Ontoshift
Chapter 7 of Technological Metamodernism
Previously:
Reader: Alright, we’ve just spent three chapters exploring d/acc, Plurality, and cosmo-localism. You’ve made each sound compelling—defensive technologies that distribute power, digital infrastructure for genuine democracy, bioregional production rooted in global knowledge commons. But I keep coming back to a basic question: if these approaches are so great, why aren’t we seeing them at scale? Why are we still living in a world of surveillance capitalism and technofeudalism rather than plural democracies and fab cities?
Hilma: That’s a question that occupies me too. And I think the answer goes deeper than the usual explanations—lack of funding, political resistance, coordination problems, network effects of incumbent systems. Those are all real barriers, certainly. But they’re symptoms of something more fundamental.
Let me put it bluntly: these approaches aren’t scaling because they require people to perceive reality differently, and most people—including many who intellectually agree with these visions—still operate from the ontological assumptions of capitalist modernity.
Reader: “Ontological assumptions”? You’re going philosophical on me again. Can you translate that into something more concrete?
Hilma: Let me try with an example. Imagine a talented engineer working at a major tech company. She reads about Plurality, finds it intellectually compelling, even morally inspiring. She genuinely wants technology to serve democracy rather than undermine it. But when she sits down to design an actual system, what assumptions shape her work?
She assumes users are individuals making choices, not fundamentally social beings constituted by relationships. She assumes engagement metrics matter more than collective intelligence, because that’s what her training taught her and what her company rewards. She assumes data should be centrally stored for efficiency, because that’s the default architecture. She assumes rapid iteration beats careful deliberation, because that’s startup culture.
None of these assumptions are consciously chosen or explicitly defended–they’re simply how she sees the world. And these assumptions, embedded in thousands of small design decisions, reproduce the very systems d/acc, Plurality or cosmo-localism seek to transcend.
Reader: So you’re saying it’s a worldview problem? People can’t build alternative systems because they can’t see alternative realities?
Hilma: Exactly. Or more precisely: they can intellectually understand alternative frameworks, but they can’t inhabit them deeply enough to make the thousands of micro-decisions that determine what actually gets built. The inherited ontology reasserts itself in practice even when explicitly rejected in theory.
This brings us to what I think is the core challenge these approaches face. They all require what Bollier and Helfrich call an “Ontoshift”—not just new policies or new tools, but a transformation in how we understand the nature of reality itself.
Reader: You mentioned this concept at the end of the last chapter. Spell it out for me. What exactly is an “Ontoshift”?
Hilma: Let me start with where the term comes from. In Free, Fair and Alive, Bollier and Helfrich are trying to explain why commons-based approaches remain marginal despite their proven effectiveness. They trace the problem to what they call the “Ontostory” of modern capitalism—the fundamental narrative about reality that modern Western culture tells itself.
This Ontostory sees individuals as primary, autonomous units. It treats the world as composed of discrete objects with fixed, essential properties. It positions humanity as separate from “nature.” It celebrates individual liberty over collective coordination.
These aren’t just ideas people consciously hold—they’re baked into the language we use, the categories we think with, the institutions we build. They’re the constitutional framework of the modern worldview, determining what seems natural, what seems possible, what seems desirable.
An Ontoshift means transforming this fundamental framework. Not just thinking differently about specific issues, but shifting the deep presuppositions through which we perceive and engage with reality.
Reader: Can you give me some examples of what shifts we’re talking about?
Hilma: From seeing individuals as isolated, autonomous units to recognizing what Bollier and Helfrich call the “Nested-I”—the understanding that personal identity and agency are fundamentally constituted through relationships. You are not separate from your social context; you are woven from relationships, affiliations, memberships in multiple overlapping communities.
From treating property as individual possession to understanding it as relationships of mutual care and stewardship—what they call “relationalized property.” The question isn’t “who owns this?” but “who has what kinds of relationships with this, and how do those relationships create mutual obligations?”
From seeing nature as separate from humanity—a collection of “resources” to be managed—to recognizing what Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh called “interbeing.” The understanding that life is radically interconnected, that the boundaries we draw between self and other, human and nature, are conceptual conveniences rather than fundamental truths.
