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This paper looks at Ivan Illich’s method, André Leroi-Gourhan’s method, and the method of a PhD study in architecture. It asks if there is any common ground between them, and if it will be relevant, as we are currently focused on the digital context, which does not seem to be the specialist area of these two writers. Both of them, though, share a same intuition: looking into the “mirror of the past” as a way of understanding a discontinuity in the history of technology. They suggest the implementation of a rereading, or a conversion, of certain “wild” reading and writing practices, which have been put aside by the history of the “civilized.” And the mirror also appears to be a relevant method of understanding a difficult yet significant aspect of digital culture: the reformulation of the relationship between nature and artifice.