For the last stop of my current travels, I’m at the undisputed conference highlight of the academic year – the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City, which starts with a keynote by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil. She starts with the saying that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, a saying which is perhaps also applicable to our current sociotechnical situation – to the mixture of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. This is a mixture which cannot be separated any more; it is also a series of systems that beget each other: patriarchy creates colonialism, and colonialism provides the funds and labour that underpins capitalism.
This is the reality in which technologies develop. And it also means that is impossible to fight one of these without also fighting the others. Fighting only patriarchy makes you Hillary Clinton; fighting only colonialism makes you Che Guevara. The three systems are in fact one and the same – and in combination they have also created the current climate emergency, an emergency which now overlays everything else. Is the capitalist extractivism from colonial lands which is primarily responsible for the climate crisis.
This is of course also a substantial social justice problem: 10% of the world’s population generate about half of all CO2 emissions; the poorest 50% produce only 10% of the emissions. And indeed only 100 companies generate some 71% of the emissions that cause climate change. This does not simply mean that technology is to blame, but it means that we must think about how we use technology, and indeed how we can use technology outside of capitalist frameworks.
To do so we can draw on other technological traditions – and in particular, on the traditions of Indigenous peoples. But there is no simple binary between Indigenous and western peoples: neither are monolithic cultures, and every distinct and individual culture has its own specific relationships to the natural world as well as to digital environments. In Mixe culture, there is a concept of Indigenous knowledge, but the category of Indigenous is complicated here – Mixe Indigenous knowledge is different from Sámi Indigenous knowledge is different from Ainu Indigenous knowledge, and so on.
‘Indigenous’ is therefore also a political concept, which emerged over the past several centuries; its emergence is connected to the emergence of nation states, and their complicated intersections with cultural distinctions. There are some 200 countries around the world, but over 7,000 distinct cultural groups. Of these, Indigenous peoples are stateless nations that have suffered colonialism, and it is possible to stop being Indigenous while still retaining one’s cultural identity. In order to avoid being pigeonholed as ‘Indigenous’, perhaps it is critical to emphasise that cultural identity more strongly again.
This also means emphasising the technological traditions of the world again, of which western technological traditions are only a small subset. These have long been openly discriminated against – but just as dangerous is the validation of such traditions by the western world, as it imposes western categories (like ‘science’ or ‘philosophy’ or ‘feminism’) on such traditions, and may also become a precursor to western exploitation and extractivism.
The scientific system of peer review, for instance, is a process of validating knowledge through its adherence to western scientific norms and categories, yet this is not the way that science is validated in Indigenous cultures. Similarly, the Indigenous process of growing corn alongside other useful plants as a milpa is different from monocultural western cornfield agriculture, where no other plant species are allowed, and valuable nutrients are therefore lost.
Such cultural knowledge is preserved through ritual; the appropriate metaphor here is a spring of water as a rich, collective source of information. Yet western knowledge traditions emphasise the idea of individual invention, ignoring prior intellectual history and in the process also privatising knowledge rather than keeping it in the commons. The spring of knowledge is fenced off (and western education systems, including universities, do this too). Springs provide water, of course, and water is not a material that is created – yet even water has been privatised, and clean air is not far behind.
Women have suffered especially badly under such systems; they have often been systematically excluded from western knowledge and technology systems, yet their knowledge has been usurped by the capitalism system. Further, colonialism has exploited colonial lands for its own technological development, without benefits to the colonised.
Capitalism is often seen as necessary for technological development; some see them as indivisible. Yet capitalism is actually a brake on technological advancement: it subordinates technological development to the interests of the market, which is not necessarily interested in creating cheaper, better, more powerful technologies unless there is a payoff.
Indeed, capitalism constantly separates humanity from the natural world, and turns even nature itself into a commodity, while othering uncommodified nature as wild and dangerous. When the Americas were invaded, there was a live debate about whether their Indigenous people should be classified as full humans, or understood as part of the fauna; this lower status justified their colonisation and exploitation.
An alternative model requires a focus on balance in a finite world, yet current approaches are illogical and unreasonable. Such scenarios imagine AI and other future technologies as magical solutions to our current problems; instead, we need to address the challenges that currently face us – and here we come back to ownership. Who owns vaccines, for instance: the scientists, or the people on whom they were first tested? Who owns new technologies: Silicon Valley, or the people on whose activities they were trained?
Overall, then, in a world where nature and humanity must no longer be separated, it is necessary to question the definitions of progress and development. We must return to a commons-based understanding of knowledge, and commons-based technologies based on this knowledge. These will then also become technologies of diversity.
What would happen to our technological traditions without such systems of oppression? What might milpa-based systems look like? We might be able to learn from the Indigenous, collective approach of tequio, which represents a philosophy of reciprocity and exists in similar forms in other Indigenous cultures around the world. This requires a collective reciprocity amongst families, acknowledging and building on what is already there, and collectivising the innovations that build on such bases.
Open source software projects already show that we can build technologies through constant reciprocity – such projects, then, produce tequiology.
