Re-worlding the User Experience of Being Human

 

Change the metaphor of the self, and you change the user experience of your world.

Changing the Operating System of the Self

We live in a time of constant software updates. Our phones, apps, and devices ask for them weekly. But what if the system most in need of an update isn’t digital at all?

What if the software that actually needs rewriting is the metaphor of the self: the invisible code that runs our consciousness?

 

Metaphor as the Operating System of Being

Every era runs on an implicit operating system — a story about what a person is and how reality works. For the modern West, that OS has been something like Self 1.0: The Autonomous Individual. It boots up with a familiar interface:

• I am an independent self.
• The world is made of separate objects.
• Agency means control.

It’s a powerful architecture. It gave us science, technology, individual rights, and the idea of personal freedom. But it also left us with the illusion of separation: from nature, from each other, and from the systems that sustain us.

Like an old OS that can’t handle the complexity of new hardware, the metaphor of the autonomous self is crashing under the weight of planetary interdependence.

 

When the OS Updates, the World Feels Different

Here’s the thing about operating systems: they don’t just manage functions; they shape experience. Change the OS, and the user experience changes too: the menus, the gestures, and the icons. Everything feels different, even if the hardware stays the same.

Ontology works the same way. Your ontology — your underlying sense of what is real and how things relate — is your user experience of the world.

If your OS says you are a discrete individual navigating an external environment, the world appears as a field of separate objects.
But if your OS says you’re a node in a multi-plex — a living junction in a vast web of relationships — the world renders differently. Reality stops feeling like scenery and starts feeling like interface.

 

The Multi-Plex: Self 2.0

In this new operating system — let’s call it: Self 2.0 — identity is relational rather than autonomous. You’re still “you,” but the boundary between self and world becomes porous. Ideas, moods, and signals pass through like data packets. Consciousness becomes a membrane of exchange, not a private chamber.

Agency changes, too.

It’s no longer about command and control but attunement: sensing the flows that move through you and responding in resonance. At the same time, ethics becomes network maintenance: how you manage the quality of your connections, what signals you amplify, and what feedback loops you reinforce. To live this way isn’t to dissolve individuality; it’s to recode it as participation rather than possession.

 

Metaphor as Ontological Code

Metaphors are not just linguistic ornaments; they’re ontological code. They determine what kind of world can appear for us. When you shift the metaphor, you change the experience that becomes possible.

“I am a self in a world” loads one version of reality: individualist, extractive, and human-centered. Yet, “I am a node in a multi-plex” loads another: distributed agency, interdependent, and ecological.

The metaphor is the code. The ontology is the interface. Together, they define your user experience of being human.

 

Installing the Update

Like any software upgrade, this one requires a reboot. It takes practice to live as a node — to listen more deeply, to sense the invisible circuits of relation that sustain life, to realize that the world isn’t background but active field.

You don’t lose agency; you gain context. You don’t dissolve the self; you expand it to include the heterogenous systems that make it possible.

Importantly, the multi-plex isn’t a science-fiction horizon. It exists in the here and now, already running in the background, waiting for us to notice that the interface has changed.

Your ontological update awaits.

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