do technically better something we did technically before. I insist on technically in the sense that I am referring to a method deployed to achieve a result, integrating instrumental use where appropriate. Of course, generative AI allows us to write text that we were capable of writing manually or mechanically (with a keyboard), but you will agree with me that generative AI is radically different. There was no (consumer) software capable of producing and generating content on a simple instruction before November 2022 and the release of ChatGPT.

This new technique is, in my view, truly disruptive. It allows us to achieve something we could not achieve before its existence. These generative AIs have not only accelerated or optimised an existing flow, they have made it possible to produce content where only humans produced with their head and body, assisted by tools controlled by them.

Where generative AI is, or becomes, incremental, is during the evolution of content generation models. I am thinking of the videos of Will Smith eating a plate of spaghetti: the first models used produced videos of poor quality to arrive, in 2026, at “quasi-real” videos. Moreover, one must not confuse the incremental effects linked to the integration of AI into other processes that are not linked to the technique of generative AI itself.

These new tools now make it possible to produce language from an idea contained in an instruction. The machine will produce the expression of this idea (among many other possible expressions) where only humans, until recently, were able to achieve it (I leave aside everything relating to the philosophy of language, being aware of my shortcomings on the subject. The informed reader will therefore excuse me for the naive considerations I may formulate).

This rupture is what historian Harari considers as the hack of the operating system of human civilisation (“AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation”).

This interaction in natural language and this capacity for content generation are not such as to “reconfigure” our modes of communication or thought in a manner similar to what we have previously encountered. It is a technique that allows fundamentally new things to be done and which, for this reason, transforms rather than reconfigures.

I believe that this difference has a consequence on the imperceptive: it is no longer about making an alternative obsolete at the margin of an activity, but about making obsolete a way of being, of thinking. The imperceptive updated by generative AI does not bear on a tool among others. It bears on the very function and capacity to write, to produce and therefore to think. It is in this sense that generative AI marks, in my estimation, a rupture: it touches a faculty that we had never influenced so directly. It is perhaps bold to consider, with so little hindsight, that this technical thing marks a rupture, and this is why this point must be examined in the context of the imperceptive which maintains, with or without this rupture, its effects.

5.3. Choosing One’s Battlefield

The imperceptive is timeless and we can therefore observe its persistence through technical evolutions. Generative AI could mark a rupture in that it touches faculties that we had never influenced so directly before.

Two authors mobilised in this text (Illich and later Scardigli) use the car as an illustration and already propose fairly fine analyses. The years have passed and the situation is similar or worse depending on the point of view.

Faced with this situation, some might see challenges to be met, battles to be fought. Although the image is strong, I think we have an active role to play, and perhaps in a utopian way, a battle to fight. I will take up Rutger Bregman’s words in Utopia for Realists:

Without utopia, we are lost. We need horizons, even somewhat crazy ones. Having several of them in conflict will keep our democracy alive.

Because one can only fight against what one sees, the imperceptive allows us to think a resistance action. To do so, I propose to start from an observation: that which we keep harping on about the effects of technologies and the regular drifts we observe. Despite this, we all still consume these technologies more or less voluntarily.

To give ourselves a clean conscience, we will invoke the imperious necessity to (re)appropriate the Big Tech narrative or to (re)take our digital sovereignty. I deeply adhere to these proposals, but I remain equally sceptical in the face of this “enlightened humanism” that drapes itself in beautiful virtues.

Faced with certain discourses, we fall into a true Tartuffery: experts, who transform themselves into modern-day sophists, take pleasure in these ideals and claim to think the technical subject without truly questioning it outside its framework. We fall into the “ethic washing” that I denounced here. Sometimes, beneath these apparently sensible recommendations, there are few or no concrete proposals, methods or solutions. We are exhorted to act without being told how. The result is unsurprising: not up to par.

If we must think the technical subject, it is clear that the means deployed struggle to offer lasting solutions. When we are exhorted to (re)appropriate the Big Tech narrative, we push reflection within a framework of rationality that the imperceptive has already configured. All criticism presupposes a given framework of rationality to allow comparison between what is criticised and what should be, and this is what we struggle to find. Illich already noted:

when a tooled activity exceeds a threshold defined by the appropriate scale, it first turns against its end, then threatens to destroy the entire social body.

Consequently, our usual frameworks of criticism appear insufficient. We see this fairly well in AI, where among the proposed solutions emerge trustworthy AI or explainable AI. On this subject, I remain dumbfounded by the reflections raised on 8 October 2025 in an article in Le Monde where the question was asked of the compliance of AI that would test the stress of a job candidate. This questioning is deplorable insofar as the question being asked is the legality of a tool before even considering whether its use is desirable. At this rate, we will soon no longer distinguish between job interviews and torture (yes, I am exaggerating but it is to illustrate my point).

