We’ve found ourselves living in the age of artificial intelligence—a technological shift suspended somewhere between digital transformation and quantum computing, in a space where the intangible collides with the urgently immediate. Our world is full of mirrors and shortcuts. In this context, even processes, transitions, and the sense of continuity—the gerund itself—are under strain. It’s a sign, perhaps, of a deeper crisis of being.
Against this backdrop, the AI for Developing Countries Forum (AIFOD) took place last January at the United Nations’ Palais des Nations in Geneva. Some of us were invited to debate the challenges of rolling out artificial intelligence in the Southern Hemisphere—though, in keeping with historical irony, from the comfort of the North. I couldn’t attend. My plans to leave Venezuela were thwarted by a surreal coincidence: the impending return of President-elect Edmundo González. It’s a reminder that before we can even begin to philosophize about technology, airports need to be open, and institutions must be solid and autonomous.
Just a few days before the forum, I had a brief but enjoyable exchange with Lindsey DeWitt Prat, a UCLA researcher and director of Bold Insight. We quickly found common ground—having both attended EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) and given that we share similar lines of inquiry in our research.
Lindsey is fascinated by the way language and technology intertwine. If, as Heidegger once said, “language is the house of being,” then it makes perfect sense that the language we use to train large language models (LLMs) will shape the kind of intelligence we get in return. In this light, AIs aren’t just machines—they’re cultural reflections. And just as cultures don’t use or interpret a tool the same way, they won’t engage with the same AI in the same way either. Culture meets us at both the inputs and outputs of the technological process.
DeWitt grounds this idea in her work across Africa, a region rich in languages and cultural contexts. “By focusing on Africa,” she says, “a continent whose knowledge and languages have been marginalized for far too long, we’re starting to build a more collaborative vision—and doing the essential work of decolonizing LLMs.”
I’ve approached the topic from a similar angle, focusing on how culture and technology interact in the Hispanic American industrial world. Spanish may be our common language, but that very sameness often masks deeper cultural differences. Interestingly, the closed nature of industrial spaces and their internal standardization acts like a sieve—filtering what’s cultural from what’s purely technical or economic.
The logic seems simple: if a technology solves an urgent problem and the money is there to pay for it, why wouldn’t it be adopted? And yet, time and again, we see hesitation—sometimes even flat-out refusal.
More often than not, what stalls a new technology isn’t its price tag or its performance—it’s something deeper. Culture. Habits. Ways of doing things that don’t show up in data sheets or pitch decks. Look closely and you’ll see it: engineers who prefer the familiar over the new, technicians who refuse to log their work on an app because paper just feels more trustworthy, or miners who cling to mercury-based methods, not out of ignorance, but out of routine, mistrust, or survival. These choices might seem irrational on the surface, but they carry weight—human, environmental, and economic. And they tell us something critical: innovation doesn’t succeed by being new alone. It has to fit.
These delays often stem from primarily cultural or idiosyncratic sources. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find contradictions with real-world consequences—social, environmental, and economic.
Ahead of the AIFOD forum, one idea stood out: before we can ask which AI tools might help the Global South, we need to ask something more basic. Are we building companies—or even institutions—that understand how local cultures shape whether new technologies are embraced, ignored, or rejected?
Innovation as Technological Westernization
In most companies, culture is treated like fog—acknowledged, but too vague to factor into serious planning. Too hard to quantify, it slips through sales plans and marketing charts. At best, you’ll find some business analysts or UX researchers trying to make sense of it, but not in a long-term way that can yield the course-altering results an anthropological analysis has the potential to. To really understand how culture shapes technology, we need anthropologists. Especially the kind who know their way around a factory floor or a boardroom, business anthropologists.
At some point, the question catches up with us: why are we working so hard to make people adopt new technologies? Why is it such an uphill battle in some regions? What exactly are we pushing against—and why does it push back so hard?
We talk about innovation like it’s always a good thing. But even if it is—why copy someone else’s version of it? Every device, every system, comes with its own logic. Why should we innovate in the style of other countries? Why should we uncritically assimilate foreign technologies, which essentially represent alien ways of doing and thinking?
The Global Innovation Index ranks Brazil, Chile, and Mexico at the top in Latin America. But you have to wonder—are we really measuring innovation? Or just how closely these countries resemble the West when it comes to tech, institutions, and ways of thinking?
Look under the hood of that innovation index and you’ll find 21 metrics—things like academic output, business climate, and intangible assets. But scratch a little deeper, and it’s clear: these are all built on a single model of progress, one born in 19th-century Europe and shaped by the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution didn’t just happen—it was built on top of something. Germany, England, France… they already had the structures: armies, bureaucracies, ideologies, corporate states. The technology came later. First, they thought a certain way. Then, they built accordingly.
Even before the first steam engine fired up, England and Germany were chasing speed, precision, and numbers. Those weren’t just preferences—they were philosophies. And they’re still with us, in today’s technocrats and the systems they build. You hear it in the languages too: English for business, German for accuracy. These aren’t coincidences—they’re clues. It’s the kind of links between language and technology that my friend, Dr. DeWitt, is interested in.
Toward a Review of our Cosmotechnics
Rethinking ourselves through our technical imagination isn’t new. Hispanic American philosophers, archaeologists, anthropologists, artists and thinkers have been doing it for decades. What’s new is we’re entangled in a knot of converging forces that have thrust the issue back into the spotlight—this time, with greater urgency and complexity than ever before. A shift toward multipolarity, a wave of critical theory coming back around, and a need to rethink the very idea of technology—not as a tool, but as a worldview.
Multiple forces are colliding right now. There’s the rise of a multipolar world—what philosopher Alexander Dugin once imagined as seven regional power blocs. Then there’s the unexpected return of Critical Theory, looping back like a boomerang, and with it, a growing urge to rethink the very history of technology. Where did our tools come from, and who gets to tell the story?
