How the East Does Tech: Lessons from a World Western Logic Can’t Fully Map

Landing in a different logic

When I moved to Asia, of course I expected change. New cities, new languages, new ways of doing everything – that was part of the draw. As a European working in the tech industry with a career spanning through the West, I thought I was well-prepared for cross-cultural work: open-minded, adaptable, curious. But the surprise was real. It was in the invisible layer underneath of how people thought about technology, time, communication, and the future. Things that felt like second nature in the Western context didn’t quite land here. Meetups moved differently, decision-making had a rhythm I couldn’t predict, and words carried meaning differently – or sometimes no meaning at all. The more I observed, the clearer it became: it wasn’t just how things were done, it was why.

We often assume that technology is universal. That a good idea in Berlin works just as well in Tokyo. That efficiency, innovation, and scale mean the same thing everywhere. But the longer I engaged, the more that assumption began to crack. But it wasn’t just in the language, presentation or roadmaps, it was something harder to name, because it pointed to a different worldview, a metaphysics, a kind of cosmology.

I’m writing this article to reflect on that deeper layer. About what happens when two civilizational approaches to technology, Western and Eastern, meet. It’s also a response to a question I didn’t know I was asking until I read Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics: Is technology really just a tool? Or is it a mirror of how we see the world?

I’m not writing a critique or a celebration of either side, but rather a journey across them. An attempt to map the differences I’ve seen, the philosophies I’ve read, and the practices I’ve lived. And perhaps, to suggest that technology isn’t one single story, but many stories waiting to be heard.

The myth of universality

One of the most deeply held assumptions in Western tech culture is that technology is neutral. That perhaps is changing a bit now, as the AI fears surge, but for a long time, this was the way. It was thought that technology exists outside of culture, ready to be adopted, scaled, and optimized – like electricity or mathematics. We talk about “best practices,” “universal standards,” and “global markets” as if we’re all operating from the same ground. But that ground isn’t neutral, it’s built by centuries of thought, values, and metaphysics, even if we rarely name them.

In the West, technology emerged from a lineage that includes Greek rationalism, Christian teleology, Enlightenment progress, and industrial capitalism. Its language is one of mastery, control, and acceleration. To build technology often meant to impose order on nature, to extract value, to innovate by disrupting what came before. But what if that’s not the only possible story?

In his book The Question Concerning Technology in China, philosopher Yuk Hui asks precisely this. Drawing from the work of Heidegger, who famously critiqued modern technology as a form of “enframing” that reduces the world to a resource, Hui goes further. He argues that Heidegger, despite his insight, universalized the Western experience. He never seriously considered that other civilizations might have their own relationships with technology that are rooted in different cosmologies.

Hui proposes the concept of cosmotechnics: the idea that every culture develops its technology in accordance with its view of the cosmos and moral order. In other words, there’s no such thing as technology in the abstract – only technologies that are situated, embedded in worldviews. The West has its technics, yes, but so does China, so does India, and so do Indigenous cultures. Each one emerges from a different relationship between humans, nature, and the sacred. Reading this felt like a revelation. It gave language to something I had been sensing all along while being thrown into the mind of a different continent, but couldn’t quite articulate. The meetups felt more like rituals than briefings. There was a reluctance to define things too early. The sense that technology here wasn’t just about functionality, but about balance, timing, and context. It wasn’t seen as inefficient – and it was a totally different logic from what I'm usually used to working with.

Communication as cosmology

If technology reflects a worldview, then so does the way we talk about it.

In the West, especially in the tech world, communication is prized for its clarity. Say what you mean! Get to the point! Disagreement is framed as productive friction, meetings are judged by how many “actionable takeaways” they produce. There’s a pride in brevity, logic, and precision, which are qualities associated with strong leadership and intellectual rigor. But in much of Asia, I found that communication often obeys a different set of rules, and a different metaphysics altogether.

