Flat Ontology
The philosophical conviction that all categories of being are real — that there is no hierarchy of substance which makes some entities more real, more present, or more deserving of ethical consideration than others. Associated with Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and Manuel DeLanda’s neo-materialist philosophy, flat ontology rejects the “Great Chain of Being” inherited from Emanationist cosmologies, according to which entities are ranked by proximity to a First Principle (God, Reason, Capital, the Human) with those closest being most perfect and those farther away increasingly material, embodied, and imperfect.
In practice, flat ontology means attending to material entities (vitreous china, fibreboard), virtual entities (Euclidean forms, psychic projections), process entities (visual contrast, decay, weathering), and pre-physical entities (quantum fields, entropy) as belonging to a single continuous plane of the real. Power structures that delimit classes and construct convenient hierarchies are not false — they have real material power — but their claims to metaphysical necessity are fraudulent.
For Ethereum and web3, flat ontology is a native disposition: the EVM is ontologically agnostic, making no prior commitment to what counts as an agent, what counts as value, or what counts as a valid input. This agnosticism is what gives Ethereum genuine ethical access to the “natural” domain so often monopolized by extractive institutions. The flat ontologist Exeunt suggests that “releasing beings from subordination” — truly attending to the democratic panorama of material, biological, and computational entities — is “so foreign and disorienting to the average superstitious Westerner as to be almost psychedelic.”