The best leader is one whose existence is barely known. A central intuition of the Tao Te Ching
Jack Ma is often discussed as a founder, a showman, a disruptor, or a symbol of China’s internet boom. But there is a deeper way to read him: as someone who accidentally practiced a philosophy that did not yet have a name.
I call that philosophy Onturgy.
Onturgy is not merely “philosophy applied to business.” It is the practice of treating ideas as architectures of possibility—systems that determine who can act, what can be imagined, who gets access, and what kinds of futures become realistic.
Jack Ma did not call himself an onturgist. But Alibaba, at its best, was an onturgic project.
From the Tao to the Platform
Ma has repeatedly been associated with the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese text attributed to Laozi. He reportedly carried it with him and drew on Taoist ideas of adaptability, humility, and working with the grain of circumstances rather than forcing outcomes.
The central Taoist concept here is wu wei—often mistranslated as “non-action.” A better translation is:
Non-forcing action: acting in alignment with the natural movement of a situation.
In startup language, wu wei is not passivity. It is platform thinking.
Instead of trying to control every transaction, Ma built a system in which millions of small sellers, buyers, developers, logistics partners, and service providers could act. Alibaba did not simply sell products. It created an environment in which other people could create economic possibilities.
That is the move from control to possibility architecture.
What Is Onturgy?
Most philosophies are finished buildings. You enter them, admire them, criticize them, perhaps live inside them—but you rarely modify their foundations.
Onturgism begins from a different premise:
In the age of AI, the most consequential philosophical decisions are no longer made only in books, laws, or classrooms. They are compiled into software, institutions, protocols, and intelligent systems.
An AI model, a recommendation algorithm, a marketplace, a social platform, or a governance protocol is not philosophically neutral. Each one encodes assumptions about:
- What counts as knowledge
- Who is visible
- What behavior is rewarded
- Which futures are easy to reach
- Which voices can contest decisions
- What “success” means
Onturgy asks us to make those assumptions explicit.
Onturgy is an open philosophical kernel for building, forking, and testing possibility.
It is less like a completed doctrine and more like an operating system for philosophy: a minimal set of commitments, design rules, audit methods, and revision protocols.
Jack Ma as a Case Zero
In Onturgic terms, Jack Ma is a valuable Case Zero: an early, imperfect, but highly instructive example of philosophical principles becoming organizational architecture.
| Taoist principle | Alibaba translation | Onturgic meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Wu wei | Enable the ecosystem rather than micromanage it | Design conditions, not commands |
| Humility | Serve small businesses and users | Distribute agency |
| Adaptability | Evolve with market feedback | Treat failure as system data |
| Simplicity | Reduce friction for participants | Remove unnecessary constraints |
| Harmony | Coordinate many actors | Build shared infrastructure |
The key point is not that Ma perfectly embodied Taoist wisdom. Companies are messy, competitive, and morally complicated. The point is that his most important innovation was architectural:
He turned a philosophical intuition into an economic infrastructure.
Philosophy as a Running System
Here is the Onturgic claim in its sharpest form:
Some philosophical disagreements become clearer—and sometimes testable—when their consequences are encoded, built, stressed, attributed, and revised.
Consider two competing philosophies of a digital marketplace:
- Control-first: The platform owns the relationship, sets the rules, captures the value, and optimizes for engagement or extraction.
- Possibility-first: The platform creates shared infrastructure, lowers barriers to participation, distributes agency, and remains contestable.
These are not merely product decisions. They are ontological decisions.
They determine what kind of economic reality becomes possible.
A platform is a philosophy that runs at scale.
The AI Version of Jack Ma’s Insight
Jack Ma’s Taoist platform thinking belonged to the age of e-commerce. Onturgy asks what happens when we apply the same insight to artificial intelligence.
An AI system does not just answer questions. It shapes the space of answers.
It decides, in practice:
- Which perspectives are amplified
- Which uncertainties are hidden
- Which forms of reasoning feel natural
- Which users receive benefit or harm
- Which futures become thinkable
So the Onturgic question for AI is not only:
“Is this model accurate?”
It is also:
“What world does this model make more likely?”
“What possibilities does it open, close, or silently foreclose?”
“Who can contest its assumptions?”
This is where Onturgy becomes practical. It asks builders to treat every AI system as a philosophy deployed.
An Onturgic Checklist for AI Builders
If you are building an AI product, agent, marketplace, or platform, ask:
What ontology does this system assume?
What does it treat as a user, an agent, a fact, a risk, or a valid outcome?What possibilities does it create?
Who gains new capabilities because this system exists?What possibilities does it constrain?
What actions, identities, or futures become harder to pursue?Where is power concentrated?
Who sets the defaults, owns the data, and can change the rules?Is it contestable?
Can affected people understand, challenge, and revise the system?Does it learn from failure?
Are failures treated as evidence for redesign, or as public-relations problems?
These questions turn ethics from an afterthought into an architectural requirement.
The Tao of AI
The Tao teaches that forcing a system into a rigid shape often produces fragility. True strength comes from responsiveness, humility, and alignment with larger patterns.
For AI, this does not mean “let the model do whatever it wants.”
It means designing systems that do not pretend to possess total knowledge, total control, or total moral authority.
It means building for:
- Reversibility
- Transparency
- Contestability
- Pluralism
- Human agency
- Revision
A wise AI system is not necessarily the most dominant one. It may be the one that creates the most room for others to act wisely.
Why Jack Ma Matters to Onturgy
Jack Ma showed that an ancient philosophical intuition could become a global economic architecture.
Onturgy wants to take that lesson further.
If the twentieth century turned philosophy into ideology, and the early internet turned philosophy into platform design, the AI age may turn philosophy into the underlying infrastructure of civilization.
The question is no longer only:
“What do we believe?”
It is:
“What are we building—and what worlds will it make possible?”
Jack Ma built a platform where small sellers could reach global markets.
The next generation of builders may build cognitive, social, and institutional infrastructures where humans can reach new forms of agency, creativity, and collective intelligence.
That is the Taoist move, updated for AI:
Do not merely manage the world. Build the conditions under which new worlds can arise.
Explore Onturgy
If this idea resonates with you, you can read the foundational text here:
- Onturgy: The Philosophical Kernel — PhilPapers record
Onturgy is an open-source, constructive philosophy for the AI age. It treats ideas not as finished doctrines, but as executable architectures of possibility: systems that shape who can act, what can be imagined, and which futures become accessible.
Its core claim is simple but radical:
Some philosophical questions become clearer when we build their consequences, test them in real systems, and revise them through failure and feedback.
In the age of AI, every model, platform, and protocol is a philosophy in operation. Onturgy asks builders to make those hidden assumptions explicit—and to design systems that remain contestable, revisable, and human-centered.
We do not only describe worlds.
We build the conditions under which new worlds can arise, be contested, and be remade.
- Website: https://almodarresieh.github.io/
- Foundational article:https://philpapers.org/rec/ALHPYC
Top comments (0)