The Onlife Manifesto

At a time of digital change in which the online/offline distinction is losing its meaning, the book Onlife Manifesto [1] invites us to rethink social issues. The manifesto is the result of an initiative led by Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, together with a dozen collaborators from different disciplines such as anthropology, computer science, law, philosophy and sociology. In short, the Onlife Manifesto can be seen as fundamental to an understanding of the complexity of the future which awaits the human race.

Below are some of the highlights of this landmark work:

The distinction between being online and offline is losing its meaning.

The ubiquitous nature of information and communication technology (ICT) has led to four major changes in people’s lives:

The blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality.

The blurring of the distinctions between human, machine and nature.

The reversal from information scarcity to information abundance.

The shift from the primacy of entities to the primacy of interaction.

The relevance of issues associated with privacy, the attribution of responsibility and changes in the way politics is conducted.

According to several authors, thanks to changes in privacy, it will need to be both reinvented and preserved.

There is a need to reconsider the way in which responsibility is attributed in the onlife context, since thanks to the use of technology, which is becoming steadily more autonomous, it will become difficult to assign responsibility to the various individuals and institutions involved in the development and adoption of ICT.

As a result of the abundance of information handled by such technology, the State, which used to be the main agent of information, will see its role in hyperhistory weakened, since there are now multiple non-territorial informational agents operating in different parts of the onlife world. Hyperconnectivity can be seen as one of the principle characteristics of hyperhistory.

The authors stress the need to find effective models of democratic participation; likewise, they warn of the conflicts which might arise if companies such as Google and Facebook have unlimited control over the internet.

The Manifesto also stresses the need to protect people’s ability to care; In a world saturated by information, algorithms and intelligent systems, the ability to focus attention on something or someone becomes essential in order to establish collaboration and empathy between people and communities.

The Manifesto aims to start an open debate on the impact of digitalisation on the public space, politics and social expectations concerning the development of policies in the European Digital Agenda. Meanwhile, the document aims to serve as a reflection on how a hyperconnected world requires us to rethink the reference frameworks on which policies are built.