Reader: This sounds very... spiritual? Are we leaving the realm of practical technology policy and entering some kind of New Age philosophy?
Hilma: I understand the skepticism, and it’s worth addressing head-on. But notice what’s happening when you call this “spiritual” in a dismissive way—you’re performing exactly the ontological framework we’re discussing. Modern secular rationalism taught us to segregate the “objective” realm of facts, policy, and material reality from the “subjective” realm of values, meaning, and relationships. It then told us only the first realm is real and serious, while the second is private, optional, not properly the subject of collective concern.
But this segregation is itself an ontological choice, not a neutral description of reality. And it’s a choice with profound consequences. When we treat relationships as less real than objects, care as less valuable than production, meaning as subordinate to efficiency, we create systems that optimize for objects, production, and efficiency while degrading relationships, care, and meaning.
What I’m calling an Ontoshift isn’t about adding spirituality on top of material reality. It’s about recognizing that the supposedly “hard” objective realm and the supposedly “soft” subjective realm are deeply entangled—that how we understand reality shapes what we build, and what we build shapes how we understand reality. This is precisely what Alnoor Ladha meant in his interview with David Bollier when he said: “ontology feeds structure and structure feeds ontology.” The worldview enables certain institutional forms; those institutional forms reinforce the worldview. It’s a feedback loop, not a one-way causation.
Reader: Alright, I’m willing to suspend my skepticism for now. But how does this Ontoshift idea help explain why d/acc, Plurality, and cosmo-localism aren’t scaling?
Hilma: Because each of these frameworks implicitly requires a different ontology than the one most people—including many of their advocates—currently inhabit. They can’t be fully implemented by people operating from the assumptions of capitalist modernity, any more than Darwin could have articulated evolutionary theory while remaining committed to Biblical literalism about creation.
Let’s work through each approach and identify the specific ontological shifts it requires.
d/acc: Security as configuration, not possession
Reader: Start with d/acc. What’s the ontological shift there?
Hilma: The core shift is moving from understanding security as possession—having defensive capabilities, controlling protective resources—to understanding security as configuration—arranging relationships and systems such that threats are structurally difficult to realize.
Current security thinking, whether national defense or cybersecurity or public health, operates from an ontology of possession. Security means having: having weapons to deter adversaries, having walls to keep threats out, having surveillance to detect enemies, having vaccines stockpiled against pathogens. The secure agent is the one who possesses sufficient defensive capabilities to repel attacks.
This possession-based security ontology creates particular dynamics. It tends toward centralization—defensive capabilities concentrate in specialized institutions (militaries, intelligence agencies, public health bureaucracies) because specialization increases capability. It tends toward secrecy—you don’t want adversaries knowing your defensive capabilities or vulnerabilities. It tends toward zero-sum thinking—your security is achieved partly at others’ expense, through superior force or better defenses.
Reader: And d/acc requires a different ontology? How so?
Hilma: d/acc points toward a fundamentally different conception of security—one based on system configuration rather than resource competition.
Traditional security thinking is essentially adversarial: your safety depends on having more defensive capability than attackers have offensive capability. Build higher walls than they can scale. Field more soldiers than they can defeat. Stockpile more weapons than they can counter. This creates arms races, favors those with the most resources, and means security is always relative—you’re only as safe as your advantage over the threat.
Encryption works differently. Strong cryptography doesn’t protect your messages by “outgunning” attackers. It protects them through mathematical properties that hold regardless of how powerful the attacker is. The NSA’s vast computing resources don’t help them break properly-implemented AES—not because you’ve outspent them on defense, but because the mathematical configuration makes decryption infeasible for anyone without the key, no matter their resources.
This distinction matters enormously. Resource-competitive security concentrates in wealthy, powerful actors—only they can win arms races. Configuration-based security is available to anyone who implements it. A dissident journalist using Signal has the same cryptographic protection as a Fortune 500 company. The math doesn’t care who you are or what resources your adversaries command.
