While autonomous and humanlike technologies enter our lives, we see behavior reminiscent of what was called animistic behavior at the beginning of the twentieth century (“Old Animism”). Humans talk to artefacts, become emotionally attached to them and seem to be blinded, manipulated and replaced by their own doubles. Confusion about what it means to be human vis a vis our technological creations is a result. How to keep a critical distance to these artefacts? How to control our relationship to them? This contribution takes a look at anthropological theories of so called “New Animism” (e.g., “Relational Epistemology”, “Perspectival Multinaturalism”). Here anthropologists reinterpret behavior of indigenous people: instead of defining animism to be an irrational and naïve belief systems, they describe it to be a relational mindset based on practical techniques. These techniques negotiate similarities and differences as a means of generating knowledge or of defining power relations between species. Judith Dörrenbächer traces out four animistic techniques (to dividuate, to subjectify, to imitate, to joke) and suggests to transfer them to technology design. Thus, following “New Animism” in anthropology, techno-animism is not a state of unconscious projection. Contrarily, it could become a critical tool for designers to negotiate fuzzy human-technology relations.