Silicon Tanks: Yuk Hui Argues for Homelessness as an Antidote to Fascism
How a Hong Kong-born philosopher of technology proposed abandoning all origins in favour of planetary thinking
How Should We Reorganise Humanity?
Yuk Hui is a computer engineer, founding director of the Institute for Philosophy and Technology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a student of Bernard Stiegler. In his work, he proposes one of the decolonial approaches to understanding the tasks of philosophy and technology in the context of modern wars, the shifting “center of power” towards the US and China, the lingering sense of the “end of Europe,” the rise of right-wing sentiments, and various forms of nationalism.
In 2016, while preparing his book The Question Concerning Technology in China for publication—a work criticising the universalisation of technology by Western philosophy, particularly by Martin Heidegger—Hui’s editor posed a clarifying question. He asked the author whether he might be stepping into the same trap as the German thinker, risking a speculative fallacy by attempting to reconstruct a distinct Chinese technological thought. In crude terms, isn’t there a danger, embedded within the “return to origins” perspective, of sliding into fascism and nationalism?
To understand that no, this danger is not inherent—meaning it was never intended—one must grasp the essence of “planetary thinking.” Let’s allow the author to explain it himself.
“To think the planetary means first: to think beyond the configuration of modern nation-states, which have been unable to escape the vicious cycle of economic and military competition; second, to formulate a language of coexistence that allows different peoples and species to live on the same planet; and third, to develop a new framework capable of leading us beyond the question of territory, addressing the current ecological crisis, and reversing the accelerating entropic process of the Anthropocene,” Hui wrote in his later book Machine and Sovereignty: Toward Planetary Thinking.
There, he also explains that technology confined within nationalist discourse expresses itself in the form of war:
“It is obvious that technology determines economic development and military expansion. The cosmopolitics of cosmotechnics offers a way to reflect on different technological programs without being limited by the dominant mode of technological thinking shaped in the 19th century. However, if we continue to view the world from the perspective of nation-states, the possibility of technodiversity can be forgotten, because, as intuition suggests, a nation-state can only maintain its sovereignty through military competition and armies. We will need a different viewpoint—what I call planetary thinking.”
Here, it’s necessary to clarify what “technology” means in Hui’s view. Put very broadly, it is the way the world is organised, understood, and set into motion through specific forms of rationality, morality, and cosmology. Technology is simultaneously how to think, how to make, and how to live—philosophy in material form.
Hui argues that due to the imposition of a singular Western technological logic on the entire world, a global process of “de-individuation” is taking place. This concept describes a destructive process in which technical systems suppress the uniqueness of the individual and cultural diversity. Within a global technological monoculture, people become part of a consumer “herd.”
For Hui, the solution to this problem lies in “technodiversity” — the creation of multiple local “cosmotechnics,” which allow cultures to preserve their identity in a dialogue with technology. The concept of cosmotechnics entails embedding technologies within local cultural and moral contexts.
In Hui’s philosophy, the notions of individuation and de-individuation are central to analysing how technology shapes our existence and society in 2025. Individuation represents a creative union of humans and technology, whereas de-individuation occurs when a person is turned into an appendage of a global algorithmic machine.
Hui seeks to counter the process of globalisation, which he views as an extension of Western colonisation, with planetary thinking and individuation. In his view, globalisation manifests as the universalisation of European philosophy, epistemology, and technology, which are presented as the neutral and sole rational path of development.
He arrives at the conviction that it is necessary to create a new politics of technology which counters the de-individuation generated by capitalism, consumer society, and the “economy of desire.” Drawing on the works of Gilbert Simondon, Hui speaks of individuation as a process in which something becomes this and not any, not a ready-made “thing,” not a copy of a template, but a form of its own, arising under specific conditions.
“The urgent task is not only the invention of new models of individuation that counter consumerism, which dominates technological innovation today — a corresponding individuation of thought is also required. In this process of individuation, philosophy must undergo a de-Europeanisation,” states one of the central theses of the book Post-Europe.
What Does ‘Home’ Have To Do With It?
The return to Heimat (home/homeland) as a means of restoring a lost wholeness of being originated as an intellectual movement within the Romantic tradition of Hölderlin, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers. They counterposed feeling, memory, language, landscape, folk tradition, or the folk spirit (Volksgeist) to abstract reason.
This was a response to the rationalisation, universalism, and cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment era. The sense of losing ‘home’ (not geographical, but existential and cultural) stemmed from the conception of man as an abstract subject of reason, rather than a being rooted in a specific place, tradition, and language.
