Technological artefacts have become “world objects” – they affect the world as a whole. This becomes increasingly evident considering the imprint of their development and use on our global natural environment. The growing awareness of the entanglement of humans, their practices, and their technological artefacts with their natural environments goes along with growing uncertainty. The rising number of experiences with the catastrophic consequences of climate change and environmental crises are increasingly shaking many people’s belief in a stable course of life and of the future. Although the philosophy of technology, and the ethics it grounds, should provide us with the necessary tools to conceptualize, clarify, and counteract this uncertainty, we argue that it has so far largely overlooked an important dimension of technological artefacts, namely their environmental-social history. With this charge, we particularly address the so-called empirical turn in philosophy of technology, which examines the affordances of concrete technological artefacts. We argue that this focus on concreteness has blinded the philosophy of technology to the material environmental-social condition of the existence and use of technological artefacts, and as such to its own existence as a philosophical discourse. We advocate not to abandon the lessons of the empirical turn, but to put its approach into its wider ecological and socio-political context. Part of this context are ongoing practices of extractivism. Indeed, all the technological artefacts that we know and use are grounded in the practice of extracting natural resources, of which extractivism is a linear and systematic acceleration. We develop a scale critique of the current state of the philosophy of technology, from concrete technological artefacts to the global environmental-social context in which they arise. In doing so, we further flesh out the meaning of what has been called the “terrestrial turn” in the philosophy of technology by considering the role extractivism plays as an unquestioned environmental-social material condition of the philosophy of technology. We propose that alternative, “de-extracted” approaches to the philosophy of technology are needed to complement the current discourse.