What is OOO? (tip: not a computer programming methodology)

Object Oriented Ontology is something that I’ve been interested in ever since I learned about OOP (Object Oriented Programming). I then came into OOO on a side-channel (on a connection that I don’t think anyone has made yet), from Brian Cantwell Smith’s excellent On the Origin of Objects. OOO is notoriously difficult to explain without getting into minutia of ontological ideologies, so Ian Bogost drafted up a tentative “ordinary folk” definition. I think it’s pretty good:

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.

1. Brian Cantwell Smith, On the origin of objects (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1996).