Bartleby, the IoT, and Flat Ontology: How Ontology is Written in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract:The Internet of Things, as the object-oriented reconstruction of the traditional internet, is characterized by its smart objects freely inter-operating without being necessarily under human control. Re-building the internet's information economy from the data captured by and communicated through these autonomous objects, the IoT operationalizes a sort of flat ontology, which recent realist philosophers suggest as a means to speculate about the world-making activities of nonhumans not necessarily correlated to human subjects. This paper examines the coincidence of recent interest in these nonhuman world-making processes drawn by two traditionally distinctive but now converging fields: computer engineering and philosophical ontology.