Chapter 5
Proto-metamodern thinkers on technology
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Reader: So we’ve established the metamodern sensibility—this way of transcending and including, holding sincerity and irony, hope and critique, construction and deconstruction together. But you mentioned we’d be looking at “proto-metamodern” thinkers? People who were doing this before metamodernism had a name?
Hilma: Exactly. Before the language of metamodernism crystallised in the 2010s, there were thinkers grappling with remarkably similar tensions around technology. They refused the simple binaries of progress versus regression, embraced nuance and paradox, and sought to articulate visions of technology that served human flourishing without naive faith in technological salvation.
Today I want to introduce you to four distinct but related approaches to technology that emerged primarily in the latter half of the 20th century. Each offers a different lens, a different emphasis, but all share what I’d call a proto-metamodern sensibility. These are: convivial technology, liberatory technology, appropriate technology, and calm technology.
Convivial technology, articulated by Ivan Illich—tools that remain under user control and enhance human autonomy rather than creating dependency.
Appropriate technology, championed by E.F. Schumacher, which emphasises human-scale systems designed for specific local contexts rather than one-size-fits-all industrial solutions.
Liberatory technology, envisioned by Murray Bookchin, which points toward ecological, decentralised systems that could free humanity from toil while harmonising with natural processes.
And calm technology, developed by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown and later refined by Amber Case, which describes technology that enhances our awareness without demanding our constant attention.
What unites these approaches is their refusal to accept technology as either salvation or scourge. They all seek to shape technology toward human ends—but different human ends, with different emphases and priorities.
Convivial Technology
Reader: You’ve mentioned Illich before. Didn’t we already cover him pretty thoroughly in Chapter 3?
Hilma: We did introduce his core concepts—tools for conviviality, radical monopoly, the two watersheds. But it’s worth revisiting him here as a foundational proto-metamodern thinker on technology, with some concrete examples of what convivial technology actually looks like in practice.
Illich’s fundamental insight was deceptively simple: tools can either extend human capability while remaining under human control, or they can come to control humans. Convivial tools serve the user’s purposes; industrial tools press users into serving their purposes.
The distinction isn’t about complexity or sophistication. Remember the telephone from Chapter 3: a vast, technically sophisticated network, yet convivial, because anybody can dial anybody and no one at the centre decides what they say. The tool serves whatever purposes its users bring to it.
Compare this to television in Illich’s era. It’s no less complex than the telephone network, but it runs the other way. A few broadcasters transmit to millions of passive receivers. The tool creates a radical monopoly over visual mass communication—you can choose which channel to watch, but you cannot choose what gets broadcast. The relationship is fundamentally asymmetric. The tool shapes you more than you shape it.
Reader: But couldn’t you just turn the TV off?
Hilma: You could, but television at scale reshapes society in ways that constrain even non-viewers. When TV becomes the primary medium of cultural transmission, political communication, and shared reference points, opting out means removing yourself from key social conversations. The off switch is real, but the society it leaves you in has already been shaped by the screen.
Reader: Can you give me another example of the convivial versus non-convivial version of the same function?
Hilma: Consider tools for growing food. A garden hoe is profoundly convivial. It’s durable, maintainable by the user, and enhances the gardener’s ability to cultivate land through their own effort. The gardener controls what to grow, when to work, how to organise their garden. The tool serves their purposes.
Now consider a combine harvester. It’s enormously productive, but it’s expensive, requires specialised maintenance, demands large-scale monoculture to be economical, ties the farmer into debt relationships with equipment dealers and banks, and often requires government price supports to make farming profitable at that scale. The farmer serves the demands of the machine and the industrial system built around it. One bad harvest, one mechanical failure, one market downturn can mean bankruptcy.
The combine isn’t evil—it’s extraordinarily useful in certain contexts. But Illich would say that when it becomes the only way to farm at scale, when it makes small-scale diverse farming economically impossible, when farmers must keep enlarging their operations and going deeper into debt to stay competitive—that’s when the tool has passed from servant to master.