In the 19th century, industrialisation, urbanisation, and increased mobility intensified feelings of alienation. Heimat became a symbol of resistance to market logic and capitalist transformations—for instance, the loss of artisans’ skills and art due to the replacement of individual handicraft with factory labour.
In the 20th century, particularly in Heidegger, Heimat transforms into an ontological category. It becomes a question of being, where man is fundamentally “thrown” into the world, and modernity intensifies Unheimlichkeit—the “uncanniness” or homelessness of being. The necessity is a return to an authentic way of being-in-the-world, not to a concrete territory.
Heidegger believed that the European intellectual tradition (and consequently Europe as an idea), beginning with the Greeks, had strayed from the authentic Question of Being towards the metaphysics of “beings,” forgetting the temporality and finitude of human “Dasein” (being-there). This “death” of philosophy, in his view, was linked to the domination of technology and subjectivity, leading to the “forgetting of Being” and the “end of metaphysics.” His understanding was that one must find the origin (ancient Greek philosophy) and return to it.
Hui considers it necessary to combine the question of the European Spirit with the question of technology to substantiate his ideas about post-Europe.
Proceeding from the fact that the very phenomenon of philosophy is exclusively European, Hui, following his mentor Stiegler, notes the contingent nature of its essence. In his book Post-Europe, he asserts:
“There is no shadow of a doubt that philosophy is European: not only because it is a Greek term, ‘love of wisdom,’ but because philosophy in the European understanding is, above all, a philosophy of being, a thinking of essence.”
And further:
“This theoretical attempt to comprehend being as such and as a whole, according to Edmund Husserl, distinguishes European philosophy or Greco-European science from other so-called philosophies: Indian and Chinese. The first is based on theory, the latter on practice; the first moves towards the universal, while the latter remain confined to the local and are therefore thought, but not philosophy.”
Hui does not attempt to soften this distinction. On the contrary, he accepts it as a starting point for analysing the European Spirit. However, the crucial step for him is the following: acknowledging that European philosophy is not universal. He convincingly demonstrates this using the example of addressing the question “What is Asia?”
According to Hui, only someone with a European mindset would ponder such a question. And to answer it, one would most likely have to resort to essentialisation—that is, to dissect what exactly makes Asia Asia, just as we might reason about what makes a tree a tree. This is entirely foreign to the Eastern way of thinking. Ontology is alien to the person of Asia; Western philosophy poses questions about Being, while Eastern thought is concentrated on comprehending Nothingness.
In seeking an approach to the de-Europeanisation of philosophy, Hui relies on Stiegler’s deconstruction of the Western logos, in which he shows that European rationality does not exist in and of itself but is, from the outset, mediated by technology. The logos does not precede technology; it is formed through it: through external memory supports, writing, tools for transmitting and securing knowledge. Therefore, European philosophy is, in its essence, techno-logocentric. It is also important for Hui that, given the conditions of its emergence, this philosophy is contingent. Here, the “techno‑logos” is understood as the materialisation of the ancient Greek immaterial nous in technology. This underscores the historical contingency of philosophy as a form of thinking, rather than its ahistorical universality.
Technology as a “contingent necessity” arises not according to a pre-given plan, but as a response to the original inadequacy of man. It is precisely this contingency that later becomes a necessary condition for thinking. In Greek mythology, this is enshrined in the error of the Titan Epimetheus, who distributed various capacities among living creatures and, through forgetfulness, left humans unendowed, and in the subsequent “crime” of his brother Prometheus, who decided to compensate for the predicament of humanity left naked and defenceless. The theft of fire from the gods and its transfer to humans is, according to Stiegler, the act that became the norm—that very necessary contingency.
Many 20th-century philosophers who touched upon the theme of the collapse of European thought and the crisis of Europe used the Hegelian concept of Spirit. For Stiegler, this is the spirit of the techno-logos, and consequently, globalisation is a continuation of the colonisation carried out by this Spirit. Differentiating between ancient Greek, German, French, and British philosophies, Hui notes that they are all manifestations of the European spirit. And based on this, philosophers like Valéry, Husserl, and Patočka spoke of the crisis of Europe as an Idea.
Stiegler considered French philosophy a contingency in the spiritual life of Europe. In his view, it arose from the appropriation of German philosophy: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others. But clarifying the role of technology in the European spirit is the unique contribution that makes French philosophy necessary in the history of philosophy. The essence of French philosophy lies in its non-nationalistic character—unlike German philosophy. The reason it turned out this way is that it managed to “push” the European spirit further. Where?
