What if we stopped patching harmful and extractive technology and reimagined it entirely? What would the new design patterns be?
Tech is full of business, finance, and measurement models that prioritize profits for the few at the cost of the whole. What models are obsolete, ready to be transformed? Not just because they’re awful and annoying, but because they undermine the health of people, society, and the planet?
That was the provocation at the heart of the Regenerative Technology Project’s recent “Playshop” — an imaginarium for collective curiosity and alternative to the standard workshop. Scores of participants from across the globe gathered to do something deceptively simple: take a broken pattern in today’s tech ecosystem and reimagine it as something life-giving. The result was a lively, cross-pollinating conversation that surfaced new patterns worth naming — and nurturing!
The Exercise: Reimagine Extractive Patterns in Tech
First, participants named what they’d most like to transform, to change, to compost in the current tech paradigm. Some of the examples we heard:
- Attention-grabbing algorithms
- Scarcity mindsets
- Monopolistic network effects
- Shareholder supremacy
- Rent-seeking platforms that enrich a narrow few at the expense of the whole
- Lock-in, low portability across platforms
Then came the harder challenge: take one of these extractive patterns and reimagine it as regenerative. What would it look like? What relationships would need to shift?
Across six breakout rooms — covering regenerative AI, sensing and IoT, commons and cooperatives, indigeneity in tech, developer tools, and decentralized tech — the community got to work. The discussions were wild and diverse, perfect loamy soil for reimagination. Here’s what emerged.
New Patterns for Designing Tech
From Profit Metrics to Life Metrics The most recurring theme was replacing single-metric optimization (growth, profit, time-on-site) with multi-dimensional measures of health. Participants pointed to frameworks like Doughnut Economics as models for technology that balances ecological, social, and economic value — what one participant called “flipping the switch” toward holistic metrics that measure life, sustainability, and environmental, social, and bioregional health.
From Narrow Value to Common Value Several participants pushed beyond critiquing capitalism toward building alternatives. One concrete example: the Sarafu Network, where people pool and trade commitments rather than money — creating micro-networks of reciprocal exchange that rebuild social trust. What if “value” in Tech were not we something extracted, but something woven between people? It’s a real-world manifestation of the collaborative, participatory principle: shifting toward models that facilitate abundance through mutual offering rather than transactional exchange.
From Proprietary Ownership to Open Commons Conversations circled around membership models, cooperative ownership, and the shift from closed, zero-sum intellectual property toward open-source, ecosystemic innovation. The pattern: tech that enriches a whole community rather than locking value behind a paywall. In the spirit of design principles that mimic nature’s genius, this is an expression of circulatory flows and metabolism, where information and value circulate symmetrically across a network rather than pooling at the top.
From Scaling Up to Scaling Out — Fractally One participant reframed scale itself. Rather than copy-paste growth that strips local context, what if technology grew fractally — consciously extending patterns that are life-affirming, and pausing to ask whether a pattern should continue before propagating it further? This mirrors how healthy ecosystems grow: adapting to place (ecological niche; context) rather than enforcing uniform structure.
From Human-Centered to More-Than-Human Design. Participants noted that even the founding vision of the web — “to serve humanity” — encodes a problematic anthropocentrism, or myopic orientation around humans as the only stakeholders. Regenerative technology expands its circle of care to include all life: other species, ecosystems, and the living world of which humans are only a part. This wisdom is echoed in many ancient and indigenous worldviews and their “TEK” (traditional ecological knowledge) which recognizes that all tech is in relationship to its ecology, localized to community, cultural, and bioregional contexts.
From AI as Product to AI as Offspring. One of the more provocative threads questioned whether “regenerative” even goes far enough. If regeneration means restoring what we had, what if our aim is something evolutionarily novel and precious — progenerative? One participant proposed treating AI not as a product, but as offspring — a child of human culture that reflects back whatever values we encode into it. If we encode domination and extraction, we get domination and extraction. If we encode relationship and care, something different becomes possible.
From Next Quarter to Next Generation: Several participants offered a longer-horizon frame: whatever we build now, we should be building with the next generation in mind. Designing tools in an educational, youth-centered manner may not yield immediate results, but over decades it compounds — seeding the values, literacies, and relationships that will shape how future generations relate to technology and to each other.
From Monoculture to Diversity The event itself embodied another pattern worth naming: diverse participants arrived from across continents, disciplines, and movements. Many different perspectives and fragmented efforts are coalescing around the need for different patterns in the tech we’re all building and using. The living systems principle of resilience through diversity is as relevant in Tech as ever: many voices and perspectives create better technologies; build for interoperability and open standards, and ensure multiple pathways so no single point of failure can bring down the whole.
Alignment with Living Systems Principles
These patterns are not random, they echo 4 billion years of nature’s R&D — a profound re-membering with millennia of experimentation and learning that can guide how we design, govern, and relate to our technologies.
The RegenTech whitepaper maps these principles to technology directly: interdependence points toward holistic, life-centered design; circulatory flows toward circular economy and value-sharing across networks; resilience through diversity toward interoperability and redundancy; self-organizing in balance toward systems that scale outward and adapt, rather than replicate rigid structures. Where extractive tech optimizes for uniformity, regenerative tech favors diversity and place-based adaptation. Where extractive tech centralizes power, regenerative tech distributes capacity. Where extractive tech operates on closed, zero-sum logic, regenerative tech circulates value openly. Above all, relationships (rather than transactions) emerged as the key organizing principle that extractive tech destroys and regenerative tech must regrow.
Technology is not inherently good or bad. It’s a mirror. As one participant put it, the problem is rarely the tool itself — it’s the values encoded in it, and whose voices are in the room when we build it. Regenerative technology starts there: with different values, different voices, and a fundamentally different relationship to life.
The playshop ended with a dance party. Because this work isn’t about frameworks and methodologies — it’s a practice of joy, connection, and showing up with our whole messy, silly, and creaturely selves.
The Regenerative Technology Project hosts these playshops quarterly, with the next event planned in June. Join us and bring your imagination!
The time to transform tech is now. What will we reimagine together?