Information Systems scholarship has increasingly recognized that technological success cannot be evaluated solely through performance, scalability, or efficiency. Recent work has instead emphasized the contextual, social, and civic dimensions of technological development, drawing attention to participation, explainability, legitimacy, and lived experience in use (Sarker et al., 2019). Drawing on insights from the social sciences and humanities, this shift has broadened how designers and institutions understand technology in practice, including its effects on organizational routines, participation, and vulnerability. Yet the dominant benchmarks shaping technological progress remain heavily oriented toward speed, efficiency, and scalability, often at the expense of accountability, social development, and collective well-being (Scott et al., 2025). The result is a widening gap between technical capability and the societal conditions – structural, institutional, and cultural – within which systems shape participation, governance, and human agency. The consequences are increasingly visible across contemporary digital systems. Biometric identification schemes may exclude eligible beneficiaries where documentation or network quality is uneven. Risk scoring in welfare and credit can shift the burden of error onto those least able to absorb it. Workplace monitoring may intensify surveillance while limiting recourse, while content moderation systems can centralise discretionary power without meaningful mechanisms for contestation. These outcomes reflect an innovation culture that frequently subordinates ethical reasoning to the imperatives of speed, scale, and deployment, treating moral reflection as peripheral rather than foundational to design (Chatterjee et al., 2009).