Reader: So the line between convivial and non-convivial isn’t fixed? The same technology could be either depending on context and scale?
Hilma: Exactly. This is crucial. Illich argued that most tools have an optimal scale—a point where they maximise their convivial potential. Beyond that scale, they start generating radical monopoly, dependency, and loss of autonomy.
Reader: And why exactly do you label him as ‘proto-metamodern’?
Hilma: Illich was clearly ‘aiming at reconstruction’. He doesn’t stop at the critique of industrial tools– he articulates specific criteria for convivial ones. The two watersheds model is a both-and framework: tools can be genuinely useful AND become counterproductive beyond certain thresholds. He believes in progress (the first watershed is real!) while insisting it has limits (the second watershed is also real).
Appropriate Technology
Reader: OK, that makes sense. What about this “appropriate technology” from Schumacher?
Hilma: E.F. Schumacher was a statistician and economist whose central insight was that technology needs to fit—not just technically, but socially, economically, and culturally—with the conditions where it will be deployed.
Schumacher’s 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered became something of a manifesto for the appropriate technology movement. His subtitle captures the heart of his critique—existing economics treated people as means to economic ends, when it should be the other way around.
Reader: That seems obvious, doesn’t it? Why wouldn’t you adapt technology to local conditions?
Hilma: Because the dominant paradigm during the mid-twentieth century—and to a large extent still today—was that development meant replicating the industrial infrastructure of wealthy nations. The assumption was that there’s one ladder of technological development, and “advanced” means moving up that ladder toward capital-intensive, large-scale, centralised systems.
Schumacher challenged this entire framework. He argued that for much of the world, and particularly for rural communities in developing nations, the most sophisticated Western technology was actually inappropriate. Not because it didn’t work technically, but because it required levels of capital, expertise, centralisation, and supporting infrastructure that simply didn’t exist—and whose creation would devastate existing social structures.
Consider his famous example of a capital-intensive factory in a developing nation. It might employ a few hundred people using advanced machinery. But the capital required to create those jobs could have supported thousands of small workshops using intermediate technology—what Schumacher called technology that bridges the gap between traditional methods and full industrialisation. Those workshops would preserve existing skills, maintain community structures, keep wealth circulating locally, and avoid creating massive unemployment.
Reader: So “appropriate technology” just means “not too fancy”? Keeping things simple?
Hilma: No—and this is where people often misunderstand Schumacher. He wasn’t advocating primitivism or rejecting scientific knowledge. The key word is appropriate. Sometimes that means simpler technology, yes. But sometimes it means sophisticated technology deployed at a smaller scale, or hybrid systems that combine traditional wisdom with modern innovation, or redesigning industrial processes to work with local materials and skills.
Take agriculture. The Green Revolution pushed capital-intensive farming—hybrid seeds requiring specific fertilisers and pesticides, mechanisation demanding large farms and cheap fuel, irrigation systems needing centralised infrastructure. This approach dramatically increased yields in some contexts. But it also displaced millions of small farmers, degraded soil, polluted water, and created dependency on expensive inputs farmers had to purchase annually.
Appropriate technology in agriculture might mean: improving traditional seed varieties through careful selection rather than creating hybrids requiring annual purchase. Developing manual or animal-powered tools that small farmers can afford, maintain, and repair themselves. Water harvesting techniques suited to local rainfall patterns rather than massive irrigation projects. Composting and natural pest management that use locally available materials.
Reader: But doesn’t that keep people poor? If they’re using simpler technology, won’t they produce less and earn less?
Hilma: That’s the conventional wisdom, but Schumacher questioned whether it’s actually true—or whether we’re measuring the wrong things. Capital-intensive technology is extremely productive per worker. But is that the right metric?
In a society with widespread unemployment or underemployment, maximising output per worker might actually be destructive. It concentrates income in few hands while leaving many without livelihoods. What you want is technology that maximises employment relative to capital—that gives as many people as possible dignified, productive work.
