Zhitong Zhao

This article reconstructs the historical status of the technological within the tradition of political philosophy and argues for its recognition as a constitutive principle of political order. Rather than dismissing the ordinary understanding of technology as a neutral instrument, the paper deliberately begins from this common-sense perspective as a methodological point of departure. By starting where political philosophy might ordinarily understand political life amid tangible physical instruments, it becomes possible to expose the limits of that view and to justify a deeper analytical shift. The study thus moves from technology as a visible object to technology as an immanent force, and ultimately to technology as a generative principle of political existence—not as a chronological progression, but as an ascent in conceptual depth. Through rereadings of figures from Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Weber, and Arendt, and engaging major thinkers in the philosophy of technology, the article situates the contemporary “political turn” as the explicit acknowledgment of a long-implicit tension. Political philosophy today must therefore confront technology as a world-configuring power shaping authority, subjectivity, and collective life.

This paper offers a conceptual analysis of nostalgia by examining cases in which its object is a technological artefact rather than a vanished time or event. Standard accounts treat nostalgia as a past-directed, sentimentally inflected attitude that presupposes the absence of its object. We argue that these conditions lose their strict necessity when the focus shifts to artefacts that persist materially even as their practices and meanings fade. Drawing on and extending the analyses of Howard and Sweeney, we show that technological nostalgia exemplifies an object-mediated attitude. The figure of the technostalgic subject—one who maintains practical and affective engagement with obsolete technologies—demonstrates how the traditional requirements of nostalgia are radically complicated and reconfigured under closer scrutiny. We conclude that nostalgia functions not merely as an affective state but as an analytic lens that exposes the dislocation between enduring material objects and their vanished lifeworlds. This reconception clarifies the conceptual structure of nostalgia and establishes its philosophical relevance for the analysis of technological meaning.

The central shortcoming of technological modernity has not been a lack of innovation, but rather the absence of categories capable of fostering questioning and difference—of sustaining, ultimately, an alterity: that which is other, not yet codified, non-hegemonic technology. This article begins with that thesis to develop a critical and situated hermeneutics of generative artificial intelligence (AI), arguing that dominant models reproduce an ontology without difference that symbolically forecloses the future of technology. Within this framework, the emerging LatamGPT project is analyzed as a form of peripheral technological dissent that, while it does not interrupt at its foundation a system oriented toward neutralizing difference, it does unsettle that system. The analysis unfolds in two main movements. The first diagnoses how cognitive biases and algorithmic automatisms, on the one hand, and global narratives of technological inevitability and progress—conceptualized here as forms of fallacy—on the other, cancel judgment and technocolonize plurality. The second shows how LatamGPT, by combining situated hermeneutic design, symbolic imagination, technodiversity, and the prioritization of the political dimension of technology in light of its structuring nature, reactivates the space for reappropriating technology from other symbolic and epistemological repertoires, opening an illuminating breach for alternative futures. Finally, the concept of technological alterity is introduced as an epistemic and political condition not only for imagining other ways of existing with technology, but also for resisting its dominant forms of closure, and as an inescapable task of any genuinely emancipatory philosophy of technology and critical thought.