Notes on technology from a broader reality: toward technodiversity based on Yuk Hui

Abstract

The article examines the concept of technodiversity developed by Yuk Hui as a way to confront the consequences of implementing modern Western hegemonic technology, which has been imposed as the only path to human progress. At its core, it seeks to rethink technologies through a critique of monotechnology, conceived as a logic, structure, or device that presents itself as a universal and neutral instrument. Technodiversity involves considering not only the concept of culture but also cosmologies and cosmotechnics, as proposed by Hui, and it points to the ontological turn represented by the critique of modern technology. Following Hui’s call for cultures to reflect on the question of cosmotechnics, this approach argues the need the need to reappropriate modern technology by reorienting its framework of understanding toward a cosmotechnics constructed –according to the author— from different epistemes and epistemologies.

Ethnographic and philosophical sources are analyzed to show that technical practices, such as those of Chinese, Wayuu, or Mapuche cultures, respond to an epistemological and cosmological logic distinct from the Western model, emphasizing reciprocity and collective meaning. This discussion is approached through analytical notes, since throughout Latin America there are numerous ancestral communities with similar cosmologies, particularly in weaving as both a practice and a form of thought. The article concludes that it is necessary to acknowledge the existence of diverse technical rationalities and to rethink technoscientific hegemony from situated epistemologies.

To address these questions, the proposal is organized into five sections: the Introduction; Technology as a Cultural Form, which clarifies the meaning of technological culture as a system of representations, norms, and expressions characteristic of each collectivity—an essential element, since technology proves inseparable from our symbolic and cultural dimension; “The Only Technology”, which analyzes the roots, logic, and rationality of Western thought; Technodiversities, devoted to developing Yuk Hui’s concept of technodiversity and distinguishing between Western and Westernized countries and their respective ways of thinking in relation to the possibility of technodiversity; and finally, a reflection on how this distinction helps clarify the platforms from which to conceptualize technical diversity as an alternative to the hegemony of monotechnology.