Moreover, appropriate technology typically has lower overhead costs. A small workshop using hand tools requires less capital to start, lower ongoing expenses, cheaper maintenance. The owner isn’t burdened with debt. The workers aren’t dependent on distant supply chains or vulnerable to distant market disruptions. This creates more economic resilience and stability.
Schumacher wasn’t saying rich nations should abandon advanced technology. He was saying that technology transfer to poorer regions needed to account for local conditions and capacities. And more radically, he was questioning whether even rich nations should measure success purely by productivity and GDP, rather than by whether people have meaningful work and flourishing communities.
Reader: This is starting to sound more sophisticated than I expected. Can you give me a more concrete example of what appropriate technology looks like in practice?
Hilma: One of the best-known examples comes from work by the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now Practical Action) and similar organisations, which helped develop and spread low-cost human-powered treadle pumps.
Traditional hand pumps required constant arm motion and were exhausting to use. Motorised pumps were expensive to purchase and maintain, required fuel, and often broke down with no local repair capacity. The treadle pump uses leg muscles—much less tiring—and can be manufactured locally using simple materials and skills. It costs roughly a tenth of a motorised pump, can be repaired by the farmer, doesn’t require fuel, and can irrigate about half an acre.
This isn’t the most “advanced” technology by conventional measures. But it’s brilliantly appropriate—affordable, maintainable, effective, and within reach of millions of small farmers. It improved yields and incomes dramatically while avoiding the debt trap and dependency that expensive inputs create. Millions of these pumps are now in use across Asia and Africa.
Reader: Okay, that’s compelling. But this all feels very focused on developing nations. Does appropriate technology thinking have anything to say about rich, industrialised societies?
Hilma: Absolutely, and this is where Schumacher becomes most challenging to comfortable assumptions. He argued that even wealthy societies had developed inappropriate technologies—systems that were too large-scale, too centralised, too energy-intensive, too alienating for human flourishing.
His critique anticipated much of contemporary thinking about sustainability and resilience. Massive electricity grids vulnerable to cascading failures. Food systems dependent on industrial agriculture and long supply chains. Cities built around automobiles, making walkable neighbourhoods illegal through zoning. Economic systems requiring constant growth regardless of ecological limits or social cost.
Schumacher advocated what he called “technology with a human face”—systems scaled to allow human understanding, participation, and control. Not necessarily small in every case, but structured so that people could grasp how they work, maintain them with available skills, and adapt them to changing needs.
Reader: So what would you say makes Schumacher proto-metamodern?
Hilma: Like Illich, Schumacher reconstructs rather than just critiques: he doesn’t say ‘industry bad, return to peasant life’ - he designs intermediate technology systems that incorporate modern knowledge at human scale. His both-and move is subtle: he wants the sophistication of modern engineering AND the community control of traditional craft. He believes in development (backward countries can advance) but redefines what development means (not mimicking the West’s industrial path but finding contextually appropriate technical solutions).
Liberatory Technology
Reader: Next up is Bookchin’s “liberatory technology”. How does his vision differ to Schumacher’s?
Hilma: Where Schumacher focused on scale and appropriateness to context, Murray Bookchin focused on the relationship between technology, social organisation, and ecological integration. His vision was more explicitly utopian—he was sketching not just better tools but an entire ecological society that technology could help make possible.
Bookchin was writing in the 1960s and 70s, a period of remarkable technological innovation but also growing awareness of ecological limits. He looked at emerging technologies—automation, solar power, new agricultural methods—and saw potential for genuine liberation. Not just marginal improvements, but the possibility of transcending scarcity and toil entirely.
His key argument was that we stood at a threshold. For the first time in history, technology had advanced to where we could meet human needs abundantly with minimal labour. The barriers weren’t technical—they were social and political. Capitalism required artificial scarcity to maintain profit. Bureaucracy required hierarchy and control. But the technology itself pointed toward a different possibility: decentralised, ecological, liberatory.