We must therefore try, as much as possible, to step outside the framework to formulate a criticism of it and not remain confined within it to carry that criticism. Criticising within the framework will not allow it to evolve.

5.3.1. Which Critical Framework?

In 1986, Ellul writes in “The Technological Bluff” of the necessity of operating a dialectic between science and spirituality:

One has answers to the questions of the other and vice versa.

A few years earlier, Habermas laid the foundations of this dialectic that we should have in the face of technology by indicating that:

The liberating force of reflection cannot be replaced by a deployment of technically usable knowledge.

Through these quotations, I can consider that the solution advocated to face the problems of technology will not come through more technology. This vision is that of techno-solutionism, which has demonstrated its irrelevance (see the topic How does AI change our system society?).

Anders also wrote in 1956: the “technically feasible” gives rise to an obligation in the individual. “What we are capable of” has become “what must be.” We must escape these dictates. We must think about what technologies do to our bodies and minds in order to really think about the technical subject and perhaps cease to invent new ones that will only accentuate this Promethean gap, thus contributing to the imperceptive.

We must become aware of the effects of these palliatives implemented and discriminate poisons from remedies. In 1973, Illich made a similar observation: consumers, aware of the dangers of automobiles, organise themselves to demand safer and better quality cars. It is a Pyrrhic victory because it implies a renewed individual confidence which means more collective dependence. He continues:

That consumers “hooked” on a product organise themselves to defend themselves has the immediate effect of increasing the quality of the drug supplied and the power of the supplier.

This is the aspect I tried to demonstrate in the confrontation of compliance and ethics regarding technologies. We exert ourselves thinking about how without first reflecting on what, and you will surely see a link with trustworthy AI…

In April 2025, Mark Hunyadi distinguished in his paper “The Battle of the Mind” forced enslavement from the consented colonisation of our minds. He rightly recalls, in my view, that the battlefield of the big techs goes through our mind and that the stake is to impose on everyone a relationship to the world that goes through their technical devices. “This is the major fact that must guide critical analyses of digital technology,” Hunyadi tells us.

Bernard Stiegler, in his Pharmakon course, regularly uses the metaphor of the flying fish. Incapable of distinguishing its milieu (water) until it leaves it. It is only during its flights that the flying fish can see its own milieu and try, if the urge takes it, to question it. This is also why I wanted to propose the imperceptive. To understand that in order to think our framework, we must extract ourselves from it. This is where the battlefield lies.

Let us recall David Noble’s words:

A war is raging but only one of the two sides is armed: this is the summary of the question of technology today.

We must therefore invest this terrain, the meta-framework, where we can really and radically question technology, while abstracting ourselves, as much as possible, from the imperceptible imperatives.

5.4. The Impact on Freedom

Another answer to “Why the imperceptive?” and one that seems important to me to understand, is the consequences of the imperceptive, its impact on the individual’s freedom.

As Hunyadi writes, the battlefield of Big Tech goes through our mind, and this battle uses precisely the imperceptive by constraining the model of rationality in which a dominant criterion, efficiency, imposes itself without being discussed, configuring upstream the conditions of the reasonable.

In order to perceive the impact on freedom, we must first distinguish formal freedom from substantive freedom. It is not an abstract dichotomy. I borrow it from Amartya Sen, who qualified substantive freedom as the effective possibility an individual has of choosing various combinations of “modes of functioning.” This distinction seems necessary to me to demonstrate the insidious character of the imperceptive. Where many think they are acting freely, they are in fact blinded by the constraints of the imperceptive that push them to act in the name of a logic of efficiency.

In this context, formal freedom targets the possibility of acting while substantive freedom targets the capacity (real or effective according to Sen) to choose. It is a way of distinguishing capacity (aptitude) from possibility (effectiveness). The imperceptive tends to point to this gap between these two forms of freedoms. If each of us has the capacity to do, the imperceptive comes to restrict this capacity by making impossible (or unthinkable) such and such an option.

Today, we all have the formal freedom to use the technical devices made available to us. We could all continue to send mail by post. That is our formal freedom. Many, however, use digital means of communication. As a result, the substantive freedom to use postal mail is reduced to nothing in the sense that it becomes unthinkable. There is no prohibition on using postal mail, but the imperceptive makes this option unreasonable. Nobody has removed the possibility of using postal mail. Postmen still deliver mail, letterboxes are still there and post offices are still open. We have simply made the alternative outdated and obsolete, therefore absurd.

What the imperceptive neutralises is the relevance of the choice, not the choice itself. This nuance is important because it shows that the imperceptive destroys nothing, and this is why it is so persistent and vicious. It is all the more so as it leaves formal freedom intact. One can always say “you could have not done it that way” and this is also why the constraint remains imperceptible, since formal freedom remains.

