Julia Pelger

In his recent commentary to our article „Being Blinded by the Concrete – On the Extractivist Blindspot of the Empirical Turn in Philosophy of Technology” (Vandemeulebroucke et al., 2025), Jeroen Hopster (2025) agrees with us that the so-called ‘empirical turn’, perhaps even large parts of the philosophy of technology, has a blindspot for the environmental-social ontogenesis of technological artefacts. Yet, while he “underwrite[s] this general diagnosis”, he would like to see a “somewhat different cure” (Hopster, 2025, p. 1). We appreciate Hopster’s critical engagement with our work and would hence like to offer a reply in our turn.

Technological objects have become world objects which becomes increasingly apparent by their different impacts on the global natural environment culminating in current natural crises. We argue that the philosophy of technology, due to its empirical turn to concrete technological objects, cannot provide the necessary conceptual tools to account for these natural impacts and the different uncertainties this creates. In this paper we give an account of this shortcoming of the philosophy of technology by giving an account of the relation between this philosophy and extractivism; the exponential acceleration of extracting natural resources to develop technological objects. Hence, we make the case that extractivism is an environmental-social condition of the possibility for technological objects to come into existence. We do this by carrying out a scale critique of the philosophy of technology, specifically the empirical turn, from its focus on concrete technological objects to the global environmental-social context in which they arise. We lay bare the occluding mechanisms within the political-economy of extractivism and the empirical turn that blind the philosophy of technology for extractivism. As a consequence, the philosophy of technology needs to be broadened, which we do by relying on Māori philosophy, specifically its relational and broader conceptions of time and space. By doing so, we provide the philosophy of technology with conceptual tools to account for extractivism and provide fruitful ground to develop conceptions of technological objects that benefit all, human and non-human, and everything.