Here’s the irony: Critical Theory, in trying to dismantle dominant systems, ends up giving each society the tools to rewrite the script. And sometimes that means rejecting Critical Theory itself. Revisionism turns back on its own origin.
Take the case of Aymara women in Bolivia, who’ve managed to weave nitinol wire into a life-saving heart device. It’s a powerful innovation—but one that wouldn’t survive strict ideological filters. After all, the weavers are Indigenous women, and the business is run by European men. What do we do with a story that doesn’t fit our categories?
The project went on to win the Innovators of the Americas award—granted by the Development Bank of Latin America. And yet, Bolivia still ranks near the bottom of the global innovation index.
Techno-anthropologists and philosophers are paying attention to something they call telluric technodiversity—the grounded, culturally rooted ways people create and use tools, even in the face of global market forces. It’s not just about resisting—it’s about remembering and to uphold that diversity amid global homogenization.
A tool isn’t just a thing—it’s a memory repository. Woven into every invention is a web of values, stories, and relationships. The act of making always carries meaning. And those meanings deserve to be seen, named, and protected, just like the objects themselves.
Think back to 18th-century southern Europe, engineers weren’t just laying tracks—they were exchanging ideas, building railways and relationships at the same time. From those collaborations, something subtle but real emerged: a shared technical culture. You might even call it, just to make the point, the Franco-Spanish way of building railways and tracks.
We’re seeing it everywhere. From the 2022 anthology Thinking on Technology in Mexico, to the 2024 Conference on the History of Technology in Maastricht, to the upcoming Fifth Ibero-American Congress of Philosophy of Science in Santo Domingo—these are all signs of something bubbling up. A collective interest in techniques—not just technology, but plural ways of making and thinking are on the rise. It’s the political spirit behind Yuk Hui’s invitation to fragment the future.
The Technical Dimension of Sovereignty
Technology doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. For some, it’s speed and efficiency. For others, it’s a form of control—or maybe it’s a kind of cultural expression. In one place, it might signal progress. In another, the loss of a way of life, skills or cultural expression.
Globalization imposes homogenization, but people push back in quiet ways. We rarely adopt foreign technologies wholesale—we take what we need, make it ours, and often twist the meaning along the way. That’s the telluric power of culture. An electric pencil sharpener might end up as a paperweight, if that’s what the moment calls for. And no algorithm can predict that.
Just because China builds the most machine tools or the U.S. churns out the most startups doesn’t mean Latin America should do the same. What we need isn’t imitation—it’s liberation. We need to break from the idea that progress only moves in one direction, toward a single shared future. There are many ways to build, many futures worth remembering. Cosmotechnics aren’t just technical—they’re cultural memory.
For an effort like this to work, technical workers need more than skills—they need vision. They must be given the opportunities to think beyond the task at hand and ask deeper questions about the systems they’re part of. And from the industrial sector to academia, we need alliances that connect science, technology, and society—not just in theory, but in action, to engage in dialogue with workers, recognizing them as more than hyper-specialized employees.
Governments and institutions need to rethink how they measure and compare. The usual metrics often miss the mark, especially when applied across vastly different realities. But let’s be clear—this is about acknowledging complex realities within nationalities. Every country hosts many cultures that share spaces and citizens whose identities intersect and organically evolve. What we need is a new kind of protectionism—one rooted in sovereignty and knowledge, not exclusion.
Brazil gives us a compelling case. It’s pushing back against the technofeudal lords of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, refusing to hand over the keys. At the same time, it’s planning for the future—building nuclear plants to power AI and blockchain systems. And it hasn’t forgotten homegrown innovation either: its research in mathematics, both theoretical and applied, continues to thrive.
Here we see it clearly: sovereignty and industry are tied at the root. Argentine professor Cecilia Rikap, now at University College London, has laid this out with others in a roadmap for reclaiming Latin America’s digital autonomy. The stories we’ve explored so far aren’t isolated—they’re pieces of a broader pattern.
There’s no one “right” way to do things. That kind of technical univocity—one way, one path, one future—is inherently totalitarian. What we actually find is a shared truth behind the plurality: a pluriverse of cosmotechnics. Patterns that echo across cultures.
Venezuelan meta-technique lines up, in strange harmony, with Chilean autopoiesis and French individuation, as we learn through the lens of morphogenesis. You can feel the logic of the abacus ripple through the Andean quipu. And in myth, Prometheus steals fire for the Greeks. The tlacuache does the same for the Mazatecs—dragging it with his tail. Different stories, same gesture. A shared spark of invention.
If we’re going to question what innovation and progress really mean, then we have to question what we mean by “underdevelopment” too. It’s very likely that what we’re calling underdeveloped is simply complex—and reflects nuances we’ve yet to fully understand. These are societies with many layers—different ways of seeing, speaking, believing. Materialist and mystical. Ethnic and ideological. Practical and poetic. Put ten like-minded people in a room, and order tends to follow. Add diversity, and things get messier—and also more interesting.
For our Balkanized Hispanidad, I take up Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla’s call: to see ourselves as new men. Not empty. Not rootless. Not “vertical barbarians” fallen from nowhere —disconnected from our cultural soil and history, as Mayz Vallenilla once described—, but creators. Like painters brushing colour onto a canvas that’s already faintly sketched. Like builders shaping a home on foundations already laid.
That’s our strength as Americans. Our sovereignty—especially in how we build and think—comes from this: we are future. In our potential. In our becoming. And that’s exactly why we can’t let fear—or outside force—smother what’s just beginning to grow. Our ideas, our tools, our way of seeing the world—they’re still forming. And they deserve the space to breathe.
