Latour refers to them as technical mediations between human and non human.

As Simondon describes the assemblages, they are neither chronological or geneaological. Rather they exhist independantly or re assert themselves into new ensembles without a direct geneological trait. An example would be the heat sink in traditional stove construction reappears years after the abanodement of traditional housin infavour of more industrialized models. More recently the reappearance of the sink within a new technical ensemble of passive solar energy.

For Latour, this is hardly genealogical, but none the less, part of a continuum but topologically separated. Hence latour refers to this condition of technical mediation as a folding – both geometrially, but most importantly temporally as he says:

Michel Serres: [the late model car] is a disparate aggregate of scientific and technical solutions dating from different periods. One can most certainly date it component by component.