CONCEPT
The One-World World
Escobar's term for the ontological assumption — foundational to modern Western thought and now encoded in AI systems — that there is one reality, accessible through one set of methods, describable in one vocabulary, and subject to one form of governance.
The One-World World (OWW) is not the world as it is. It is the world as it appears to those whose knowledge systems have achieved institutional dominance. The OWW assumes that cultural differences are merely different perspectives on a single underlying reality, that scientific method is the privileged access to that reality, and that political disagreement is a matter of interests rather than of worlds. Escobar's work has systematically challenged this assumption, demonstrating through ethnographic engagement with Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities that what appear as perspectival differences are often ontological differences — different worlds, not different views of one world.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept entered Escobar's vocabulary through engagement with the ontological turn in anthropology, particularly the work of John Law, who coined the term. The foundational claim is that modern thought has systematically suppressed ontological plurality by reframing it as cultural or epistemic plurality — as