The consequence of this neutralisation of the relevance of a choice is the normalisation of a behaviour with the risk that it becomes natural and therefore automatic. The normalisation is more difficult to see and to contest because it does not resemble a constraint.

6. Autonomy as a Solution

Before concluding, I must sketch a solution to remain faithful to my desire to bring “constructive” criticism and to participate, on my modest scale, in the reflection of others who would like to change things.

The imperceptive constrains us to look at the world and the framework in which we evolve with the same pair of distorting glasses that it itself creates. We must therefore truly extract ourselves from this framework and examine our milieu according to our own rules.

These own rules are those of autonomy. Autonomy is:

• “autos” which means the same, that which comes from oneself; and

• “nomos” which means the rules established by society, the laws.

If we want to fight the imperceptive, we must go beyond the rules it imposes on us. But as we have seen, the imperceptive influences our decisions in that it is a model of rationality that configures upstream the conditions of the reasonable.

It is therefore necessary to rise, beyond the imposed model of rationality, to define one’s own model with an authentic autonomy. That is self-evident, you will tell me, and you are perfectly right. There is, however, a trap into which one must not fall: that of the impact of the imperceptive on our freedoms. If you set your own rules, autonomously, but by picking from what the imperceptive offers you, this autonomy is only an illusion of freedom. You are in fact completely directed by the imperceptive, where each of your choices will be inspired by a logic of rationality oriented, almost always, by progress or efficiency. This dynamic in which we evolve almost daily without realising it must be radically challenged (I will share soon a concrete illustration of this situation).

It is therefore here that we should try to set our rules. Those that will orient the framework in which we are going to or want to evolve. Not all technology is to be thrown out. Without it, you would not have the possibility of reading these lines (assuming this is beneficial to anyone), advances in medicine or telecommunications would not be there. The idea is not to give you the (inevitably subjective) list of what technology has brought us, but to keep in mind this inevitable ambivalence and to accept its complexity (on the subject, see notably III. How to navigate?).

If the imperceptive structures the reasonable, then to resist autonomously is not only to disobey the framework, it is to step out of it in order to question it. To resist the imperceptive consists in making explicit the implicit criteria of the reasonable in order to be able to contest them.

To resist the imperceptive is to manage to criticise the conditions of validity imposed by the reasonable.

This is not an incitement to revolution. It is to take back control of the tool as Illich advocates in his “convivial” society. It is to impose one’s own rules on the tools, whatever they may be, rather than having them dictated to oneself.

The attainment of this autonomy requires that the criteria themselves be chosen, discussed, appropriated. It is not a question of rejecting the dominant criteria. We must relearn the capacity to question them, to hierarchise them and, where appropriate, to step away from them. Where the imperceptive naturalises a criterion of rationality to the point of making it invisible, autonomy consists in restoring its visibility in order to make once again possible the choice of one’s own reasons for acting.

7. Conclusion

The exercise of naming the imperceptive is not an intellectual coquetry.

In Tools for Conviviality, Illich writes:

We understand that another society is possible when we manage to express it clearly. We provoke its appearance when we discover the process by which the present society makes its decisions.

This approach, I believe, falls within the framework of linguistic determinism: the idea that language determines the amplitude of our thought and knowledge. This echoes what Wittgenstein wrote: “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” What we cannot formulate cannot be properly thought or discussed (I renew here my warning of my shortcomings on the subject of the philosophy of language and solicit the informed reader’s benevolence).

Since the imperceptive is imperceptible for the one who undergoes it, it is all the more important to express it, to trace its contours in order to appropriate it, examine it, analyse it and distance ourselves from it if needed. We must compel ourselves to broaden our field of vision, to force ourselves to understand how things work, how they assemble and how they disassemble in order to have a real understanding of them according to the idea of G. Vico (Verum ipsum factum). To know a thing precisely, one would have to be its author.

By naming the imperceptive, we create a possibility that it itself seeks to suppress: that of seeing the framework rather than reasoning within it.

Étienne Klein wrote in Philosophie Magazine (March 2026) that our language was built to say what is, to stabilise substance and identity. Language would therefore be ontological. The difficulty is that, even when something changes, our language presupposes the subsistence of the thing.

All this allows the imperceptive to subsist in this “grey” zone. Forging a word to designate this phenomenon is a way of forcing language to say what it tends to naturalise.

To consider that we master technology because we use it is to confuse formal freedom with substantive freedom. We are incapable of imagining what our tools do to us. Recognising it is not an admission of weakness. It is a starting point to evolve towards a convivial technical practice, a conscious and mastered use.