This configuration-based approach generalizes beyond cryptography. Consider pandemic defense. The resource-competitive version: governments stockpile vaccines, maintain hospital surge capacity, control borders to keep pathogens out. Your safety depends on whether your government has more resources than the pathogen has transmission opportunities. The configuration-based version: distributed manufacturing capacity for rapid vaccine adaptation, wastewater monitoring networks that anyone can access, HEPA filtration becoming standard in buildings, open-source knowledge for pathogen detection and response. Safety emerges from how the system is configured, not from any single authority’s resource advantage.
See the difference? Resource-competitive security asks “who has more capability—defenders or attackers?” Configuration-based security asks “can we arrange the system so that capability asymmetries matter less?”
Reader: I can see the distinction conceptually. But what makes this an ontological shift rather than just a different security strategy?
Hilma: Because it requires fundamentally reimagining what security is. In the possession framework, security is a state you achieve—being safe, being protected. It’s something you have. In the configuration framework, security is a relationship you maintain—being appropriately situated within networks and systems such that threats can’t easily manifest.
This connects to deeper questions about agency and causation. The possession ontology sees security as something individual agents (whether persons, nations, or institutions) achieve through their capabilities. The configuration ontology sees security as an emergent property of how multiple agents and systems are arranged—nobody possesses it individually, but everyone can participate in sustaining the conditions that generate it.
This opens fundamentally different technological possibilities. If security must be possessed, it tends toward technologies that concentrate power—stronger weapons, more pervasive surveillance, more centralized control. If security can be configured, it opens space for technologies that distribute capability—strong encryption, mesh networks, open-source biosecurity, decentralized infrastructure.
Current institutions struggle to embrace configuration-based security because it threatens their ontological foundations. National security agencies exist to possess capabilities that protect nations. Public health bureaucracies exist to control disease through centralized authority. These institutions can supplement their possession-based approaches with some configuration elements—encouraging vaccination, promoting hygiene—but they can’t fully shift to configuration because that would undermine their raison d’être.
Reader: So you’re saying these institutions are ontologically trapped? They can’t shift to configuration-based security without ceasing to be what they are?
Hilma: Largely, yes. Which is why d/acc can’t be implemented primarily through existing security institutions. It requires building parallel infrastructure—decentralized networks, open-source tools, distributed capabilities—that embodies configuration-based security from the ground up. But this parallel building struggles to get resources and legitimacy because the people controlling resources and conferring legitimacy are embedded in institutions shaped by possession-based security ontology.
This is the scaling problem. d/acc can work beautifully in communities that have made the ontological shift—cryptography communities, biosecurity networks, parts of the open-source world. But it can’t easily scale to civilizational level while most institutions and most people’s intuitions remain shaped by possession-based security thinking.
Plurality: Difference as opportunity, not problem
Reader: Now for Plurality. What ontological shift does that require?
Hilma: Moving from experiencing difference as problem—something to be resolved, overcome, or managed away—to experiencing difference as generative opportunity, the very substrate from which collective intelligence and robust decisions emerge.
The dominant ontology treats disagreement as malfunction. When people disagree in a meeting, the goal is resolution—find the consensus, silence the outliers, restore unity. Political philosophy in the liberal tradition talks about “reaching agreement” and “overlapping consensus” as if disagreement were a temporary defect in the social order. Social media platforms designed to ‘connect the world’ actually create filter bubbles through algorithmic curation, and when they do expose people to different perspectives, their engagement-optimization amplifies the most inflammatory framings—manufacturing tribal outrage rather than enabling productive encounter between genuinely different viewpoints. Even well-intentioned facilitation traditions often treat “moving through conflict” toward harmony as the destination—experiencing divergence as something to traverse rather than dwell in productively.
The deeper assumption is that correct answers exist and difference reflects deviation from them. If we’re all rational actors with access to the same information, we should converge. Persistent disagreement, therefore, signals irrationality, bad faith, or insufficient information—and the people who keep disagreeing become, in some sense, enemies of reasonable progress. The proper response is more data, better argument, or social pressure toward conformity.
