Care does not promise control. It promises attention. And attention, unlike scale, cannot be automated.
There is a common misunderstanding when people talk about decolonial approaches to technology. It often sounds like rejection. As if the only ethical gesture were to step back, refuse the tool, or withdraw from the system altogether. But that has never really been how cultures survive. Cultures survive by staying. By adapting without surrendering. By learning how to live inside what arrives.
Care belongs to that lineage.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa writes from a place that feels very far from Silicon Valley logic. She is not interested in innovation as disruption, nor in ethics as a set of abstract principles. Her work circles around a quieter, more uncomfortable idea: care as something material, ongoing, and unavoidable. Not care as kindness or good intention, but care as the labor that keeps things from falling apart.
She insists that care is not a moral posture you adopt. It is a practice you inherit. A set of obligations you don’t fully choose. Care is what happens when you accept that systems — technical or social — are never neutral, never finished, and never free from dependency.
This perspective changes how technology looks.
Instead of asking what a system can do, you begin to ask what it sustains. What it drains. Who has to adapt to it. Who maintains it when the excitement fades. Who absorbs its failures quietly.
Technology stops looking like an external force and starts looking like a participant.
Decolonial thinking enters precisely here. Not as a loud refusal, but as a refusal to pretend that systems arrive into empty space. Every tool lands inside a world already held together by habits, rhythms, relationships, and vulnerabilities. Pretending otherwise is the real violence.
When large platforms present themselves as universal solutions, they don’t just offer efficiency. They quietly propose a way of living. A way of spending time. A way of relating to others. A way of being available. Their power is not only technical, but temporal and moral.
Care resists this not by opposing technology, but by insisting on proximity.
Care asks whether a system can remain answerable to the people who live with it. Whether it can be corrected without punishment. Whether it can slow down without breaking. Whether it knows when to stay silent.
This is why small systems matter.
A tool built for a cultural collective, a local scene, or a specific community does not have the luxury of abstraction. It cannot hide behind metrics alone. It must negotiate real relationships. It must respect shared tempos. It must carry memory. It must make room for ambiguity.
These systems are not smaller because they lack ambition. They are smaller because they accept responsibility.
Care thrives at this scale because care is always situated. What feels supportive in one context can feel invasive in another. What counts as automation here might feel like erasure there. Care cannot be scaled without being translated, and translation always demands listening.
Listening, in this sense, is not a metaphor. It is the condition of staying in relation. It shows up in how much time a system assumes its users have. In what it measures and what it leaves untouched. In whether it treats pauses as errors or as part of life.
The exhaustion many people feel around contemporary technology is not accidental. It emerges when systems demand constant activation without offering rhythm in return. When everything must respond, update, perform. Fatigue becomes a cultural signal that care has been optimized away.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s insistence on care brings us back to something older than innovation cycles: maintenance. Repair. Staying with things when they are no longer new. Accepting that dependency is not a flaw, but a condition of living together.
Seen this way, decolonial AI is not about purity or escape. It is about refusing indifference. It is about designing systems that are willing to remain accountable to the worlds they touch. Systems that do not aim to replace existing forms of life, but to support them without exhausting them.
Perhaps the most radical technological gesture today is not to build smarter systems, but to build systems that are willing to stay close. Close enough to be corrected. Close enough to feel the consequences of their presence. Close enough to listen.
Decolonial AI does not arrive to dominate or withdraw.
It arrives slowly, aware that something was already there — and that staying requires more than intelligence. It requires care.
by Rods Rodrigues // Membrz.Club General Manager
