“To become homeless in order not to become fascists.” Reduced to a crude formula, that is the idea Yuk Hui advances in Post‑Europe.
But the urge for simplicity turns the multidimensional into a two‑dimensional child’s pencil sketch, pushing us away from the truth the philosopher seeks. So, in the latest, irregular instalment of ForkLog’s Silicon Tanks, we must wade into homelessness, rootlessness, planetary determination and planetarity—and step away from binary oppositions.
How should we organise humanity?
Yuk Hui is a software engineer, founding director of the Institute of Philosophy and Technology at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, and a student of Bernard Stiegler. In his work he offers one decolonial approach to the roles of philosophy and technology amid today’s wars, the shift of the “centre of power” to the United States and China, the lingering sense of “the end of Europe”, and the flowering of right‑wing moods and sundry nationalisms.
When in 2016 Hui was preparing for publication the book “The Question Concerning Technology in China”, in which he criticised the Western philosophical universalisation of technology, particularly by Martin Heidegger, his editor posed a clarifying question. He wondered whether the author was not stepping on the same rake as the German thinker—falling prey to a speculative error when attempting to reconstruct Chinese technological thinking. Put bluntly: is there, in the “return to origins” perspective, a built‑in danger of sliding into fascism and nationalism?
To see that no, it is not built in—that is, it was not intended—we should unpack what “planetary thinking” is. Let the author explain.
“First of all, to think planetarily means: first, to think beyond the configuration of modern nation‑states, which have proved unable to escape the vicious circle of economic and military competition; second, to formulate a language of co‑existence that would allow different peoples and species to live on one planet; and third, to devise a new frame that can take us beyond the question of territory, answer the current ecological crisis and reverse the accelerating entropic process of the Anthropocene,” — Hui wrote in the later book Machine and Sovereignty: Toward Planetary Thinking.
There he also explains that technology constrained by nationalist discourse takes the form of war:
“It is obvious that technology predetermines economic development and military expansion. A cosmopolitics of cosmotechnics offers a way to think various technological programmes without confining ourselves to the dominant mode of technological thinking that took shape in the nineteenth century. Yet if we continue to look at the world from the standpoint of nation‑states, there can be no talk of technodiversity, since, as intuition suggests, a nation‑state can sustain sovereignty only through military competition and armies. We will need another point of view — what I call planetary thinking.”
Here we should clarify what “technology” means for Hui. In very broad terms, it is the way the world is organised, understood and activated through concrete forms of rationality, morality and cosmology. Technology is at once how to think, how to make and how to live—philosophy in material form.
Hui argues that the imposition of a single Western technological logic on the world produces a global “disindividuation”. The term names a destructive process in which technical systems suppress the uniqueness of the individual and the diversity of cultures. Under a global technological monoculture, people become part of a “herd” of consumers.
Algorithms, on the one hand, continually impose desires and spur consumerism, and, on the other, standardise behaviour, depriving a person of the chance to make a “quantum leap” towards his or her own uniqueness. Contemporary networks and AI can lead to a loss of control over one’s thought processes, replacing them with automated reactions.
For Hui, the solution lies in “technodiversity” — the creation of multiple local “cosmotechnics” that allow cultures to preserve their identity in dialogue with technologies. The concept of cosmotechnics implies embedding technologies into local cultural and moral contexts.
In Hui’s philosophy, individuation and disindividuation are central to analysing how technologies shape our existence and society in 2025. Individuation is the creative coupling of human and technique; disindividuation occurs when a human becomes an appendage of a global algorithmic machine.
Hui seeks to counter globalisation, which he sees as a continuation of Western colonisation, with planetary thinking and individuation. In his reading, globalisation manifests as the universalisation of European philosophy, epistemology and technique, presented as neutral and the only rational path.
He concludes that we must invent a new politics of technology that resists disindividuation generated by capitalism, consumer society and the “drive economy”. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon, Hui speaks of individuation as the process in which something becomes this rather than any thing—not a ready‑made “thing”, not a copy of a template, but its own form arisen under concrete conditions.
“The urgent task is not only to invent new models of individuation that resist the consumerism which today dominates technological innovation; there must also be an individuation of thinking. In this process of individuation, philosophy must pass through de‑Europeanisation,” — runs one of the key theses of Post‑Europe.
Two almost rhetorical questions arise.
