Ethics Unknown: Progress, Cosmotechnics, and the Pharmakon

This is an experiment of sorts. The rainy days here in Vietnam have been perfect for diving into books, and the ones I’ve read have helped me lay down some conceptual roots in ideas I’ve been circling around for years. Along the way, I experimented with GPT to untangle certain concepts and used NotebookLM to weave and explore knowledge. Weaving ideas, noticing patterns, and catching subtle connections has been an exhilarating process, intellectually and creatively. It’s led me down some fascinating rabbit holes—some foundational, others simply compelling.

With the help of technology, I used prompts to generate the outline for this article. In this article I critique dominant technological narratives while advocating for pluralism in technology and progress. By examining frameworks such as Bernard Stiegler’s pharmakon, Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics, and perspectives from Indigenous epistemologies and feminist technoscience, it seeks to provide culturally diverse and ecologically attuned alternatives to the universalizing paradigm. It is an effort to tune in to new contexts and complexities involving a grounding of technology within ethical, relational, and contextual perspectives.

TL;DR

Technology as a Double-Edged Sword: Bernard Stiegler’s concept of the pharmakon illustrates technology’s capacity to heal or harm, depending on its cultural and ethical context.

Plurality Over Universality: Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics critiques the imposition of efficiency values, emphasizing culturally specific and ecologically harmonious practices.

Weaving with Technology

In an era of technological acceleration, humanity finds itself at a crossroads in its relationship with technology. The prevailing narratives often champion efficiency and control, with little consideration for the deeper, pluralistic frameworks that could guide how we could ethically and sustainably develop technology. The concept of the pharmakon, cosmotechnics, and feminist and Indigenous approaches to technology offer critical tools for rethinking progress in ways that embrace the complexities of cultural and ecological contexts.

Machines, once made, make humans. The tools we create do not simply shape what we do—they shape who we are. Technologies become threads woven into the broader tapestry of life, forming patterns that influence how we think, relate, and create. In this weaving, technologies amplify our ability to observe, share, and imagine, yet they also risk tightening patterns of control, commodification, and surveillance. We are relational beings, continually adapting to and co-evolving with the tools we use. In this process, our ability to design, adapt, and refine technologies becomes central to imagining ways of being more attuned to each other and to the world we inhabit. Being together amidst machines.

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The ethical challenge is whether it is possible to transform such systems from within or if entirely new forms of governance and accountability are required.

Technocratic visions often prioritize efficiency, optimization, and control, erasing alternative ways of knowing and relating to the world. Their supposed neutrality obscures deeply political assumptions about agency, value, and governance. Against this backdrop, the pharmakon invites us to view technology as an ambivalent force—capable of healing or harming, depending on how it is shaped and used. By approaching design critically, we can emphasize stewardship over exploitation, imagining technologies that reinforce collaboration and plurality rather than hierarchy and extraction.

Yet, collaborating with extractive technologies—those built on a legacy of exploitation and centralization—poses significant risks. Technologies that emerge from systems of extraction often reproduce patterns of control, commodification, and hierarchy. Engaging with such systems without interrogating their origins risks perpetuating these structures, even when intentions are democratic or participatory. This tension reveals the need not just to redesign tools but to reconsider the frameworks that shape them, foregrounding values like reciprocity, relationality, and care.

Working within extractive systems also raises ethical dilemmas, particularly when those systems knowingly exploit or marginalize others to sustain themselves. The metaphor of 'controlled burning'—intended as a practice of renewal in ecological systems—becomes fraught when applied to human systems, where it can signify sacrificial logics that benefit some at the expense of others. The ethical challenge, then, is not only to critique these systems but also to ask whether it is possible to transform them from within, or whether entirely new forms of governance, relationality, and accountability are required.

This critique extends to the broader technocratic vision that dominates much of contemporary technological discourse. By prioritizing efficiency, optimization, and control, technocratic systems often erase alternative ways of knowing and relating to the world. Their supposed neutrality obscures deeply political assumptions about agency, value, governance, and extraction. Against this backdrop, the pharmakon invites us to see technology as an ambivalent force—capable of healing or harming, depending on how it is shaped and used. By approaching design and deployment critically, we can emphasize stewardship over exploitation, imagining technologies that reinforce collaboration and plurality and omni-wins rather than hierarchy and extraction, encourage agency and accountability over control.

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Plurality Over Universality: The Cosmotechnical Critique

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Philosopher Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics expands this ethical inquiry by emphasizing the cultural specificity of technological practices. Co-creation, as described in Embracing the Messy Complexities of Co-Creation by Louise Phillips, complements this perspective by highlighting the relational and participatory nature of meaningful innovation. It challenges linear and hierarchical paradigms, emphasizing that technological development thrives when it emerges from inclusive and context-sensitive processes. \

For instance, Indigenous regenerative agriculture offers a compelling counterpoint to industrial farming. Imposing this idea is oppressive and neocollonial when combined with something like monetising clean air and not engaging people in the process of making these designs and decisions. This way of approaching problems is rooted in the logic of conceit. Practices like polyculture planting and controlled burning reflect ecological intelligence honed over centuries, aligning human activity with natural systems. Similarly, Daoist and Confucian traditions conceptualize the cosmos as a harmonious whole, shaping technological development toward balance rather than extractive or hierarchical approaches.  \