Reader: That does describe how most institutions behave. But is difference actually generative? Most of my experience of disagreement is that it’s exhausting and productive only in retrospect, if at all.
Hilma: Most of your experience of disagreement is probably mediated by systems designed around the problem-ontology—platforms optimised for engagement through outrage, debate formats structured around winning and losing, meetings that equate consensus with success. Of course disagreement feels exhausting and adversarial when every structure you encounter encodes the assumption that it shouldn’t exist.
Plurality starts from a completely different premise: that human cognitive diversity is a feature, not a bug. Different people bring genuinely different information, genuinely different processing styles, genuinely different values. These aren’t errors to be corrected—they’re the raw material from which collective intelligence is generated. Epistemologists have formalised this through the “diversity trumps ability” theorem, which shows that under certain conditions a diverse group of problem-solvers will outperform a group of individually superior but similar ones. Innovation research consistently finds that breakthrough ideas emerge at the boundaries between disciplines, communities, and traditions—precisely where difference is sharpest and most uncomfortable.
The Pol.is interface embodies this ontology architecturally. Rather than structuring conversation as debate—opposing positions fighting for dominance, creating winners and losers and enemies—it maps the landscape of opinion and highlights statements that draw support across clusters that usually diverge. The algorithm doesn’t try to resolve difference; it makes difference legible and then surfaces the places where unexpected agreement emerges from within it. This presupposes that difference is information worth preserving, not noise to eliminate. The Taiwanese consultations on Uber regulation worked not despite the clash between taxi drivers and tech workers but because that clash contained genuine insight on both sides about fair labour practices, public safety, and economic disruption. The conflict was the resource.
Reader: But some differences aren’t epistemically productive—they’re just clashes of interest or value. Some conflicts really are zero-sum—dividing a fixed budget, negotiating wages against profits. One side’s gain is the other’s loss, full stop.
Hilma: Absolutely right—and Plurality doesn’t claim otherwise. The shift isn’t from conflict to harmony. It’s from treating conflict as inherently destructive and enemy-generating to treating it as potentially generative, while developing much better tools for distinguishing which conflicts carry real information and which are purely strategic. The Plurality ontology asks: what is this disagreement showing us? What does each position know that the other doesn’t? Where might they be pointing toward a synthesis neither has yet articulated?
This requires holding something psychologically difficult: genuine curiosity about perspectives you find wrong or even repugnant. The problem-ontology permits you to dismiss difference with the tools of debate—find the flaw, win the argument, move on. The opportunity-ontology demands you stay with the discomfort long enough to ask whether the position you’re opposing might be tracking something real, even if it’s expressing it badly. This is deeply metamodern territory: not resolving the tension between opposing views prematurely, but inhabiting it long enough for something new to emerge.
That’s the capacity Plurality’s tools are trying to build at scale. Not eliminating disagreement, but developing collective skill at inhabiting it productively—treating friction between perspectives as the engine of collective intelligence rather than the obstacle to it. Most people haven’t made this shift deeply enough to build the systems Plurality requires. They understand it intellectually but still experience disagreement as threat, still equate consensus with success, still unconsciously sort the world into reasonable people who agree with them and unreasonable enemies who don’t. Until that spontaneous reflex changes, even the best deliberative infrastructure will be undermined by the people operating it.
Cosmo-localism: Knowledge as commons, not commodity
Reader: Alright, I’m seeing the pattern. What’s the ontological shift for cosmo-localism?
Hilma: Moving from understanding knowledge as commodity—something owned, controlled, bought and sold—to understanding knowledge as commons—something shared, enriched through circulation, collectively stewarded.
The commodity ontology treats knowledge like any other scarce good. Value comes from exclusive control. If you discover something useful—a design, a technique, a formula—you protect it with intellectual property law, license it for fees, sell access. The more exclusively you control it, the more value you can extract. Knowledge is treated as capital—something that generates returns through monopolization.