Reader: That sounds utopian in a way that makes me skeptical. “Technology will free us from scarcity and toil”—haven’t people been saying that for two hundred years?
Hilma: Your skepticism is warranted, and Bookchin would have understood it. He was a former Marxist who had seen promises of liberation through industrialisation turn into Stalinist nightmares. But his argument was more nuanced than simple techno-utopianism.
First, he was crystal clear that technology alone couldn’t liberate anyone. Social revolution was necessary—changing property relations, dismantling hierarchies, transforming how communities organise themselves. Technology created possibility, but realising that possibility required conscious political action and new social forms.
Second, he distinguished sharply between different types of technology based on their social implications. Some technologies—massive factories, centralised power grids, complex bureaucratic systems—structurally require hierarchy and centralised control. Others—solar panels, small-scale manufacturing, networked communication—lend themselves to decentralisation and democratic control.
Reader: Can you be more specific about what he meant by “liberatory technology”?
Hilma: Bookchin looked at the emerging technology of his time and identified several key developments that he thought pointed toward liberatory possibilities.
First, automation. He saw cybernetic systems and computer control making possible the automation of repetitive, dangerous, or degrading work. Not partially automated—truly automated. Factories that could produce goods with minimal human supervision. Agricultural systems that could grow food with machines handling most physical labour. He wrote about this explicitly: “In a future revolution, the most pressing task of technology will be to produce a surfeit of goods with a minimum of toil.”
But—and this is crucial—he didn’t envision automation under continued capitalist ownership. That would simply concentrate wealth and power further while throwing people out of work. He imagined automation within communities that collectively owned and controlled their productive systems, where eliminated toil meant more freedom for everyone rather than unemployment for some and excessive wealth for others.
Reader: So his version of automation looks nothing like what we’re actually getting with AI and robotics?
Hilma: Not at all. Current automation is happening within existing capitalist structures—companies replacing workers to cut costs, with productivity gains flowing to shareholders rather than society. The workers lose jobs, the companies boost profits, inequality widens. That’s the opposite of liberatory.
Bookchin’s vision required different ownership structures and different goals. Automation should eliminate drudgery so people can do meaningful work—scientific research, artistic creation, community building, environmental restoration. The point wasn’t to maximise productivity but to free human potential.
Second major element: decentralised energy. Bookchin was writing before widespread solar panels, but he saw their potential clearly. Solar, wind, small-scale hydro—these are inherently distributed energy sources. Unlike coal or nuclear that require massive centralised plants, renewable energy can be captured locally. This has profound political implications.
Centralised energy creates centralised power. You need extensive grids, specialised expertise, hierarchical organisations to manage complex systems. But if communities can generate their own power through rooftop solar, local wind, small hydro, they gain both energy independence and political autonomy. Energy becomes something communities provide for themselves rather than consuming from distant corporations.
Reader: But we do have solar panels now, and I don’t see communities becoming more autonomous. What gives?
Hilma: Because we’ve incorporated solar into the existing centralised system rather than using it to enable decentralisation. Utilities still control most solar generation. Even home solar is often designed to feed back into the grid with complex metering schemes. The technology has liberatory potential, but we haven’t organised society to realise it.
This is Bookchin’s point—technology creates possibilities, but social organisation determines whether those possibilities are actualised. The same solar panel can either enable community autonomy or just slightly green a centralised utility. Everything depends on the social matrix.
Third element: ecological integration. Bookchin argued that liberatory technology must work with natural processes rather than against them. Industrial agriculture tries to dominate nature—eliminate pests with poison, override soil depletion with synthetic fertiliser, control weather through massive irrigation. It’s a war against ecology.
An ecological approach studies natural systems and designs agriculture to work within them. Polyculture instead of monoculture. Pest control through biodiversity. Soil building through composting and cover crops. Water management through landscape design. This requires more knowledge but less brute force—more understanding of how ecosystems work, less reliance on industrial inputs.
