The OntoShift

You can’t build a commons with the mindset that wrecked them. David Bollier calls the change that’s needed the OntoShift — an ontological shift in how we understand who we are: away from the modern story of the isolated, atomised, utility-maximising individual, and toward a relational worldview that starts from interdependence.

The story we’re stuck in

Modern culture casts each of us as a separate, self-interested unit — the “consumer,” the “employee,” the rational actor maximising private utility. That story has consequences. As long as we see ourselves that way, we’re (in Bollier’s words) “sitting ducks”: social media can atomise us into isolated individuals to be manipulated and monetised, and fear pushes even well-meaning people toward private self-protection — buy land abroad, secure your own exit — which erodes the very commonality we’d need to face shared threats together.

What the shift recognises

• We’re in a web of interdependence. Martin Luther King Jr. said it; spiritual and religious traditions say it; ecology says it. We are dependent on each other and on the earth in profound ways — what Marxists call the “metabolic rift” between the economy and living systems.
• There is no “away.” Standard economics treats harm as an “externality” — cost you can pipe somewhere else, like exhaust behind a car. But we’re not neutral observers of the system; we’re participants immersed in it. The pollution doesn’t leave the world.
• Compassion is a muscle. Trust, care, and treating people with dignity aren’t automatic — they have to be developed. That’s why the OntoShift can’t just be a private change of heart; it needs institutional forms to cultivate it. The commons is one such form.

This is the inner companion to the outer practice of commoning — and it underwrites relational property and the strategy of building a parallel polis.

Sources

• David Bollier & Silke Helfrich — Free, Fair and Alive (the OntoShift); Bollier on Team Human w/ Douglas Rushkoff (2025): youtube.com/watch?v=5NrkkC8tQGQ.