Abstract

The concept of an ontology of digital worldlessness developed in this essay examines how the unequal distribution of the ecological, political, and economic harms of AI undermines plural political belonging in a common world. It argues that digital worldlessness stems from a constellation of several sociopolitical practices, including: a) the formalization of information inherent in algorithmic procedures abstracted from the material world, history, and common sense; b) the insertion of digital surveillance networks into a common world to facilitate continuous extraction of data; c) the opacity of algorithmic procedures to the general public affected by their outcomes; and d) the algorithmic sorting of people and nonhuman phenomena in relation to prediction targets set by corporations and state institutions. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political theory and on critical race and feminist theories of AI, in particular, Ruha Benjamin and Wendy Chun, the essay foregrounds the relationship between world, technology and power in order to analyze the assaults on human plurality by algorithmic practices. These practices not only automate gender, racist and economic discrimination, but also undermine collective action contesting these harms. This approach to digital ontology provides an alternative to the dominant but narrow technical meaning of computational ontology in analytical philosophies and computer sciences where this term refers to formulating compatible taxonomies among different data sets for the purposes of information classification.