CONCEPT
The Pluriverse
Escobar's central ontological concept — a world in which many worlds fit — and his most ambitious contribution to the AI debate: the insistence that the technology must be redesigned to sustain rather than suppress the irreducible diversity of human ways of knowing and being.
The pluriverse is Escobar's name for the world as it already is, in its irreducible diversity: a plurality of knowledge systems, governance arrangements, cosmologies, and forms of life that cannot be absorbed into a single universal framework without violence. The concept was developed most fully in Designs for the Pluriverse (2018) and draws on the Zapatista slogan un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos — a world where many worlds fit. The pluriverse is not a utopia to be built. It is the condition that the homogenizing pressure of globalization, development, and now AI systematically suppresses in the name of standardized progress.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The pluriverse stands opposed to what Escobar calls the One-World World — the ontological assumption 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 is not the world
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