This ontology is embedded throughout modern institutions. Universities increasingly patent discoveries and establish exclusive licensing deals. Pharmaceutical companies guard drug formulas zealously. Tech companies treat source code as their most valuable asset, protecting it obsessively. Individual researchers build careers on being first to publish—staking territorial claims over intellectual territory.
Reader: But there are good reasons for this, right? People need incentives to invest in creating knowledge. If anyone can immediately copy your innovation, why would you invest time and resources developing it?
Hilma: That’s the standard argument, and it has some validity within the commodity ontology. But it ignores how knowledge actually works as a phenomenon, how it behaves when shared versus when controlled.
Knowledge is “non-rivalrous”—my using it doesn’t diminish your ability to use it. Unlike physical objects, knowledge can be copied infinitely at near-zero marginal cost. This means knowledge is actually more valuable the more widely it’s shared, not less. A design used by one person has limited value. The same design used by thousands generates massive collective value—improvements, adaptations, complementary innovations, network effects.
The commodity ontology, by treating knowledge as scarce when it’s actually abundant, creates artificial scarcity that reduces total value while enabling private extraction. Patent monopolies prevent beneficial innovations from reaching people who need them. Trade secrets mean problems get solved repeatedly in isolation rather than once collaboratively. Paywalls fragment knowledge that would be more valuable unified.
In a commons, knowledge is created not primarily for profit but for use—to solve problems, to help communities, to advance collective understanding. The motivation isn’t “how do I extract maximum value from this?” but “how can this be most useful?”
This doesn’t mean knowledge creation can’t be funded. It means using different funding mechanisms that don’t require monopolization. Quadratic funding for public goods. Retroactive funding based on actual impact. Community subscriptions supporting ongoing open work. Government funding for research treated as public infrastructure rather than privatizable intellectual property.
These mechanisms are often more efficient than commodity-based ones because they eliminate the deadweight loss of artificial scarcity.
Reader: So the shift is from “knowledge as private property that generates profit” to “knowledge as shared resource that generates collective value”?
Hilma: Yes, but it’s even deeper. It’s a shift in how we understand what knowledge is. In the commodity ontology, knowledge is treated as a thing—an object that can be owned, transferred, bought and sold. In the commons ontology, knowledge is understood as relationship—it exists in the connections between people, in shared practices, in collective memory, in ongoing dialogue.
Think about what happens when you learn something from someone. They don’t lose the knowledge when they share it—unlike physical objects that change possession. Both of you now know it. And your understanding might differ from theirs because you bring different context, different connections to other knowledge, different ways of applying it. The knowledge grows through sharing, elaborating, diversifying.
The commons ontology recognizes this is how knowledge actually behaves. It sees knowledge as alive—constantly evolving, adapting, being refined through use. Treating it as dead commodity to be frozen in patents or locked behind paywalls violates its nature.
Reader: This is starting to sound quite radical—you’re basically arguing for abolishing intellectual property?
Hilma: Not necessarily abolishing entirely, but recognizing that IP law emerged from and reinforces a particular ontology that may not be appropriate for all knowledge in all contexts. Some knowledge—cultural expressions deeply tied to specific communities, indigenous practices developed over generations, genetic resources from particular ecosystems—may need protection for different reasons: to prevent appropriation and exploitation, to maintain relationships with source communities, to ensure benefits flow to those who stewarded the knowledge.
What cosmo-localism argues against is the default of treating all knowledge as private property. Instead, the default should be knowledge as commons—freely shared, collectively stewarded, openly accessible. Exceptions should be justified based on specific contexts and relationships, not assumed as natural.
Reader: So all three approaches—d/acc, Plurality, cosmo-localism—require ontological shifts that most people haven’t made. That’s why they’re not scaling?
Hilma: That’s my sense. You can’t fully implement defensive, decentralizing technology while thinking of security as possession. You can’t build genuine Plural infrastructure while experiencing difference as problem. You can’t participate in cosmo-local production while treating knowledge as commodity.
The frameworks remain marginal not because they lack good ideas or technical feasibility, but because they’re asking people to inhabit ontologies most of us weren’t raised with and aren’t practiced in. We intellectually understand these alternatives, but we haven’t done the deeper work of shifting how we actually perceive and engage with reality.