Importantly, Bookchin saw this as more efficient in the long run, not just more ethical. Industrial agriculture depletes soil, pollutes water, destroys biodiversity, requires constant fossil fuel inputs. Eventually these systems collapse or require ever-increasing inputs for declining yields. Ecological agriculture, properly designed, builds soil, enhances biodiversity, and becomes more productive over time.
Reader: This is starting to sound less like technology and more like a whole social vision. Is that the point?
Hilma: Yes! That’s exactly Bookchin’s insight—technology can’t be separated from social organisation. “Liberatory technology” isn’t a category of tools, it’s a way of organising the entire relationship between humans, tools, and nature.
He envisioned small-scale, ecologically integrated communities that would be largely self-sufficient in food and energy, networked with other communities for trade and shared resources, governed through direct democratic assemblies. Technology would be scaled to what communities could understand and control.
This doesn’t mean primitivism. These communities would use sophisticated technology—computers, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology—but organised differently. Not massive factories producing for national markets, but diversified local production using versatile equipment, supplemented by trade with other communities.
Reader: So Bookchin’s vision is basically Green anarchism? Small communes living sustainably?
Hilma: It’s more sophisticated than that caricature. He wasn’t advocating “dropping out” or rejecting science. He argued for what he called “libertarian municipalism”—democratic control at the community level, but with communities freely confederating for larger-scale coordination.
Some things genuinely require larger-scale cooperation. Medical research. Scientific equipment. Rare materials processing. Complex manufacturing. Bookchin didn’t imagine every community making everything. But he wanted communities to be the basic unit—making key decisions locally about land use, energy, food, governance—while cooperating voluntarily on larger projects.
The technology enables this by reducing the scale at which high-quality production is possible. In the early industrial era, you needed massive factories to produce efficiently. But modern manufacturing tools—CAD/CAM systems, versatile machine tools, small-batch production—make smaller-scale manufacturing viable. Solar panels and batteries make local energy autonomy possible. Hydroponics and permaculture make intensive local food production feasible.
Bookchin saw this technological trajectory and imagined where it could lead if organised around community autonomy rather than corporate profit. That’s what makes his thinking liberatory—not the specific tools, but the social vision they could serve.
Bookchin’s proto-metamodernism appears in his reconstructive vision: he’s not content simply critiquing centralised industrial production, he imagines decentralised ecological alternatives powered by solar and wind. His both-and move: he wants automation to eliminate toil AND community-scale production to maintain human agency. He believes deeply in technological progress while insisting it must serve liberatory social relations rather than determine them. This is Game Change thinking avant la lettre.
Calm Technology
Reader: These first three perspectives both come from the 1960s and 70s. What about more recent thinking? Surely technology has changed since then?
Hilma: Indeed it has, which brings us to “calm technology”—a framework developed in the 1990s by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, and later refined by Amber Case.
Weiser was chief technologist at Xerox PARC in the early 1990s when he articulated a vision he called “ubiquitous computing”—technology woven seamlessly into the environment, disappearing into the background of our lives rather than demanding our constant attention.
The problem he identified was that computers had become too present, too demanding. Using a computer meant sitting at a desk, focusing on a screen, being pulled out of your physical environment and social context into a virtual space of windows and menus. He saw this as a historical aberration—a temporary limitation that future technology should overcome.
Reader: But we’re more glued to screens than ever. Smartphones have made it worse, not better. How is that calm?
Hilma: You’re right that the trajectory went in the opposite direction from what Weiser hoped. But that makes his framework more relevant, not less. “Calm technology” offers a design philosophy that contemporary tech largely violates—and understanding why reveals a lot about where we went wrong.
The core principle is elegantly simple: technology should move to the periphery of our attention, informing without overburdening. It should enhance our awareness of our environment and our connections to others without demanding centre stage.
Weiser and Brown gave a beautiful example: the very best technology is invisible in use, like a pair of eyeglasses. You see through them, not at them. When working properly, you forget you’re wearing glasses—they become transparent, a seamless extension of your perception. That’s calm technology: it enhances your capabilities without inserting itself between you and your experience.
