Building Small Systems That Know How to Listen
If cosmotechnics teaches us anything, it is that technology does not arrive into an empty world.
Every technical system enters an already-existing fabric of meanings: ways of gathering, ways of speaking, ways of waiting, ways of caring. What often appears as a neutral tool is, in fact, a proposal about how life should be organized.
Yuk Hui insists that technology is never universal. It is always tied to a particular cosmos — a way of understanding the world — and a particular moral order — a way of living together. The problem of modern technology is not its power, but its claim to universality: one technical logic, scaled endlessly, indifferent to place, memory, or rhythm.
But this claim begins to fracture when we shift our attention from large systems to small ones.
A cultural collective, a music scene, a community space, a local practice — each of these already operates as a micro-world. They have their own tempos, their own thresholds, their own forms of participation. They know when to accelerate and when to pause. They know what should remain visible and what should stay intimate. Long before any software is introduced, these worlds already function through a shared intelligence.
When we build technical systems inside these contexts, the question is no longer how to scale, but how to listen.
Listening, here, is not metaphorical. It is design work. It appears in decisions that seem minor but are decisive:
What gets automated, and what remains human?
What is measured, and what is left unquantified?
What is optimized, and what is protected from optimization?
What kind of time does the system assume its users have?
A system that listens does not impose a rhythm from the outside. It learns the rhythm that is already there.
This is where micro-cosmotechnics becomes possible. Not as a grand alternative to global technology, but as a parallel practice. An app designed specifically for a cultural collective is not merely a customized interface; it is a technical expression of that collective’s way of being together. Its structure encodes care. Its pacing encodes respect. Its limits encode ethics.
In this sense, small systems are not weak systems. They are precise systems.
They do not aspire to universality. They accept partiality. They know who they are for, and who they are not for. And because of this, they can host meaning without exhausting it.
The danger of contemporary technology is not that it is intelligent, but that it is deaf. It listens only for signals that can be converted into action, extraction, or growth. Everything else becomes noise. Small systems, by contrast, can afford to listen differently. They can afford silence. They can afford ambiguity. They can afford to let something remain unresolved.
This does not mean resisting technology. It means situating it.
Perhaps the future will not be shaped by a single technical worldview, but by many small, situated ones — each carrying its own sense of time, relation, and value. Not a replacement of systems, but a plural ecology of them.
In this landscape, building technology becomes less about invention and more about attention. Less about control and more about hospitality. Less about efficiency and more about resonance.
A system that knows how to listen does not claim to understand everything. It simply stays close enough to hear what matters.
And maybe that is how different worlds continue to exist — not by rejecting technique, but by composing it, carefully, from within life itself.
by Rods Rodrigues // Membrz.Club General Manager
