When the philosopher of technology Yuk Hui claims that a global technology cannot exist, he is not contradicting the obvious – airplanes, smartphones, and AI are undoubtedly present everywhere – but rather the underlying myth of neutrality. Hui shows that technology is never merely a technical solution but always also a cultural configuration, interwoven with ideas about the human being, the cosmos, and the good life. Every culture produces its own way of ordering the world and generating meaning, and this order shapes its technological systems. Technology, which we so easily take for granted, thus appears as a historically and cosmologically conditioned practice: as cosmotechnics.
In this thinking Hui stands in a clear, though not uncritical, proximity to Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, too, saw modern technology not as a mere collection of devices but as a mode of revealing that forces being into a particular horizon. His notion of Gestell describes the modern world not as an assemblage of useful means but as an all-encompassing ordering principle in which things appear only as resources. Hui adopts this fundamental intuition but frees it from Heidegger’s often fateful sense of inevitability. Whereas Heidegger treats the modern technological world as a nearly unavoidable, globally dominant way of being, Hui opens a space for plurality: there could be many technologies rooted in different cosmologies; many ways of understanding the world, and hence many possible technological futures. Art becomes the key instance in this framework – for both thinkers – yet in Hui it takes on a distinctly world-pluralistic function: it reveals unactualized possibilities, alternative modes of perception and relation, that can inspire and transform the technological. From this perspective it becomes clear that travel, too, is never merely a movement across space but a meeting of cosmotechnics – a friction between ways of being in the world that, at best, enrich one another.
It is within this context that the Nine Doors of Travel open up: a philosophy that leads travel out of its touristic impoverishment and back into an aesthetic and existential practice. The structure of the Nine Doors can be understood through three spheres, each illuminating a particular dimension of the journey. The inner sphere encompasses metamorphosis, transformation, and intuition – three processes that do not simply take the traveler to new places but set in motion what within them has remained dormant or unformed. The outer sphere describes constellation, transaction, and resonance space, making visible that every journey is a mesh of situations, exchanges, and atmospheric fields in which meaning emerges. And the social sphere distinguishes between traveling alone, as a couple, or as a group, not as logistical categories but as different modes of self-perception, attention, and relation to the world. Taken together, these three spheres form the architecture of the Nine Doors – an open system describing how travel becomes a movement of internal and external becoming.
Each door embodies an attitude toward being on the move: a way of seeing, of inscribing oneself into the world, of allowing oneself to be shaken or expanded by it. Because they are movements rather than rules, the Nine Doors offer a counter-image to the algorithmic flattening that increasingly shapes our experience. They remind us that travel begins not with predictability but with the tactile encounter with the unknown.
In this sense, art becomes indispensable – both in Hui’s thinking and in the philosophy of the Doors. Art is what makes the world appear differently. It is what resists the grasp of function, what does not need to explain itself in order to have an effect. Perhaps it is even the only space in which intuition and sensitivity can live undisturbed. And it is precisely here, in this aesthetic dimension, that the Nine Doors meet Hui’s cosmotechnics: both emphasize the necessity of a form of perception that does not conform to the grid of usefulness. Art becomes a school of travel, because it teaches us to look again without immediately seeking to understand.
Yet under today’s digital platforms this way of seeing is increasingly endangered. Algorithms designed to protect us from overwhelm begin to smooth the world. They filter, sort, and prioritize; they make decisions easier, yet quietly remove that uncertainty which makes travel transformative. Intuition yields to recommendation; freedom to optimization; sensitivity to data points. The world loses depth when it consists only of what a system presents to us. And yet within this situation lies the possibility of a new, conscious design of artificial intelligence. An AI shaped by the spirit of the Nine Doors would not lead, but accompany. It would cultivate an awareness for those interstitial spaces where the expected and the surprising meet. It would pose questions instead of dictating answers, helping the traveler sharpen their own perception. Such an AI would not be a navigator that knows the shortest route, but an aesthetic compass that widens the field of possibility. It might suggest the unforeseen without imposing it; it might offer cues that do not predict how we will act but encourage us to see differently.
In such a future, the Door of Sensitivity would be more than a moral gesture. It would imply a technology attuned to atmospheric qualities – those quiet signs that cannot be measured yet transform a journey. AI would provide not only facts about places but also moods, stories, and fragile connections. It would restore the unspectacular as a legitimate mode of experience and free travelers from the confines of rating systems. At best, it would cultivate a relationship between traveler and place supported not by consumption but by attention.
Freedom, too, would take on a new timbre. It would no longer be the illusion of endless choice, but the capacity to face the uncertain without fear. An AI that protects freedom would need to incorporate precisely what cannot be calculated – chance, incompleteness, silence. It would need to question itself rather than present itself as an all-knowing authority. Perhaps the greatest freedom AI could ever offer is the insight that we do not have to follow it. That it offers options, not paths. That it sees us without defining us.
Responsibility ultimately stands at the heart of travel. Every movement through the world has consequences – for landscapes, for communities, for fragile cultural fabrics. An AI that takes responsibility seriously would not obscure these relationships but illuminate them. It would amplify local perspectives and invite travelers into networks of mutual care. This, too, would constitute a cosmotechnics in Hui’s sense: a technology that does not destroy but binds; that does not dominate but mediates. Within this vision, one can glimpse the outline of a new kind of digital travel platform. A platform that does not cling to destinations, but to world-relations. The Nine Doors would not appear as categories, but as passages – ways of approaching the world with different eyes. Such a platform would be less a map than a compass; less an algorithm than an invitation. It would trust that people can find their own paths – and that technology does not have to stand in their way.
Travel, in this understanding, is no act of consumption but a form of art. It is the art of losing and finding oneself; the art of experiencing the world as something unfinished, something that does not wait for us yet nonetheless receives us. If AI one day accompanies this form of travel without diminishing it, then only because we have learned to treat AI itself as an aesthetic practice – as a space in which perception can grow.
In such a future the world is not smoother but richer. Not more univocal but more diverse. Not more predictable but more human. And the doors we pass through on our journeys will not be made of stone, steel, or software, but will open within us when we are willing to see differently