Where is he wrong? And…
What has home got to do with it?
The return to Heimat for the sake of restoring a lost wholeness of being emerged as a current of thought in the Romantic tradition of Hölderlin, Novalis and the Schlegel brothers. They opposed abstract reason with feeling, memory, language, landscape, popular tradition or the spirit of the people (Volksgeist).
It was an answer to the rationalisation, universalism and cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment. The sense of loss of “home” (not geographic but existential and cultural) arose from the fact that the human came to be thought as an abstract subject of reason rather than a being rooted in a particular place, tradition and language.
In the nineteenth century industrialisation, urbanisation and mobility intensified alienation. Heimat became a symbol of resistance to market logic and capitalist change, for example the loss by artisans of their craft and art as individual handwork was replaced by the factory.
In the twentieth century, in Heidegger among others, Heimat was transformed into an ontological category. It became a question of being, in which the human is originally “thrown” into the world, while modernity reinforces Unheimlichkeit—“un‑homeliness”, the homelessness of being. What is required is a return to an authentic mode of being‑in‑the‑world, not to a particular territory.
Heidegger thought that the European intellectual tradition (and therefore Europe as idea), beginning with the Greeks, had strayed from the authentic Question of Being to the metaphysics of “beings”, forgetting the temporality and finitude of human “there‑being” (Dasein). This “death” of philosophy, in his view, is linked to the dominance of technique and subjectivity, which led to the “forgetting of Being” and the “end of metaphysics”. In his understanding one had to find the origin (ancient Greek philosophy) and return to it.
Developing Heidegger’s thought on homelessness as the fate of the West and the world, and drawing on Jan Patočka’s concept of post‑Europe, Yuk Hui rejects a return home—to Heimat—as a way out of the crisis of Europe and of European philosophy and technology, where those philosophers came to rest. For Hui, the “post‑European” is a way to preserve the critical and universalist impulse of continental philosophy, but to relocate it into a multipolar, techno‑planetary situation where Europe is no longer the centre but one node.
Hui deems it necessary, to ground his thoughts on post‑Europe, to conjoin the question of the European Spirit with the question of technique.
Starting from the premise that philosophy as a phenomenon is exclusively European, Hui—following his mentor Stiegler—notes the contingent character of its essence. In Post‑Europe he writes:
“In there being no shadow of a doubt that philosophy is European: not only because it is a Greek term, ‘love of wisdom’, but also because philosophy in the European sense is above all a philosophy of being, thinking on essence.”
And further:
“This theoretical attempt to grasp 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 former rests on theory, the latter on practice; the former advances towards the universal, while the latter remain limited to the local and therefore are thought, but not philosophy.”
Hui does not seek to soften this difference. On the contrary, he accepts it as a starting point for analysing the European Spirit. Yet decisive for him is the next step: recognising that European philosophy is not universal. He demonstrates this convincingly through the question “What is Asia?”
In Hui’s view, only someone with European thinking can pose such a question. And to answer it one is likely to resort to essentialisation—dissecting what makes Asia Asia, as one might ask what makes a tree a tree. This is alien to an Eastern way of thinking. Ontology is alien to a person of Asia; Western philosophy asks questions of Being, whereas Eastern thought is concentrated on the apprehension of Nothingness.
In seeking an approach to de‑Europeanising philosophy, Hui relies on Stiegler’s deconstruction of the Western logos, which shows that European rationality does not exist by itself but is always already mediated by technique. Logos does not precede technique; it is formed through it: through external memory supports, writing, the tools of transmission and sedimentation of knowledge. Therefore European philosophy is, in its essence, techno‑logo‑centric. For Hui, it is also important that by conditions of its emergence this philosophy is contingent. The “techno‑logos” is understood as the materialisation of the ancient Greek immaterial reason in technique. This underscores the historical conditionality of philosophy as a form of thought, rather than its ahistorical universality.
Technology as a “contingent necessity” arises not by a pre‑given plan but as a response to the original lack of the human, and this very contingency later becomes a necessary condition of thinking. In Greek myth this is sealed in the mistake of the Titan Epimetheus, who distributed different abilities among living beings and, in his forgetfulness, left humans without, and in the ensuing “crime” of his brother Prometheus, who decided to compensate the naked and defenceless humanity for its lot. The theft of fire from the gods and its transmission to humans, Stiegler holds, is the act that became the rule, that necessary contingency.
