I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely, induced by the panic of the Spanish invasion in 1588. “My mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear,” he would later write in an autobiographical poem. The politics of fear would become a central aspect of his philosophy.
Hobbes was born to a modest family, but destiny put him into the care of his wealthy uncle. Well-educated, young Thomas made his way to Oxford and Cambridge, and then he spent his twenties steeped in literary classics. Hobbes worked as a tutor and translator, and around age 40 his work brought him to Paris, where he studied philosophy and began to write on political issues.
In his late 40s, Hobbes returned to his native England to find it riven by civil war. The big question was whether Britain should be ruled by a monarch with absolute authority or through a more limited constitutional monarchy.
It was at this point Hobbes wrote what would become his greatest work, Leviathan, which argues in support of absolute monarchy.
The Social Contract
Without a strong and respected head of state, Hobbes argues in Leviathan, society descends into what Hobbes saw as the pre-civilizational state of nature: a “war of all against all.” In such a state, everyone must look out for numero uno, and there’s no trade or collaboration.
As Hobbes writes in chapter 13 of Leviathan:
In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
But people can escape this “state of nature” by establishing contracts and covenants with each other, sacrificing some individual rights for greater mutual gain. For Hobbes, this is the basis of all civilization—tribes, towns and eventually city-states. Humans discover that when they work together, things like culture and knowledge and navigation become possible. And Hobbes sees the logical conclusion of this being a large nation with a strong head of state holding it all together.
This idea is the original formulation of social contract theory, and it has been very influential. Hobbes’ account has spawned all sorts of takes and spinoffs over the centuries.
The social contract is meant, in broad terms, to provide a basis for design—in its original sense, the design of a political system. There’s some indication that Hobbes was not trying to describe things as they are, but rather to provide a political justification for how he wanted things to be.
But it turns out that Hobbes’ theory rests on some false assumptions. For instance, recent evolutionary anthropology suggests that humans are pretty much cooperative and collaborative all the way back. And some of Hobbes’ assumptions about how civilization forms—by voluntary equals who self-consciously negotiate over particular rights and responsibilities—do not seem to be how political entities actually emerge. The theory is also limited in other ways. It doesn’t account for why we care about others who do nothing for us, including future generations, animals and things.
All this being the case, Hobbes’ social contract theory doesn’t really provide an accurate description nor much of a guide for us today, especially outside the political sphere.
Still, the project is worthwhile, and I think that’s why his theory endures. What basis is there for our being together here on earth, and what sort of contract or covenant might provide us with guidance for design?
A “Social Contract” for the Infosphere
Last week I wrote about the notion of the biosphere and the more recent infosphere.
The biosphere is a way of conceptualizing the world to acknowledge the mutual bonds that all lifeforms have with each other. It’s a mode of description that can help us if our goal is to keep life going here on earth. (If it doesn’t go without saying, that must be the goal.)
Hobbes, writing in the 17th century, was not concerned with the biosphere but rather the political sphere—hence his focus on humans alone and his intent to provide justification for political power.
But as we can appreciate here in the 21st century, politics does not occur in some sort of disembodied abstract space, but in a world teeming with life. We must consider the biosphere, too, given that ecological issues stand orthogonal to political boundaries. Climate change doesn’t care about your borders.
Yet we don’t always—or just—inhabit the biosphere. Here in the digital age, the infosphere is what drives many of our concerns. What might a social contract theory that accounts for the infosphere look like?
The philosopher Luciano Floridi, who coined the word infosphere, has proposed an “upgrade” to Hobbes’ social contract theory, overcoming the limitations I mentioned above and providing relevant grounding for life in the infosphere.
Floridi calls it the ontic trust. Ontic here means “that which exists,” and trust comes from the legal concept of the trust, in which one party (the trustor) settles some property on a second party (the trustee) for the benefit of a third party (the beneficiary). In a trust, no one fully owns the property: The trustee may be the legal owner of the property, but they cannot benefit from it; rather, they are a fiduciary, obligated to care for the property on behalf of the beneficiary.
The ontic trust, then, is a kind of relationship where the whole world (including all beings and entities) is the property, owned by no one but passed down by past generations and cared for by current beings and entities, for the benefit of all future and current ones. Thus the ontic trust is, Floridi writes, a “primeval, entirely hypothetical pact, logically predating the social contract, that all… agents cannot help but sign when they come into existence, and that is constantly renewed in successive generations.”
The ontic trust, as Floridi writes, is entered unwillingly and inescapably, but it is not rooted in fear like Hobbes’ social contract; rather, the ontic trust constitutes a caring bond, an invitation to respect and appreciate others (including other people and all organisms and things), “which is fostered by the recognition of the dependence of all entities on each other.” The ontic trust suggests that all beings and things are bound to each other by their very fact of existing, which implies obligations of care and respect of all beings to each other and even toward being as such.
I appreciate the concept of the ontic trust because it describes not only the infosphere but also the biosphere. In the biosphere, living things depend on each other. Plants produce oxygen, and animals breathe it in.
Floridi sees the infosphere in much the same way. Humans write books and record podcasts to share with other humans, and yet other humans take care of these information artifacts and ensure they are stored well and can be located later on. We’re all trying to figure things out and help each other do the same.
The ontic trust provides us with some moral scaffolding for all our pursuits, not least design. What can I do or make to respect and strengthen the informational bonds between all things? How can I help us navigate complexity? What can I do to help organize and maintain a little corner of the infosphere? I’ve written before about how AI could be understood in this way. Recognizing the ontic trust suggests certain designerly virtues that we ought to cultivate within ourselves and help others do the same.
The ontic trust also helps us see why bad actors are bad. Just like in the biosphere there are viruses and parasites which get without giving, in the infosphere there are troll farms and data brokers and surveillant enterprises that intend to sow discord or extract data for ulterior purposes. And just like a virus, if these processes are left unaddressed, they will bring down the whole thing.
Ports of Call
A Case Study in Destroying Public Space: For the novel I’m writing, I have found myself digging into the history of Love Park here in Philadelphia. In the 1990s, the park became the world capital of street skateboarding. Skaters brought life to that corner of Center City, which was previously derelict. Philadelphia, of course, bungled that several times. Today’s Love Park (redesigned and reopened in 2018) is blah in comparison. I came across this wonderful documentary from 2004 telling the story up to that point.
People Selling Mirrors: An account on X/Twitter compiling examples of people trying to take pictures of mirrors without them in it.
New Jamie xx Music: Renowned electronic musician and DJ Jamie xx (of the band The xx) has a new song out, his first offering (I think) since his 2015 album.