The perspective adopted by this course is not to argue the existence of a totalitarianism of gadgets but rather to try to understand our media relations. We wish to explore the new forms of sensibility that emerge from there without neglecting the risks they involve. Trying to understand the current relationship between technique and technology involves developing a new idea of technique, in which our mode of existence includes technical systems and attempts to understand them. It also involves understanding the implications of the dramatic transformations of technology's shift towards the digital (numerical) that Vilém Flusser advocated, thus laying the foundations of contemporary media theories. 

Therefore, the starting point for the reflection will be an approach to the understanding of technique, taking as an initial reference the theses of Martin Heidegger, José Ortega y Gasset and Günther Anders. After a presentation of the terms of the problems, we will carry out a partial reconstruction of the philosophical controversy about the modes of existence of technical objects (Kittler, Stiegler, Stengers and Hui) and finally propose a turning point in the traditional understanding of technique, altering the paradigm of opposition for one of relation (Flusser and Simondon) that provides us with tools for thinking about our present, and using as a basis the following questions: How then can one set up a dialogic potential with these techniques that have emerged as unidirectional? How can one reactivate the productive force of that imagination that seems to have been frozen (Steyeri, 2012)? 

The course will be divided into three sessions:

Session One: The Age of Technology
- The question about technique (M. Heidegger and J. Ortega y Gasset)
- The obsolescence of man (G. Anders)
- Is there a world to come? (E. Viveiros de Castro and D. Danowski)

Session Two: Technicity as a Problem
- The age of gadgets (W. Benjamin and F. Kittler)
- The sin of Epimetheus (B. Stiegler)
- The mode of existence of technical objects (S. Simondon and V. Flusser)

Session Three: For a Negative Theory of Media
- Digital technologies and process automation (I. Stengers and Y. Hui)
- Media Ecologies (M. McLuhan, V. Flusser and F. Kittler)
- For a negative theory of media (D. Mersch)