WORK
Metadesign
Maturana's 1997 essay reframing the relationship between technology and human living — arguing that the question facing humanity is not about biology versus technology but about desires and the responsibility to be accountable for them.
Delivered and published in 1997, 'Metadesign' is Maturana's most sustained engagement with technology, and the essay that gives his framework its sharpest contemporary application. The core argument is that technological transformations do not determine human outcomes — human emotions, desires, and relational dispositions do. Technology provides perturbations; the living system's structure, including its emotional structure, determines the response. The essay's central sentences have become its most quoted: 'Technology is not the solution for human problems, because human problems belong to the emotional domain as they are conflicts in our relational living.' And: 'The question that we must face at this moment of our history is about our desires and about whether we want or not to be responsible of our desires.'
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay was composed during the first major wave of digital transformation — the rise of the consumer internet, the approaching saturation of personal computing, early discussions of what would become the AI