Silicon Valley is many things, but perhaps most importantly it serves as a symbol; a metaphor. In public discourse, Silicon Valley frequently represents a particular vision of technology and the future, and much of its lasting influence emerges not from its inventions alone but from its symbolic significance, shaping aspirations and serving as a model to be replicated elsewhere (McElroy 2024; Chan 2025). Indeed, today there exists not merely one Silicon Valley but many—the Silicon Valley of Europe (Stockholm, London, Dublin), the Silicon Valleys of India and China (Bangalore, Shenzhen), and the Silicon Valley of Africa (Lagos), among numerous others globally. While this vision of technological innovation is often celebrated as a promising pathway toward future prosperity, it simultaneously raises anxieties about what critics describe as a form of “Silicon Valley Imperialism” (McElroy 2024). In this critical perspective, the ideals, practices, and economic models originating in Silicon Valley are exported worldwide, presented as the singular viable pathway to technological advancement. Hong Kong-based philosopher Yuk Hui notably refers to it as a “unilateral” future (Hui 2017:52).
Hui introduces the concept of cosmotechnics, “the unification of the cosmic and moral order through technical activities” (2016:19), which explicitly connects cosmologies—ways of understanding and experiencing the world—with technical activities like tool-making or artistic endeavours. Hui’s insights underscore the inseparability of technological practice and underlying moral and cultural frameworks, highlighting that the shape technology takes in any society inevitably embodies its broader cosmological and ethical commitments.
Against this theoretical backdrop, it is striking that places as culturally and geographically distant as Sweden and Colombia—the respective field-sites of us authors—have both adopted the metaphor of Silicon Valley. Stockholm positions itself explicitly as one among many potential Valleys outside California (Stockholm Business Region 2019), while Medellín seeks to chart a future shaped implicitly by Silicon Valley’s foundational assumptions, calling itself “the Software Valley” (Ruiz Rico 2020). Although both of us authors find Hui’s theoretical framework valuable, we aim here to complicate and interrogate the neatness of its premises. Our aim is to foreground the more intricate, dynamic relationship between the travelling metaphor of Silicon Valley and its reception in various local settings, emphasising how “technology” and its associated futures are perhaps not as thoroughly unilateralised as Hui’s argument might initially suggest.
Considering space constraints, the heavy lifting in this piece will primarily be accomplished through ethnographic examination of historical data from our respective field-sites. We argue specifically that an ethnographic lens allows us to highlight how historical trajectories deeply influence contemporary cosmotechnics, uncovering substantial differences that are frequently hidden in plain sight. Furthermore, we posit that historical-ethnographic methods are particularly well-suited to address the nuanced challenge of revealing distinctions between apparently similar technological visions, thereby opening up essential spaces for further investigation.
As Stockholm and Medellín each seek to take up the mantle of Silicon Valley within their particular corners of the globe, we thus ask: does the metaphor of Silicon Valley resonate similarly in the Colombian context as it does in Sweden? And if not, what exactly underpins the differences in meaning, and how can we better understand the dynamics that produce such divergent interpretations of technology’s promise?
Stockholm as a City of Unicorns—a unicorn colloquially being a start-up (often tech) company valued above US$1 billion.
Photo: Unsplash / Istockphotos
Integral Technology Education
For at least a decade, digital education has been widely popular in Colombia’s public policy as a solution to improve the structural problems of the education system. And no other place has worked to make digital education a ‘trend’ like Medellín, a place that brands itself as The Software Valley (making a playful reference to Silicon Valley; Ruiz Rico 2020). The city has hosted dozens of international events discussing how digital technologies in schools might enhance student engagement, improve pedagogical processes, and, most importantly, align students’ skills with global digital market demands—a market dominated by Californian Tech startups. Yet in this context, techno-hype tells only half the story.
At these events, the message was clear. Technological objects such as coding software, educational robots, 3D printers, or TikTok had the capacity to transform students’ employability and skills. However, there was another narrative coexisting with such claims: technology was not enough. It followed a ‘yes, but’ form of argumentation (sensu Cearns and Knox 2024): we need technology, yes; but we also need something more. That yes-but logic was condensed in the word “integral,” a term that is ubiquitous in Colombia’s public sector. Typically modifying nouns like “education,” “student,” or “citizen” (e.g. Romero-Amaya 2024), “integral” denotes holism—an educational approach transcending mere technical training to incorporate other dimensions. So, what did they mean with ‘other dimensions’ when using a term like “integral education”? In one of those events, a local state official intervened and invoked a sense of integrality through more specific words: “We can’t keep using the Internet to send funny memes. We also need ethics and education to achieve digital transformation.”
Here is where a historical enquiry begins—one that takes us to 1950s Colombia. Back then, the word “integral” started appearing with the rise of the post-war development industry (Escobar 2011). In one sense, “integral” was closely related to systems theory and rational state planning. An example of this was the notion of “integral planning in education,” a concept born in Colombia’s Ministry of Education that later entered UNESCO’s policy lexicon (Ossenbach and Martínez Boom 2011). But the term “integral” also had other conceptual roots. The Catholic Church, especially congregations coming from the US and France, had a big influence among technical education policymakers through the term “integral” (Roldán 2016), though they defined the term differently: “integral development” or an “integral education” pointed to a human essence, or soul, that could not be reduced to sociological, economist, or behavioural theories. Thus, when invoking “integral education” or “ethics” in Colombia’s technology education industry, people are pointing to more than technological progress—they are showing the historical connections of technology with theological understandings and moral duties. In short, with the Colombian case we can devise a local cosmotechnics that comprises, but cannot be reduced to, Euroamerican techno-progress.