Now, I want to be very clear about something before we continue: I’m not claiming that the ontology implicit in d/acc, Plurality, and cosmo-localism is objectively superior to the ontology of capitalist modernity. That would be committing exactly the kind of metaphysical overreach that modernity itself is guilty of.
Reader: Wait, what? You’ve just spent pages arguing these ontological shifts are necessary and beneficial. Now you’re saying they’re not better? That seems like a contradiction.
Hilma: Not a contradiction—a necessary complication. Let me explain by invoking Arturo Escobar’s concept of the pluriverse.
The modern Western worldview assumes what Escobar calls a “One-World World”—a single reality that we’re all trying to understand correctly, one ladder of progress we’re all climbing at different speeds, one set of truths valid for everyone everywhere. In this framework, ontological disagreements are ultimately matters of being right or wrong. If my ontology is better at explaining reality, it’s objectively superior, and everyone should adopt it.
The pluriverse framework rejects this entirely. It holds that there are multiple valid ways of being in the world, multiple ontologies that work for different purposes in different contexts, multiple realities that can coexist rather than compete. As the Zapatistas say: “A world where many worlds fit.”
Reader: That sounds like relativism. “Everything is true from some perspective, there are no real disagreements, just different but equally valid viewpoints”?
Hilma: No—and this is crucial. The pluriverse isn’t about relativism, which collapses into “anything goes.” It’s about recognizing that different ontologies have different affordances—they enable different capabilities, make different things visible, support different values.
Think about maps. A topographic map shows elevation, terrain features, watersheds. A road map shows highways, cities, distances. A political map shows borders, jurisdictions, administrative divisions. A geological map shows rock types, fault lines, resource deposits.
None of these is objectively superior to the others. Each is optimized for different purposes. If you’re planning a hike in mountainous terrain, the topographic map is essential—the road map won’t help you understand what you’re getting into. If you’re driving cross-country, the road map is what you need—the geological map is useless. Each map makes certain features visible while hiding others. Each is appropriate for certain purposes and inappropriate for others.
The problem with the Western-individualist ontology embedded in capitalist modernity isn’t that it’s wrong exactly. It’s that it’s become utterly dominant–an invasive species that has colonized the mind. Healthy civilizations, like healthy ecosystems, rely on diversity. Any single ontology, however sophisticated, will be inadequate for navigating the full complexity of human existence.
Reader: Okay, I appreciate the metaphors. But you still seem to be implying these alternative ontologies are better, or at least that we need them to complement the dominant one. Isn’t that still making a superiority claim?
Hilma: What I’m claiming is that ontological diversity is superior to ontological monoculture—not because any particular ontology is supreme, but because different ontologies enable different capabilities, and we need multiple capabilities to navigate complexity.
Let me be even more specific. The security-as-possession ontology has real strengths. It makes centralized defensive capabilities visible and legitimate. It enables coordinated response to threats. It provides clear chains of command in crisis. These are genuine affordances that configuration-based security must work hard to achieve. For certain threats, in certain contexts, possession-based defense is clearly superior.
But possession-based security also has profound limitations and failure modes—centralization creating single points of failure, secrecy enabling corruption and overreach, competitive dynamics driving arms races. For these problems, configuration-based security offers capabilities that possession-based approaches struggle to achieve.
The wisdom isn’t saying “configuration is always better”—it’s developing skill at moving between ontologies, knowing when to think about security as possession and when to think about it as configuration, using whichever map is appropriate for your current terrain.
Reader: So the goal is ontological flexibility? Being able to shift between different ways of seeing?
Hilma: That’s right. This is the metamodern move applied to ontology itself. Chapter 4 described metamodernism as oscillation between positions rather than commitment to either pole—holding tensions productively rather than resolving them prematurely. Pluriversal thinking extends this sensibility to the deepest level: we oscillate between ontologies rather than defending one as final truth. We hold the tension between, say, security-as-possession and security-as-configuration, deploying whichever frame serves the situation rather than collapsing into either. Not accepting the dominant ontology as given, not denying its validity entirely, but understanding it as one move among many and developing skill at shifting between them.
