The Material Conditions of a Decolonised Philosophy of Technology

Mainstream philosophy and ethics of technology draws on a recognisably Euro-American canon, and the standard remedy for this narrowness is to widen the reading list by adding Ubuntu, Confucian role ethics, Buddhist ethics, or Buen Vivir to the conversation. This paper argues that the additive remedy, the "reading list fallacy," leaves untouched the conditions that made the canon Euro-American in the first place. One can cite more African philosophers and still run a field whose infrastructure systematically discounts African philosophising. I distinguish three levels at which decolonisation operates: content (whose ideas are cited), method (how cross-cultural inquiry proceeds), and infrastructure (who can produce, circulate, and be credited with knowledge). The hybridity agenda works the first two well; I argue the third is prior to both. Drawing on Hountondji's notion of extroversion and Okune's account of scholarly publishing infrastructures, I trace four interlocking mechanisms of exclusion: publication and article processing charges, conference access, funding geographies, and citation and indexing economies. Extroversion is simultaneously a material description of where prestige points and a philosophical one of which questions feel worth asking, so that relational and collective framings fail to register as serious problems regardless of how widely they are cited. The paper then turns constructive, developing Fuh's disobedient knowledge and Kwachou's pragmatic decolonisation pathways to distinguish three postures toward infrastructure: petition, reform, and disobedience. I argue that the ethics of technology can turn its own operational expertise, value-sensitive design and responsible innovation, onto the journal, the funding call, and the conference as designed sociotechnical systems. Hybridity cannot occur in the abstract; it requires shared material spaces where encounter happens on non-extractive terms. Infrastructure is therefore the precondition for the hybrid condition the collection takes as its object.