Co-creation reinforces the importance of embracing complexity, relationality, and plurality in technological systems. It underscores that technologies can emerge from and reinforce values of coexistence rather than extraction and exploitation. Together, these approaches reframe progress as culturally specific and ecologically attuned, offering a counterpoint to technocratic narratives that homogenize diverse experiences. it is crucial to recognize the diversity within these traditions and avoid idealization. Each approach operates within its own constraints and challenges, but together they demonstrate the potential for technologies to reinforce coexistence and relationality. \

These examples highlight how technologies can emerge from and reinforce values of coexistence and relationality rather than extraction and exploitation. Cosmotechnics reframes progress as culturally specific and ecologically attuned, offering a counterpoint to technocratic narratives that homogenize diverse experiences. \

Engaging with Opposing Views

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While dominant paradigms rooted in industrialization and modernity prioritize efficiency and control, these values have undeniably driven advancements in global health, infrastructure, and scientific discovery. For instance, standardized vaccination programs and industrial-scale food production have improved life expectancy and reduced hunger worldwide. However, these achievements often come at a cost, including ecological degradation and cultural erasure. \

The dynamics that sustain entire industries often reflect a troubling interplay between creation and destruction. Companies may create problems through practices of extraction or commodification, only to profit from offering solutions to the crises they have themselves exacerbated. This circular dependency locks industries—and by extension, societies—into cycles of damage and repair. For example, Bayer's merger with Monsanto highlights this entanglement. Bayer, a pharmaceutical giant, sells treatments for illnesses linked to agricultural chemicals produced by Monsanto. This interdependence raises ethical questions about industries that simultaneously generate harm and profit from its mitigation. These dynamics mirror broader societal patterns where technological fixes are framed as progress, masking deeper structural issues. \

Such examples call into question the role of democracy and participatory governance in regulating these cycles. Pursuing two strategies at once—maintaining systems of extraction while proposing solutions—reveals the fragility of democratic oversight. It demands a reconsideration of power, responsibility, and accountability. Can industries designed around extraction and control be reformed from within, or must entirely new forms of organization emerge? And how can democratic processes hold such systems accountable without reinforcing the very cycles they seek to escape? \

Environmental Economics and Ecological Economics.

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For example, I just saw a video on Instagram in which was explaining how Bayer and Monsanto in the US have merged. Bayer is a German chemical company that produces (?) pharmaceuticals to treat diseases that the chemicals that Monsanto produce for the agricultural food system.  \

The critique of universality does not dismiss the benefits of efficiency but calls for a more integrative approach. By combining the strengths of methodologies emerging from industrial and modernist traditions with the relational and contextual intelligence of cosmotechnics, we can envision systems that are both effective and equitable. This balanced perspective honors the pluralism of the pluriverse while addressing the urgent challenges of the modern world. \

Transitioning Beyond Extractive Systems: Toward Relational Economies

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Abandoning capitalistic systems entirely would demand more than critiques or reforms. It would require the construction of entirely new frameworks of governance, value creation, and exchange—ones rooted in relationality, reciprocity, and ecological harmony rather than competition, accumulation, and efficiency. \

Rethinking Value and Ownership

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To move beyond extractive economies, we need models of shared ownership and distributed governance. Commons-based peer production, cooperative enterprises, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) present alternatives to hierarchical structures, emphasizing collaboration and accountability. Such systems reject value extraction in favor of value circulation, aligning economic processes with ecological and communal care. \

Decentralized Governance and Decision-Making

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Rethinking governance demands structures that are not simply participatory but fundamentally redistributive. Distributed networks can decentralize decision-making, enabling collective stewardship rather than centralized control. Tools like blockchain may democratize governance, but they too require careful ethical design to avoid replicating existing patterns of extraction. \

Relational Economics and Stewardship

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Instead of measuring progress through growth, relational economics focuses on cycles of regeneration and repair. Technologies developed under this paradigm emphasize mutual care, adaptability, and resilience over optimization and dominance. These systems view economy and ecology not as competing forces but as intertwined processes requiring ongoing negotiation. \

Cultural and Philosophical Shifts

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Escaping capitalistic systems necessitates more than technical change—it requires a shift in worldview. Pluralistic and process-based ethics emphasize complexity and humility, rejecting binaries of efficiency versus inefficiency, success versus failure. Technologies become not fixed tools but flexible companions, embedded within the larger weave of cultural and ecological relationships. \

Redefining ‘Innovation’ Beyond Efficiency

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The mantra of "evolution before efficiency" underscores the tension between adaptability and optimization. True co-creation resists the lure of efficiency when it sacrifices relational depth or reinforces extraction. Instead, it seeks processes that are open, collaborative, and co-produced—designs that value participation over control. \

Moving Forward

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Building post-capitalist systems means experimenting with hybrid forms—blending local economies with networked technologies to create resilient, decentralized systems. These experiments may not immediately displace dominant models but can act as seeds for broader transformation, pointing toward economies grounded in plurality, stewardship, and relational ethics. \

Conclusion

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The futures we build with technology hinge on our ability to navigate its dual nature and cultural implications. Stiegler’s pharmakon reminds us that technology is never neutral; it can either amplify human flourishing or exacerbate systemic harm, depending on how it is guided. Hui’s cosmotechnics calls for a rejection of universalizing technological values in favor of pluralistic, context-sensitive approaches that align with diverse cosmologies and ecological imperatives.

Together, these frameworks provide a roadmap for reimagining progress as a dynamic interplay of mastery, humility, and care. By integrating the relational intelligence of cosmotechnics and the ethical vigilance of the pharmakon, we can create a future where technology bridges cultural and ecological divides rather than deepening them.