Reader: I’m noticing something. This talk of ontological shifts, of developing new capabilities, of “cultivating” different ways of seeing—it sounds an awful lot like those developmental stage theories you were critical of earlier. The ones that create hierarchies of consciousness. Are you smuggling that back in?
Hilma: You’ve identified a genuine tension. Yes, there are significant parallels between Ontoshift/Pluriversal thinking and developmental stage theories like Spiral Dynamics, Integral Theory, and the metamodern developmental model in The Listening Society. But there are also crucial differences, and I want to be precise about both.
The similarities are real. All recognize that people can develop different capacities for holding complexity. All observe these capacities tend to unfold in predictable patterns. All acknowledge that some ways of thinking are more adequate for navigating contemporary challenges. And all insist that ontological development isn’t just intellectual—it’s embodied, emotional, relational. You can’t think yourself into a new ontology through pure reasoning.
The critical difference is how they treat the relationship between different stages or ontologies. Classical developmental models arrange stages hierarchically. Later stages are presented as frankly more advanced than earlier ones. This generates several linked problems: insufferable self-congratulation among people who identify as being at “higher stages,” cultural imperialism where Western-educated intellectuals conveniently place themselves at the top, and obscuring that different ontologies might simply be more appropriate for different contexts.
The Ontoshift framework treats different ontologies as lateral rather than vertical. They’re different maps, different tools, different capabilities—not rungs on a ladder where higher is better. Think about languages. Nobody claims French is more “developed” than Chinese. Different languages have different features, different affordances.
Reader: But you’re still claiming some people have more ontological flexibility than others. Isn’t that creating a hierarchy—the flexible versus the rigid?
Hilma: I can’t fully escape the developmental dimension, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Yes, some people have developed greater ontological flexibility than others. But this is more like being multilingual versus monolingual—a specific capability useful in certain contexts, not a mark of being a better person or more evolutionarily advanced. Ontological flexibility is particularly valuable for navigating contemporary complexity, when you need to coordinate across communities with different worldviews. But a farmer deeply rooted in one place, working within a coherent worldview passed down through generations—their stability is a strength, not a weakness.
Three differences make the Ontoshift framing meaningfully distinct from stage theory.
Directionality. Developmental stage models assume a primary direction of development—from simple to complex, egocentric to worldcentric, concrete to abstract. The structure itself creates hierarchical thinking. The Ontoshift framework treats ontologies as multidimensional—there isn’t one primary axis of development but many possible directions. You can develop greater appreciation for difference or deeper rootedness in place. These aren’t ranked on a single scale.
Reversibility. Stage theories present development as one-way—once you’ve achieved a stage, you’ve transcended earlier ones. The Ontoshift framework treats shifting between ontologies as something you can do repeatedly, deliberately, as circumstances require. You haven’t “transcended” commodity-based thinking about knowledge when you learn commons-based thinking—you’ve added a capability you can still deploy when appropriate.
Cultural specificity. Stage theories present as universal—these stages apply to everyone, everywhere. The Ontoshift framework is more humble. Different cultures have developed different ontologies not because some are more evolved but because they faced different challenges, inhabited different environments, chose different values. Western individualism (or even metamodernism) isn’t the pinnacle of human ontological evolution; it’s one possibility among many. This opens space for learning from cultures that developed different ontological capabilities—indigenous relationality isn’t a “lower stage” preceding Western individualism, it’s a sophisticated alternative well-adapted for sustainable inhabitation of ecosystems.
Reader: I’m still sensing some reluctance about developmental frameworks. Is there something else?
Hilma: Yes—and it’s personal as much as philosophical. I’ve watched too many people use developmental stage theories as weapons of spiritual superiority. “You’re stuck at green, I’ve evolved to teal.” The frameworks become ways to dismiss others’ perspectives without engaging with them. This is toxic for both parties and violates the very insights the frameworks claim to embody—genuine development should make you more humble, more able to learn from others.