Many twentieth‑century philosophers who touched on the collapse of European thought and the crisis of Europe used Hegel’s notion of Spirit. For Stiegler, this is the spirit of the techno‑logos, and globalisation is therefore a continuation of colonisation carried out by this Spirit. Distinguishing ancient Greek, German, French and British philosophies, Hui notes that they are all manifestations of the European spirit. Hence the philosophers Valéry, Husserl and Patočka spoke of the crisis of Europe as of an Idea.
Stiegler considered French philosophy a contingency in Europe’s spiritual life. 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 what makes French philosophy necessary in the history of philosophy. Its essence—unlike the German—is its non‑nationalism. The reason it turned out that way is that it managed to “push” the European spirit further. Where to?
For Hui, to “push the European spirit further” means to pull technology out of the status of a secondary instrument and make it the central nerve of European spiritual history, in a form that refuses to close around the nation. He cares about overcoming Eurocentrism in philosophy and the possibility of de‑Europeanising it. He sees in French thought’s elevation of technology as the central question an exit into a post‑national register. The refusal of the idea of a “German” or any “national” spirit is a key achievement of French philosophers, who think of spirit as something that already circulates transnationally through translation, techniques of writing and philosophical borrowings (the French appropriation of the Germans is a symptom of this transnationality).
In Hui’s understanding, European philosophy cannot be made intelligible without acknowledging the plurality and mutual irreducibility of different modes of thinking within it. He speaks, for example, of Europe’s fundamental fragmentation, easily observed in the differences among countries inside the EU, those seeking to join it (or to leave).
“Eastern European countries distinguish themselves from Western European ones and sometimes see themselves as subjects of post‑colonialism: in the eyes of non‑Europeans, the countries of Eastern Europe are part of the colonial power, whereas these countries themselves perceive themselves as victims of Western European colonisation,” — writes the philosopher.
In the concept of contingency, Hui sees both the potential to deconstruct the Eurocentricity of philosophy—and therefore of technology—and the condition for individuation of thinking and for moving beyond the question of essence. This will require a revaluation of notions such as progress, growth and freedom. The result should be space for new models of individuation through technologies, and the future of humanity, if there is one, will be planetary.
How to free technology from nationalism?
In later texts Hui emphasises: when technology is thought as a resource of national sovereignty, an instrument of competition, it inevitably becomes military, geopolitical and expansionist.
Global technocapitalism truly makes Heimatlosigkeit the “fate of the world”: the implantation of technologies generates universal homelessness and obstructs the question of being; homelessness becomes the normal condition of life in Europe, Asia and post‑colonial societies alike. Here homelessness is the experience of life in a giant technosystem where no local tradition or national project can any longer serve as a stable home.
For many this breeds longing. And the search for liberation from this oppressive feeling often turns into a reactionary movement “back to the roots”, which, as Hui notes, in many cultures of the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries ends in “metaphorical fascism”. He stresses that all such projects attempt to “overcome modernity” by appealing to a deep origin (people, tradition, civilisation), and it is precisely this link between a transcendent ground and a political mobilisation that produces what he calls metaphysical fascism.
Instead, Hui proposes to “desubstantialise tradition” and to refuse the promises of a return home: traditions should be thought as open resources for new cosmotechnics and political forms, not as closed essences around which a mobilisation metaphysics is built.
Hui sees technique not as a neutral instrument or an anthropological universal, but as the embodiment of concrete cosmologies, links between moral order, nature and technique in different cultures.
What do we see in today’s development of artificial intelligence? A race in which states compete within a single techno‑logic, intensifying the ecological crisis and cybernetics as the governance of the Earth. Hui warns: without fragmentation, AI is doomed to build a world in which machines become a single all‑encompassing system.
Technique must be freed from service to national or capitalist projects; only then can different cosmotechnics be constructed. Today’s AI cannot resemble “human reason”, since it remains the embodiment of a European epistemology imposed globally. In an analysis of ChatGPT Hui underlines its Western‑centrism: the model is trained on data that reflect European values, ignoring cultural context and intuition; the drive toward a “universal intelligence” denies embodied cognition and leads to a machine eschatology (the singularity). AI heightens homogenisation, blocking alternative cosmotechnics. How does Hui propose to avoid this?