Here, silence is not emptiness – it’s space. Ambiguity is not confusion – it’s protection. Words don’t always aim to define, but to hold — to preserve harmony, relational balance, and the possibility of future movement. A “yes” can mean agreement, respect, or simply acknowledgment of having heard – depending on context. A disagreement is rarely stated outright. It may arrive gently, through time, wrapped in a story or through the absence of follow-up. At first, I misread all of this. I thought meetups were unproductive, everyone wes indecisive, and people weren’t being clear. That feedback loops were broken, but the more I paid attention, the more I realized that something else was happening – a kind of tuning, not asserting. Conversations weren’t meant to close things down but to open a space for interpretation. The space, while often slower, was no less intelligent, it was just structured differently.

The difference, I’ve come to see, isn’t just cultural, it’s philosophical. In many Eastern traditions, including Daoism and Confucianism, truth is not something to be pinned down and named, but something relational – always moving, always adapting. What matters is not what you say in isolation, but how your words ripple through the web of relationships around you. This has real implications for how tech is imagined and built. While Western teams might rush to prototype, name, and structure, their Eastern counterparts spend way more time in the murky early phases, aligning, harmonizing, intuiting. Neither is right or wrong (but that’s not what I thought at the beginning). They stem from different ideas of what communication is for – transmission vs. attunement, control vs. coherence.

And in the middle of it all is the technologist, or strategist, trying to translate between worlds that speak and think differently about what speech even means.

Innovation, risk, and the shape of time

Innovation is one of the most overused words in tech, and one of the most misunderstood. In the West, it often conjures a specific image: fast, disruptive, heroic! The startup outpacing the giant. The product that breaks everything and rebuilds it better. “Move fast and break things” became a kind of gospel – not just a strategy, but a worldview. Time, in this context, is linear and accelerating. The future is a frontier to conquer. But in Asia, I noticed a different tempo. Innovation isn’t always loud, it doesn’t arrive in dramatic ruptures, but in quiet adjustments, subtle refinements, iterations that evolve rather than explode. It feels less like (!) disruption (!) and more like cultivation.

To me, at first, this difference felt like hesitation. Why weren’t decisions being made faster? Why so much emphasis on precedent? But I began to see that this wasn’t fear, but rather it was a different understanding of risk, tied to a different perception of time. In many Eastern traditions, time is not just a straight line toward progress. It moves in cycles, waves, spirals. Innovation is not a rebellion against the past, but a continuation or unfolding within a wider pattern. Even the most advanced technologies are seen as harmonizing with something greater: nature, community, or cosmological order.

This isn’t to say there is no appetite for speed or scale in Asia. Of course there is – especially in places like China, South Korea, or Singapore. But beneath the surface, the values around change and control can differ significantly. A Western product manager might think: “How do we dominate the market?” An Eastern counterpart might ask: “How do we grow into the right position over time?”

This is also where Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics returns with force. If technology is always embedded in a worldview, then so too is the idea of innovation itself. In the West, technology is a tool to master the environment. In the East, it might be a means to participate in the environment, to attune to rhythms rather than override them. Understanding this doesn’t just make you a better cross-cultural manager. It makes you rethink the foundational myths of your own tech culture. It asks: Is faster always better? Is disruption always wise? Or have we mistaken speed for wisdom, and novelty for progress?

An insider case

Not long after I relocated, I found myself mingling with the Bangkok tech locals. And even though we all spoke English, I felt like I was speaking an entirely different language. What is your product go-to-market strategy, your KPIs, feature lists, mockups? Do you have an MVP, can I see a deck? But the Asians just kind of sat around, listened and nodded. Here and there they complimented each others’ work, but didn’t offer concrete feedback. No questions, no challenges, no counter proposals. Just soft smiles, noncommittal responses, warm in tone, vague in content. My Western side grew curious: “Why won’t they engage? Are they not serious?” It was like speaking into two very different frameworks.