The Ontoshift language is somewhat less prone to this abuse. Talking about shifts rather than stages emphasizes movement and flexibility rather than position and attainment. The map metaphor makes clear that different ontologies suit different purposes—you’re not claiming superiority, you’re noticing that for this terrain, a different map might be more useful. That’s much harder to weaponize for status games. The Ontoshift framing explicitly honors multiple ontologies as valid, resisting the tendency to rank them.
Reader: Has this discussion convinced you to abandon developmental frameworks entirely?
Hilma: No—that would be overcorrection. The developmental models are seeing something real: patterns in how people develop capacities for holding complexity, for perspective-taking, for systems thinking. The empirical research is substantial. What I advocate is lightening our grip on developmental thinking while deepening appreciation for ontological diversity. Use developmental insights descriptively—“here’s a pattern we often observe”—not prescriptively—“this is the path everyone should follow.” Recognize that development might proceed along multiple dimensions simultaneously rather than a single axis. Most importantly, maintain profound humility about whether movement along any particular developmental dimension constitutes genuine maturation versus just cultivating capabilities the theorist happens to value.
The Ontoshift framework preserves what’s valuable in developmental thinking—recognition that ontologies can be learned, that some ontological capabilities are useful for certain challenges—while avoiding the worst pathologies of stage thinking. Different maps rather than a single ladder. That distinction matters.
Reader: Alright, I’m convinced there’s value in thinking about ontological shifts rather than developmental stages. But we’ve been quite abstract for a while now. How do people actually make these shifts? What enables someone to move from seeing knowledge as commodity to seeing it as commons?
Hilma: Firstly, I’ll reiterate my belief that building and participating in d/acc, Plurality or cosmo-local systems is itself one of the most powerful practices for catalyzing Ontoshifts. The technologies aren’t just outputs of transformed consciousness—they’re inputs, creating conditions where consciousness can transform. Ontology feeds structure and structure feeds ontology.
Second, there are specific psychotechnologies, social practices and infrastructures that can support the ontoshifts these alternative technological frameworks require. That’s what we’ll explore in the coming chapters.
We’ll examine contemplative practices that develop awareness of how consciousness constructs reality. We’ll look at education approaches that cultivate ontological flexibility rather than indoctrinating single worldviews. We’ll consider the role of “pop-up” communities, where people experiment with living from different ontological assumptions.
We’ll be mapping the landscape of approaches people are exploring, understanding what each offers and what limitations it faces, and providing coordinates for experimentation, rather than a precise recipe for transformation. Because ultimately, an Ontoshift is something each person must discover for themselves. Nobody can grant you a new ontology. But we can create conditions that make the shift more likely, more sustainable, more supported when it occurs.
The path forward isn’t sequential—first Ontoshift, then new systems. It’s simultaneous and mutually reinforcing—systems that embody new ontologies while creating conditions for people to develop the ontological capabilities those systems require.
Let’s begin by exploring contemporary psychotechnologies—practices for transforming consciousness itself.
Hi Stephen! I appreciate the work you’re doing through this substack. I think the ontoshift is a real and significant need/opportunity for social growth, and i also want to emphasize some elements of the ontoshift I’ve been working on/with/though in my life and work in the past handful of years that i think may support your approach and perspective.
In particular, I am trying to lean heavily into the Gradient, *relative* nature of the distinction between systems, ontologies, approaches, etc… So for me, this means that there’s more of a difference of degree of emphasis, rather than a categorical distinction. In particular, this means more explicitly recognizing that “transactional”, “objectifying”, and “property-based” protocols are always already relational and interconnected.
I’m saying this because its one element that stands out in your writing that reminds me of other metamodern approaches to new-world-system-building that are still more heavily steeped in binary categorizations than I aspire to be. You can seem some of my more systematic /comprehensive comments to this effect on my recent substack replies to michel bauwens and Benjamin Life.
I also imagine (and hope) that you might find my seminal essay on onto-ethico-epistemic-phenomenology very interesting and worth your time. I will be posting the link to that in my next substack post in a couple hours.
Thanks for your efforts to build a more beautiful world. 🙏