Det Svenska Folkhemmet
Sweden often positions itself as the “World’s Most Modern Country” (Världens Modernaste Land, Andersson 2009). Whilst sometimes tongue-in-cheek, it is more often a form of ‘humblebragging’. This self-image emphasises Sweden’s role at the forefront of technological innovation and modernity writ large. Stockholm Business Region (2019)—a publicly owned company marketing Sweden’s capital city—brands Stockholm as the Silicon Valley of Europe, attributing its success to a “national culture” uniquely attuned to the new and the modern.
My interlocutors, primarily from Stockholm, frequently echoed this narrative. One—an entrepreneur, angel investor, and committed transhumanist and techno-utopian—often pressed me, the anthropologist in his midst, to explain why Swedes were so “open to technology”. He remarked, “it’s not just development, but also adoption. Swedes are just really open to new tech”. Another interlocutor, active citizen scientist and self-identified biohacker, described Sweden as “the most open country” he had ever lived in—comparing it to France and Switzerland—noting that people accepted his self-experimentation, even if they occasionally “found it a bit strange”. These two are alongside the roughly 6000 Swedes with a microchip implant—myself included (Petersén 2019; Orlowski 2020).
Central to understanding Swedish modernity is Det Svenska Folkhemmet, or the People’s Home, which defined Sweden’s modern welfare state and gave rise to the renowned “Swedish Model” (Andersson 2009). From approximately 1936 to 1976, Sweden underwent rapid modernisation characterised by intense rationalisation and underpinned by a near-ideological belief in the power of technoscientific progress. Historians Gunnar Broberg and Mats Tydén characterise this era as one where “the doctor would replace the priest as the central figure in the country’s intellectual life” (1991:91). Anthropologist Kieth Murphy (2015), writing on Swedish design, foregrounds how Swedish politicians and activists embraced modernist principles to achieve social reforms forming thematically similar, if distinct, movements for social and political progress.
During this period, advancements in science, engineering, standardisation, and social organisation promised a prosperous future. Yet, these improvements were not ends themselves; rather, they were means to achieve what Prime Minister Per-Albin Hansson (b. 1885-d. 1946; PM 1936-1946) dubbed det goda medborgarhemmet [the good home for the citizenry]. The imagery of home continually underscored Folkhemmet’s socially-driven vision. Material progress in service of human flourishing.
However, Folkhemmet’s inclusivity was selective, particularly excluding groups like the Sámi, traveling peoples, those deemed “feeble minded” (Tydén & Broberg 1991, Bommenel 2006), and anyone else who fell outside its socially-corporatist view of society. Nevertheless, the belief in science and technology as instrumental to achieving a modern, equitable society became deeply embedded. Today, many Swedes—my interlocutors, included!—maintain that technological advancement inherently promotes social, economic and political justice, continuing a legacy shaped by Folkhemmet’s socio-historical vision. After all, if it worked then, why wouldn’t it today? It is this overall outlook on the role technology has historically played in Sweden that produces a particularly fertile soil for a specifically, historio-social view of technology and the future to continue to thrive.
Excavating Cosmotechnics
Hui’s (2017) engagement with cosmotechnics is, in part, due to concerns that contemporary perceptions of technology risks unilateralising the future, foreclosing some futures whilst forcing others into existence. He notes that, “[f]or a long time now we have operated with a very narrow—in fact, far too narrow—concept of technics […]” (2017:6), and that we must “overcome modernity without falling back into war or fascism” (ibid.:8). For Hui the stakes are high.
The good news is that a cosmotechnical plurality still exists within modernity, despite what much popular discourse around the globalising forces of technology seem to hold (cf. McElroy 2024). On the other hand, it is hidden and needs to be ‘excavated’. As Silicon Valley has become the dominant metaphor for contemporary tech, its narratives, terminology, hopes, and futures have all equally spread, though these ideas do not smoothly ‘slot’ into all corners of the globe.
As in Sweden and Colombia above, on the surface, there are substantial similarities in how these two countries relate to Silicon Valley insisting upon itself. Yet, scratch the surface, and not only do differences emerge, but also increasing tensions that serve to define and redefine these outside impositions with endonymic forces and local histories. After all, whilst all three places are deeply steeped in modernity, the kind of modernism is specific to each locale (Englund & Leach 2000).
It is here we return to the importance of ordering. As new technologies feed into established cosmotechnics, processes of ordering and reordering remain, sometimes after competing visions (Colombia), and other times in ways that appear synergetic (Sweden). Nonetheless, these ordering processes must be better understood by anthropologists to be able to fully utilise Hui’s cosmotechnical framework. The challenge with neat philosophical models is that they lack the granularity and ‘messiness’ associated with human activity out in the world. Whilst we believe Hui’s framework has a lot to give, and we certainly share his concerns about a unilateralisation of the future, we also see the importance of underpinning the processes by which such ordering takes place to begin with. Only then, can such developments begin to be countered.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Dayna Jeffrey
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