The reason I find I’ve had to get into this kind of ‘philosophical’ stuff - ontology - on my way to the practice of a theory-of-practice arises directly from Robin, and DaO (*Danger and opportunity*, 2009).
> Robin Murray (2009), *Danger and opportunity - Crisis and the new social economy*, NESTA/Young Foundation. pdf 
**The digital** One of the agendas of DaO was very familiar to me: post-Fordism, the mode of capitalist economy and society that has arisen on the back of the digital. It’s been at the heart of my work since, in the GLC in the 80s, we began to engage the new ground of struggle constituted by the digital: skill and de- and re-skilling, radically altered products and services and practices, ‘mass customisation’ and the Benetton mode, and the production and assembly of actual material stuff *by writing* (that is, sitting in remote locations, mediated through software tools and digital networks) and the mobilising of hugely extended machine-systems that have no human intermediation (‘disintermediation’ is a big thing in internet business models).
It took a lot of adjustment, and one of the things I see clearly now that isn’t clearly addressed in DaO (it’s hard to figure) is that the digital is in fact *a new kind of stuff*. The digital - as a form of stuff - is truly radical, regardless of what any particular user happens to be doing with it. See Digital means and the Golemic
We talk of ‘the virtual’ and of ‘immaterial’ production or products, but of course nothing exists and has force, **unless it is material**. The material of the digital is . . - *Written stuff* - encodings of formal conceptualisations, in/on *material* media; and - (Material) *comms networks*; and - Complexes of new machines - today, *enormous* complexes of machines (server farms, digital network switches, computational modules, digital devices, ion-implanted silicon) with the size and power consumption of towns; and - *Engineering interfaces* between the new machines and the old Fordist ones: real-time systems, transducers and actuators: the apotheosis of the Fordist miracle of continuous flow production, the stuff that, as a chemical engineer, I cut my teeth on in the high-Fordist 60s.
The new material not only participates in new forces of production, it also has its own distinctive *relations* of production that are not those of macro transformation of inanimate materials, nor those of (precapitalist, residual) land either.
This is reason enough to get into ontology.
The politics of the digital are not the politics of Fordist power (literally, power: electricals, petrol engines) and the stuff of the digital is no longer the familiar human-scale, manifest stuff of macro objects, and does not offer itself up for familiar human-scale interactions. This is not business as has been usual to this point in time.
**The environment** However radical this is, it wasn’t the aspect of DaO that first got me attending to ontology (it did seem rather familiar and I kind of took it for granted).
It was Robin’s engagement with environmental economics that triggered me. Notably, he was one of the first to engage with zero waste \[Williams 2017, Zero waste obit xxx:, Murray 1999, 2002 xxx]. And in the final section of DaO, when looking to assemble a package of policy recommendations, it’s notable that mostly they are environment-related. But this seemed odd, the policy frame seemed to somehow fall from the sky without being founded in any persistent attention to environment as a distinct ‘sphere’ in that important pamphlet, which primarily is concerned with the emergent ‘dance of provisioning’ across four grand sectors: state, market, household, mutual sector.
What’s the grounding of this policy prominence, the nature of *economy, as such* (as distinct, for example, from the contingent political demands that people may be making on governments, for whatever ‘flavour of the month’, consumerist, meme-ish reason)?
I had to wonder . . what is it about ‘the environment’ **and** ‘the digital’ that makes them - *both* of them, as a dyad - radical, de facto extensions of the ‘old’ economy, leading to such a ‘new economy’ revisualisation as Robin’s, and such an expansion of activist challenges beyond the agendas of the old Lefts of 50 years ago?
Somehow, the material of ‘the environment’ - the material nature of the environment: the planet, ecosystems, first-growth forest, ocean, the biosphere, global energy balances - has finally become *material to society and subsistence*; to trans-species survival and legacy; to wellbeing and the wellbeing of the grandchildren. The nature of ‘economy’ was now different. In our times, it had different *stuff* in it, that we were very unsure how to handle.