The Western mindset is all about moving the ball forward, owning the process, delivering clarity. In the East that is seen as moving too quickly, without sufficient relational alignment or contextual understanding. Working in strategic management, I’m used to defining the future without respecting the rhythm of emergence. We think that this is how confidence looks like, but to them, it's arrogance. What we read as silence was actually processing, which for them is a culturally tuned way of taking time to consider deeper implications, including those unspoken.

I’m in love with slowness in life, in personal context. At work I’m like a rocket: my mind loves to problem solve, create systems, analyze and predict. Strategize, direct, target, shoot! But once I applied my off-the-clock mindset to my tech conversations, it made space to create a backchannel rapport, and things started to fall into place. Shaped by another logic. Generally I think that my communication and negotiation skills are pretty decent, but through this I learned how to communicate even better. Now, whether time is linear or spiral, whether success is built through assertion or attunement, I can make sense of it.

A plural tech mindset

The longer I stayed, the more I understood that what I was encountering wasn’t just a different style of doing business, but a different ontology. A different answer to the question: What is technology for?

In the West, we often imagine technology as an instrument or a neutral tool designed to extend human will, improve efficiency, and solve problems. But in much of the East, there’s still a lingering sense, mostly unspoken, that technology is not entirely separate from the moral order. That how we build things is inseparable from how we see ourselves in the world. This is where Yuk Hui’s ideas become a compass. If we accept that technology is always embedded in a worldview, then we must also accept that no single system – not even Silicon Valley's startup gospel or Berlin’s lean design ethos — has a monopoly on innovation, wisdom, or relevance. Instead, we begin to imagine a pluralistic tech future with multiple technological imaginaries. One where we can learn from each other’s methods, but also from each other’s metaphysics. Where a product isn’t just judged by performance, but by how well it integrates into a larger relational web with people, nature, time, and meaning.

And now the question – what does it mean for global tech companies? Is it a philosophical luxury or a strategic necessity?

The important thing is this: Teams that build across cultures, markets that span continents, users who carry different assumptions about privacy, trust, authority, and progress – all of this demands more than technical interoperability, it demands ontological fluency. And that is not to just localize language or tweak the UX. There should be organizations that can hold multiple truths at once, and that can operate with the humility to ask: What are we not seeing because of how we’ve been taught to see? This is especially relevant to the policies that are being debated and created to regulate new technology. New tech is global, cross-cultural and foremost, omnipresent. It is not tied to physical spaces, locations or ways of thinking. And yet, it is. That’s not easy. There will be (or is) so much discomfort, slowness, and sometimes contradiction. But it’s also where the most meaningful kinds of innovation begin, not in better code or faster deployment, but in better understanding of the context.

A changed lens

“In how many countries have you lived?” At this point I don’t even know, I have lost count, and I’m saying that as a person who loves counting. Each time I inhabited a different country, whichever continent it was, I emerged a different person. Over time, it just layered, and now I’m a cross-cultural collage of traits and experiences. So of course I came to Asia thinking I’d gain even more of that. That’s what happens when you spend enough time between systems. The invisible architecture behind the visible one catches you, slowly wraps you around and pulls you in. But I don’t pretend to have answers – I just have more refined questions.

It doesn’t necessarily mean I will abandon my management direction or working style. It works. But what can I take away from this? I think that in some contexts, away from direct product building, and more policy-oriented could really benefit from the Eastern approach, at least to some degree. In contexts that are (slightly) less reliant on working with the market logic, we could benefit from more intuition and ambiguity. Living between East and West has made me see technology not as a universal force, but as a mirror. And if we’re willing to look closely, and question what we’ve inherited, we might just start to build something more grounded, more plural, and more humane.

The challenge isn’t to choose one system over another, but rather it’s to become fluent in both – and to grow the kind of awareness that lets us move gracefully between them. Because in the end, doing tech well isn’t just about knowing the tools. It’s about knowing the worldviews they’re built on.

Title animation credits: Glitch Space by dualvoidanima