False Prophets and "Gods Among Us": Operational Ontogenesis of Artificial Immanence

This article closes a five-part inquiry into the ontological status of artificial objects. Parts 1–2 reconstructed how Western metaphysics kept artefacts in a secondary, derivative mode of being from antiquity to the industrial age; Part 3 showed how modern logic and mechanism-level analysis re-center operation and organization; Part 4 traced a genealogy from Kapp and Leroi-Gourhan to Simondon to ground an ontology of technical beings without importing life or mind as prior norms. Here, I assess Science and Technology Studies (STS) programs that promised to “open the black box.” I argue that in canonical works by Latour, Callon, and Akrich, technical objects remain signs or support within agonistic fields rather than analyzed for their own mode of functioning. Using three re-readings—fuel cells in the 1960s–70s, electromechanical electricity meters and grids, and the Aramis project—I show how ignoring levels of individuation, degrees of concretization, and associated milieus leads to over-attribution of human strategic causality, misrepresentations and contradictive uses of machine normativity (or lack thereof). I then propose an operational heuristic for STS: analyze technical objects at element, individual, ensemble, and network levels; score their abstractness vs. concretization; specify internal norms as ranges, tolerances, and failure modes; and model associated milieus and couplings. The contribution is a method to move STS beyond actorhood to ontological adequacy for a world of complex machines and so called “Artificial Intelligence”.