Every tool humans have ever made extended their reach into the world — and changed the world in return.
Sometime between 400,000 and 1 million years ago, a human ancestor learned to control fire. The discovery transformed the relationship between the human species and the world it inhabited — warmth, cooked food, light in the dark, the ability to reshape materials. From that moment, technology became constitutive of what it means to be human.
Henri Bergson called this homo faber: the human as maker. Where science had defined the human as homo sapiens — the knowing animal — Bergson argued that what actually distinguishes us from other animals is the capacity to fabricate, to make tools that make other tools. Hannah Arendt, developing the concept in The Human Condition, described homo faber as the builder of the human world — the durable artifice of objects, institutions, and buildings that persists across generations and makes civilization possible. We are inescapably technological creatures. Technology is one of the primary ways in which we are human.
This deserves emphasis before anything else is said. The farmer who uses a tractor, GPS precision agriculture, and satellite weather data is practicing technology. The medieval monk who built a mill, bred better crops, and developed wine-making techniques was using and creating technology. The hunter who shaped a flint blade was producing technology. The tendency to identify technology exclusively with screens and servers is the byproduct of a particular historical moment in which one form of making has grown so dominant that it has obscured the much longer and more varied history of human fabrication.
Technology’s dual character
Every tool humanity has ever made carries within it a double possibility. Fire warms and destroys. The printing press liberated knowledge and enabled propaganda. The internal combustion engine connected continents and heated the atmosphere. This is the permanent condition of homo faber — the maker whose creations always exceed his intentions, always act on the world in ways he did not fully anticipate, always require him to ask not only what he can make but what he should.
The philosopher Albert Borgmann identified this as the central tension of modern technological life. Technology promises to deliver the goods — warmth, food, connection, information — while progressively concealing and eliminating the practices through which those goods were formerly produced and experienced. The fireplace does not just replace the campfire; it replaces the gathering around it, the tending of it, the skill of maintaining it, even the community it generated. Every gain in convenience carries within it a potential loss of engagement — with the world, with other people, with the practices that gave ordinary life its texture and meaning.
As Pope Leo XIV argued in Magnifica Humanitas, “technology must remain ordered to the integral good of the human person and of creation.” The making capacity of homo faber is a genuine expression of human dignity. And it carries within it, always, the question of whether what is being made serves the living world or extracts from it.
Two kinds of making
The contemporary collision between farmers and data center developers in the American Midwest is a particularly clear illustration of Borgmann’s tension. The farmers are not refusing technology — they use tractors, GPS systems, and precision agriculture software. What they are insisting on is a distinction between forms of technology that remain in relationship with the living world — that take from it and return to it, that serve communities across generations — and forms that extract without reciprocity, consuming water, energy, and land to produce nothing that grows. Data center projects have taken water without notifying local officials, left dry wells, and reduced cows’ milk production through noise pollution. This is homo faber operating without the counterweight that every durable civilization has had to develop: the recognition that making and tending belong together.
As Francis wrote in Laudato Si', “The earth was here before us and it has been given to us.” What is given carries obligations. The question fire asked at the beginning of human technology has not changed: what do we make, what does it cost the world, and who tends what remains? Homo faber at his best has always answered it with both hands — one that builds, and one that keeps.
