Monotechnologism

In the AI Story

Hui traces monotechnologism through three historical phases. The first was the colonial encounter—the sixteenth-to-nineteenth-century moment when European military-industrial power forced a choice: modernize according to the Western model or be conquered. China's ti-yong formula (体用)—Chinese learning as substance, Western learning as application—attempted to adopt Western technology while preserving Chinese philosophical foundations. The formula failed because it assumed technology is separable from cosmotechnics. A tool is not neutral—it carries the logic of its production, the assumptions about nature and purpose that determined its design. To adopt the steam engine is to adopt the cosmotechnics of nature-as-standing-reserve; to adopt the factory is to adopt labor-as-commodity; to adopt the computer is to adopt information-as-fundamental-category.

The second phase was the Cold War and its aftermath—when capitalism and communism, rival economic programs, operated within the same cosmotechnical framework. Both treated nature as raw material, measured progress in productive output, understood technology as mastery. When the Soviet Union collapsed, what was being universalized was not merely an economic system but a cosmotechnics. Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" was, in Hui's reading, the announcement of monotechnologism's completion—the declaration that the Western cosmotechnical tradition had exhausted all alternatives. The third phase is planetary computation: digital infrastructure mediating all economic, social, cultural, creative, political activity. The internet, the cloud, the platforms, the large language models—all designed by institutions operating within Western cosmotechnics, encoding assumptions in every layer from physical data-center architecture to API design to AI optimization criteria.

The illusion of universality is monotechnologism's most powerful mechanism. The assumption that the tools being offered to the world are universal—applicable in any cultural context, suitable for any purpose, neutral in philosophical commitments. Hui's work exposes this as ideological core. No tool is universal. Every tool carries the cosmotechnics of its production. When everyone on Earth has access to the same AI tools, and those tools encode the same assumptions about what technology is and what it is for, the result is not diversity—it is participation in a single system on terms set by that system's builders. The democratization of capability becomes the universalization of cosmotechnics. Everyone gets to fish—but everyone fishes in the same fishbowl.

The contemporary AI industry exhibits monotechnologism at its most subtle and powerful: the colonization not of territory or markets but of concepts themselves—of the categories through which human beings understand their relationship to technology and the world. When large language models trained predominantly on English-language text generate outputs in Mandarin, the conceptual architecture remains English even if the words are Chinese. The cosmotechnical assumptions are Western even if the surface is translated. The English word "technology" carries the Greek separation of techne from physis; the Mandarin jishu (技术) carries different connotations—associations with skill, embodied practice, artisan-material relationship. When AI mediates the concept, the English framework wins—not through argument but through infrastructure.

Origin

The term appears first in Hui's 2016 Question Concerning Technology in China, though the analysis it names had been implicit in earlier critical scholarship on technology transfer and modernization. Hui recognized that the debates about whether China could "catch up" technologically presupposed a linear developmental model—a single path from primitive to advanced, along which all civilizations travel at different speeds. This presupposition was itself the problem. Not a neutral description of reality but a cosmotechnical imposition—the projection of one tradition's self-understanding onto all others. The coinage of the term "monotechnologism" made visible what two centuries of development discourse had rendered invisible: that the very concept of a universal technological trajectory is a claim, not a fact, and that the claim serves the interests of the civilization making it.

Key Ideas

One cosmotechnics universalized as "Technology." The singular, neutral-seeming category erases the plurality of genuine alternatives, rendering them premodern, cultural, or decorative.

The colonial ti-yong failure. China's attempt to adopt Western tools while preserving Chinese philosophical substance failed because tools carry cosmotechnics—adoption is never neutral.

Capitalism and communism as cosmotechnical siblings. Both variants of the same framework—nature as resource, progress as output, technology as mastery—whose rivalry obscured deeper unity.

Infrastructure imposes without announcing. Platforms, protocols, cloud services, AI models—the medium is the message, the tool is the cosmotechnics, and adoption feels like freedom.

Language is the deepest lock-in. When AI trained on English mediates global communication, conceptual frameworks encoded in English colonize thought itself—the last and most complete enclosure.