Different cultures could “appropriate” AI, making it a function of reason through local cosmologies (the Chinese Qi‑Dao), rather than a universal tool. At the same time, contingency for innovation must be preserved and determinism refused. AI should become part of multiple techno‑forms, not a Western monopoly.
Drawing on Simondon, Hui maintains 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 shape people’s desires and actions; through algorithms, systems govern and manipulate.
Hui examines how technical systems acquire their own logic of development (recursivity), becoming “organic” structures that actively participate in forming human experience; he elaborates this primarily in “Recursivity and Contingency” (2019). In his view it is too late to “treat” this by introducing ethical standards.
In contemporary discourse “ethical AI” means: remove discrimination in data, raise algorithmic transparency, add responsibility and accountability, respect human rights. For Hui, AI ethics appears only after the world has already been reduced to data, thinking to calculation, the human to a behaviour pattern.
That is, “ethical AI” does not ask: why do we consider it acceptable to think the world this way at all?
Ethics that regulates artificial intelligence proceeds from the same philosophy and logic as AI. Which means it is powerless to change anything at root. Today’s ethical frames assume that there are universal values that can be formalised and applied globally. Hui, by contrast, holds that the universality of ethics is a product of European philosophy; its globalisation repeats the logic of colonisation. Different cultures have different ways of binding technique, morality and cosmology.
We must first ask: why do states and corporations need AI? We should call into question the logic of the race, the militarisation, the total collection of data. Without that we will get either AI in the service of fascism or a fascisising AI.
A critique of decolonial theories
Hui is perceived as a decolonial thinker, but he himself takes a distanced and critical stance towards classic decolonial theories.
He argues that most decolonial theories, despite their critical intent, remain within the horizon of modernity. They criticise the West but do so using the very philosophical categories forged within Western thought. This concerns such basic notions as subject, power, identity and universal oppression.
In this sense, for Hui, decolonial thought is not an exit from modernity but an internal critique that reproduces the very foundations of the order it opposes.
He also underscores that decolonial theory is chiefly political, sociological and historical. It concentrates on structures of power, colonial legacies and epistemic violence, yet rarely turns to ontology and almost never treats technique as a philosophical problem. For Hui this is crucial, since without a philosophy of technology no decolonisation is possible: technique sets the modes of thinking, forms of knowledge and the conditions of existence of modern societies.
Hence his criticism of the risk of cultural relativism in decolonial thought. Hui notes its tendency to romanticise “local knowledges” and to harden the opposition of West and non‑West. This is problematic because local forms of thought are themselves historical and mutable. There is a danger they will be reduced to fixed identities and enrolled in the logic of the cultural market, where “otherness” becomes a commodity and a badge of distinction, rather than a ground for genuine philosophical thinking.
Hui reserves his sharpest criticism for decolonial theory’s lack of its own theory of technology. It talks much about knowledge, culture and politics, but hardly answers the question of what machines, infrastructures and algorithms themselves should be like. Yet technologies, for Hui, are carriers of the ontological and moral presuppositions of modernity. The absence of an alternative technological imagination is a critical gap that prevents decolonial thought from moving beyond critique to real transformation.
Instead of a decolonisation project in the usual sense, Hui urges us to speak of technodiversity, of a plurality of cosmotechnics. He deliberately avoids the language of return to the past or restoration of traditions. The point is not to reconstruct lost forms of life, but to reinvent technologies on other ontological grounds that are irreducible to the universalism of modern Western technique.
In this vein Hui suggests we think not through the prism of cultural identity or military and economic blocs, but through the link between technique, morality and cosmos — what he calls cosmotechnics. Such an approach, he argues, goes deeper than the politics of recognition because it touches the very grounds of how the world is understood, organised and set in motion.
Finally, Hui insists on the need for planetary thinking that does not reproduce the binary of “West versus non‑West” and is not built on moralistic opposition. Planetary thinking is not anti‑Western—it is post‑universalist. Its task is not to replace one universality with another, but to create the conditions for the coexistence of multiple, mutually irreducible modes of thought, technologies, techniques and ways of life.
Hui is often accused of utopianism. He agrees, believing that a philosopher must be a utopian. The only thing a philosopher must not do is become a philosopher in the service of the state—any state.
Text: comrade tovarisch