The really interesting developments are in ambient displays that convey information through environmental cues. Weiser and Brown’s favourite came from Xerox PARC itself: Natalie Jeremijenko’s Dangling String, an eight-foot length of plastic wire hanging from a small motor in the ceiling and wired to the office’s Ethernet. When the network was busy, the string whirled and rattled; when it was quiet, it barely twitched. Nobody had to check a monitor; the state of the network was simply present in the room, at the edge of everyone’s awareness.
Reader: So calm technology is about ambient awareness rather than active management?
Hilma: Precisely. And this connects to a deeper principle that Amber Case articulated in her book Calm Technology: the best interfaces are those that reduce cognitive load rather than adding to it. Every notification, every menu choice, every password, every update—these are cognitive interruptions. They fragment attention, create decision fatigue, pull us out of flow states.
Calm technology minimises these interruptions. It communicates through ambient cues when possible—peripheral vision, ambient sound, subtle haptics—reserving explicit notifications for truly important events. It makes sensible default choices rather than forcing constant user decisions. It works reliably in the background rather than demanding management.
Reader: I see the appeal, but isn’t this just good UX design? What makes it specifically “proto-metamodern”?
Hilma: Calm technology embodies proto-metamodern reconstruction: it doesn’t reject digital technology but redesigns it according to human-centreed principles. The both-and move is elegant: sophisticated technology (AI, sensors, distributed systems) AND simple user experience. It believes in technological progress while refusing the default definition of progress as ‘more features, more data, more engagement.’ This is another example of Game Change: understanding the attention economy’s incentives while deliberately building according to different values.
This is where calm technology thinking connects back to Illich’s tools for conviviality. The question is: does this technology serve me, or do I serve it? Calm technology serves human ends—helps me accomplish my purposes, enhances my awareness, supports my activities. Uncalm technology demands I serve it—check notifications, maintain streaks, feed engagement metrics.
Constant interruption fragments consciousness. Attention dispersal prevents deep thought and meaningful connection. The cognitive load of managing complex interfaces exhausts mental capacity needed for creative work and human relationships.
Reader: So what would genuinely calm modern technology look like? Can you paint a picture?
Hilma: Imagine your living space as a responsive environment rather than a collection of discrete devices. Lighting adjusts based on time of day and what you’re doing—brighter for detailed work, dimmer for conversation, gradually shifting as evening approaches. Temperature modulates based on occupancy and your preferences. Music plays softly when you’re alone, stops when you have visitors, without you making any explicit choices.
Information is present but peripheral. The weather forecast shown subtly in a hallway mirror. Messages from close friends appear as subtle haptic patterns on your watch, but only if they’re marked important; most communication waits until you choose to check.
Your workspace knows when you’re in flow—deep focus on a project—and routes all but emergency communications to later. When you’re struggling or taking breaks, helpful suggestions appear: stretching reminders, relevant resources for your project, opportunities to connect with colleagues who might help.
The key is that all this happens invisibly. There’s no complex interface to master, no settings to configure (beyond initial preferences), no constant maintenance. The technology learns your patterns and adapts. When it needs your attention—genuinely needs it—it asks clearly and specifically. But most of the time, it just quietly makes your environment more suited to what you’re trying to do.
Reader: That sounds lovely but also kind of creepy. All this monitoring and adapting—doesn’t that require massive data collection and processing?
Hilma: You’ve identified the tension at the heart of calm technology: achieving seamless integration often requires sensing and processing that feels invasive. This is where design philosophy matters enormously.
The surveillance capitalism model says: collect everything, store it centrally, use it for behavioural modification and targeting. That’s about as uncalm as technology gets—you’re constantly aware of being watched, constantly wondering what’s being done with your data, constantly reading privacy policies and adjusting settings.
The calm approach says: process locally, store minimally, adapt purely to serve the user. Your devices learn your patterns but keep that information on-device. They don’t report back to corporate servers. The adaptation happens locally, for your benefit, without creating a detailed digital profile for others to exploit.
