I began to think of this displacement as a kind of digital gentrification: increased convenience and apparent abundance coinciding with the disappearance of smaller, situated infrastructures of expertise and exchange. Jessa Lingel’s work on the gentrification of the internet gave this observation a broader context. Lingel describes a history of commercialisation and consolidation in which smaller and messier forms of digital culture are increasingly displaced by cleaner and more convenient platforms. She describes this process across culture, industry and infrastructure, and importantly argues that gentrification is not simply a consequence of individual choices, but of a “more structural set of rules.” Lingel is writing about transformations within digital culture rather than the disappearance of specialised electronics shops. I therefore do not use her argument to explain what I encountered. Instead, her framework helped me recognise a broader structure within an observation that had already emerged through making: convenience does not simply increase access; it can reorganise the infrastructures through which access takes place. What began as a difficulty sourcing components therefore changed how I understood the technological object itself. The component in my hand could not be separated from the systems through which it became available, just as learning how to use it could not be separated from the environments through which technological knowledge circulates. Technology appeared less as an object than as an organisation of tools, materials, knowledge, rules, infrastructures and relationships. This has a consequence for embodiment. If technology is not simply an object encountered but an organisation already in place, then our relationship with it does not necessarily begin at the moment a tool is picked up. The conditions of that relationship—what can be sensed, what is permitted, what remains unavailable—may already have been determined elsewhere, by systems the body never directly touches. But persistence alone does not make something environmental. The lettering guide offers a simple distinction. It can remain beside me throughout an entire working session without substantially changing what my body can do. Its presence is persistent, but the relationship is not. When I place my pen against its edge, this changes. The guide’s constraint enters the movement of my hand: I begin to perceive and act through it. The relationship becomes embodied.

Yet it still remains a tool. I can lift the pen away.

Technology started to look less like an object and more like an organisation of tools, materials, knowledge, rules, infrastructures and relationships. And that changed the question of where my relationship with technology begins.

Perhaps it does not begin when I touch the object. Perhaps some of the conditions of that encounter have already been decided somewhere else: what can be sensed, what I am allowed to do, what information is available to me, what knowledge I need in order to participate. The lettering guide offers a much simpler situation. It can sit beside me for an entire day and do nothing to my hand. When I place my pen against its edge, the relationship begins to change my movement. I follow it. I resist it. I learn its constraint. It becomes embodied in the gesture. And then I can do something wonderfully uncomplicated. I can lift the pen away. The relationship ends. This small gesture became important to me because it distinguishes embodiment from something else. The lettering guide can become part of how my body acts without becoming a standing condition of bodily experience. I can enter the relationship and withdraw from it.

A tool can be embodied without becoming environmental.