For Hui, “pushing the European spirit further” means extracting technology from the status of a secondary instrument and making it the central nerve of European spiritual history, and in a form that fundamentally does not close in on the nation. For him, overcoming Eurocentrism in philosophy and the possibility of its de-Europeanisation are crucial. And he sees in the fact that French thought makes technology its primary question a move into a post-national dimension. The rejection of the idea of a “German” or any “national” spirit is an important achievement of French philosophers, who think of the spirit as something that is always already circulating transnationally through translation, writing techniques, and philosophical borrowings (the French appropriation of German thinkers is a symptom of this transnationality).
According to Hui’s understanding, European philosophy cannot be explained without acknowledging the multiplicity and irreducibility of its various internal modes of thinking. For instance, he speaks of the fundamental fragmentation of Europe, which is easily observable in the differences between countries that are part of the EU, aspiring to join it, or seeking to leave it.
“Eastern European countries distinguish themselves from Western European ones and sometimes view themselves as subjects of postcolonialism: in the eyes of non-Europeans, Eastern European countries are part of the colonial power, while these countries themselves perceive themselves as victims of Western European colonization,” writes the philosopher.
How Can Technology Be Liberated from Nationalism?
In his later writings, Hui emphasises that when technology is conceived as a resource for national sovereignty or an instrument of competition, it inevitably becomes militaristic, geopolitical, and expansionist.
Global techno-capitalism truly makes Heimatlosigkeit (homelessness) the “fate of the world”: the implementation of technology generates universal homelessness and obstructs the question of being. Homelessness becomes the norm of life in Europe, Asia, and postcolonial societies alike. Here, homelessness is the experience of living within a giant techno-system where no local tradition or national project can any longer serve as a stable home.
For many, this condition creates a sense of longing. The search for liberation from this burdensome experience often turns into a reactionary movement “back to the roots,” which, as Hui notes, in many 20th and 21st-century cultures culminates in “metaphysical fascism.” He emphasises that all such projects attempt to “overcome modernity” by appealing to some profound origin (people, tradition, civilisation), and it is precisely this link between a transcendent foundation and a political mobilising gesture that produces what he calls metaphysical fascism.
Instead, Hui proposes to “de-substantialise tradition” and renounce promises of a return home: tradition should be thought of as an open resource for new cosmotechnics and political forms, not as a closed essence around which a mobilising metaphysics is built.
Hui sees technology not as a neutral tool or an anthropological universal, but as the embodiment of specific cosmologies—of the connections between moral order, nature, and technology in different cultures.
What do we observe in the contemporary development of artificial intelligence? A race in which all countries compete within the same techno-logic, exacerbating the ecological crisis and cybernetics as the governance of Earth. Hui warns: without fragmentation, AI is destined to create a world where machines become one all-encompassing system.
Technology must be liberated from serving national or capitalist projects; only then can various cosmotechnics be constructed. Currently, we have AI that cannot resemble “human reason” because it remains an embodiment of European epistemology imposed globally. In his analysis of ChatGPT, Hui highlights its Western-centricity: the model is trained on data reflecting European values, ignoring cultural context and intuition; the pursuit of “universal intelligence” denies embodied cognition and leads to a machine eschatology (singularity). AI reinforces homogenisation, blocking alternative cosmotechnics. So how does Hui propose to avoid this?
Different cultures could “appropriate” AI, making it a function of reason through local cosmologies (like Chinese Qi-Dao), rather than a universal tool. At the same time, it is necessary to preserve contingency for innovation and reject determinism. AI must become part of multiple techno-forms, not a Western monopoly.
Drawing on Simondon, Hui asserts that the individual (the psychic) and society (the collective) develop simultaneously. In the digital age, this process is mediated by “digital objects” (algorithms, data). Social networks and trading platforms influence human desires and actions; that is, through algorithms, systems manage and manipulate people.
Hui examines how technical systems acquire their own logic of development (recursivity), becoming “organic” structures that actively participate in shaping human experience. This is explored in depth in his work “Recursivity and Contingency” (2019). In his view, it is too late to “cure” this by introducing ethical standards.
In contemporary discourse, “ethical AI” means: removing discrimination from data, increasing algorithmic transparency, adding responsibility and accountability, and respecting human rights. For Hui, the ethics of artificial intelligence appears only after the world has already been reduced to data, thinking to computation, and humans to behavioural patterns.
In other words, “ethical AI” does not ask: why do we even consider it permissible to think of the world in this way?
Critique of Decolonial Theories
Text: comrade-tovarisch
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