This is technically feasible—edge computing, local machine learning, end-to-end encryption. The barriers are economic and political, not technological. Surveillance capitalism is profitable; calm technology is not, at least not in the same way.
Reader: So we’re back to a familiar problem: the technology exists to build calmer systems, but the economic incentives push toward uncalm design?
Hilma: Precisely. Which is why calm technology thinking needs to be paired with social and political change. Case’s book is a practical design guide, but the underlying vision—technology that serves human flourishing rather than capturing attention—has normative implications that extend beyond interface design.
If technology’s purpose is engagement and data extraction, you get uncalm design. If technology’s purpose is enhancing human capability while respecting human attention and autonomy, you get calm design. The technical choices flow from the underlying values and incentives.
Reader: Okay, I’ve now got four different frameworks for thinking about technology—convivial, appropriate, liberatory, and calm. How do these fit together? Are they competing visions or complementary perspectives?
Hilma: Beautifully complementary, in my view. Each emphasises different aspects of what helps technology serve human ends rather than dominating them. And together they already provide a rich framework for technological critique and design, which we’ll continue to develop:
Is it convivial? Does it enhance user autonomy or create dependency? Can people understand and control it, or does it require expert mediation?
Is it appropriate? Does it match the scale, resources, skills, and needs of the context where it will be used? Is it solving the right problem?
Is it liberatory? Does it move us toward more democratic, ecological, and humane social arrangements? Or does it reinforce hierarchy, domination, and alienation?
Is it calm? Does it respect human attention and consciousness? Does it inform without overwhelming, enhance awareness without capturing it?
What unites the approaches is their refusal of the binary choice between technological progress and human values. Each insists, in different ways, that we can have modern capabilities without industrial domination, that we can pursue development without accepting its current form, that we can redesign our tools rather than being redesigned by them. They’re proto-metamodern because they made these moves before anyone had language for them - holding technological hope and critique together, reconstructing rather than just deconstructing, believing in progress while radically questioning what progress means.
Reader: But don’t these frameworks sometimes conflict? Appropriate technology for one context might be inappropriate for another. What’s liberatory might not be calm. How do you navigate competing values?
Hilma: These frameworks aren’t rigid rules but orientation principles. Sometimes they’ll point in different directions, and that tension is informative—it reveals trade-offs and helps clarify what’s at stake.
Consider smartphones. From a calm technology perspective, they’re terrible—constant interruptions, attention capture, cognitive overload. But from a liberatory perspective, they’ve democratised access to information and communication, enabling new forms of coordination and resistance. From an appropriate technology view, they’re extraordinarily inappropriate for many contexts—designed for wealthy consumers, requiring complex supply chains, creating toxic waste—but incredibly appropriate for others—putting internet access in pockets across the developing world.
The metamodern move isn’t to resolve these tensions into a simple verdict but to hold them all in view. Smartphones have both profoundly positive and deeply problematic aspects. The question becomes: how can we preserve what’s valuable while addressing what’s harmful? Can we have the connectivity without the attention capture? The information access without the surveillance? The convenience without the toxicity?
That requires specific technical and social interventions—different business models, different interfaces, different social norms around use, different approaches to manufacturing and recycling. It’s not “smartphones good” or “smartphones bad”—it’s a complex dance of improvement, adaptation, and reconstruction.
Reader: So where does this leave us? We’ve surveyed the skeptics, the optimists, understood what technology is, grasped metamodernism, and now explored these proto-metamodern visions. What comes next?
Hilma: The proto-metamodern thinkers give us an important foundation. But they were working with the technology and challenges of their time. Today’s thinkers are grappling with AI, surveillance capitalism, platform monopolies, climate chaos, and democratic erosion—challenges that require updating and extending these frameworks.
It’s time to explore contemporary approaches to technological metamodernism, including defensive accelerationism, Plurality, and cosmo-localism. Onward.