Luciano Floridi Quote on Information: The Fabric of Reality

The infosphere is the new environment in which humanity lives, and information is the new fabric of reality. — Luciano Floridi, The Ethics of Information (2013)

Luciano Floridi, the founding proponent of the philosophy of information, uses this sentence to announce a transformation as fundamental as the one that took humanity from the oral to the written, or from the written to the printed, word: the migration of human existence into the infosphere, the informational environment that increasingly surrounds and constitutes us.

Context

Floridi, an Italian-born philosopher based at the University of Oxford, has spent two decades building the philosophy of information as a distinct field. The Ethics of Information (2013) is the second volume of his "tetralogy" on the subject, following The Philosophy of Information (2011), and it develops an "information ethics" grounded in a radical ontology: the view that reality is made of information, and that all entities — from atoms to organisms to software — are informational objects with an informational nature and an intrinsic value that he calls "informational dignity."

The context is the digital revolution. Floridi observes that the boundary between the online and the offline is dissolving: we do not merely use information technologies, we live inside them. The internet of things, social media, ubiquitous computing, and the datafication of everyday life are producing a new environment — the infosphere — that is as real and as consequential as the natural environment. The task of information ethics is to provide normative guidance for life in this new environment, where the well-being of informational objects — and not only of biological humans — demands moral consideration.

Meaning

The sentence makes two related claims. The first is environmental: the infosphere is the new environment in which humanity lives. Just as fish live in water and cannot see it, humans increasingly live in an informational environment that shapes perception, relation, and action. Much of our life — work, friendship, politics, commerce, play — is conducted in the infosphere, and even our encounter with the physical world is mediated by information systems. The environment metaphor is precise: like the natural environment, the infosphere is something we inhabit, something we alter, and something on whose health our own well-being depends.

The second claim is ontological: information is the new fabric of reality. This is the stronger thesis, and it is Floridi's signature move. It means that the entities of the world can be understood as informational objects — clusters of data, structures of relations, carriers of meaning — and that reality itself, in the last analysis, is to be characterized in informational terms. The claim is not that the physical world is an illusion, but that "information" is the most fundamental category for understanding what there is and what matters. In the age of the infosphere, this ontology is not speculative: the objects that increasingly populate our world — software, databases, profiles, platforms, networks — are nothing but information, and our treatment of them is already a moral matter.

The deeper meaning is that the digital is not a domain within reality but the medium of reality itself. Consequently, the ethics of information is not a specialized field for tech professionals but a general ethics for the information age: it addresses the creation, circulation, and destruction of information as matters of moral weight, on a par with the traditional objects of ethics.

Philosophical Significance

The sentence grounds the project of the philosophy of information as a "mature" branch of philosophy — one that, like the philosophy of language or the philosophy of mind, identifies a fundamental category and works out its logic, epistemology, ethics, and politics. Floridi's information ontology offers a unified framework for understanding the digital world: if reality is informational, then questions about privacy, identity, data, knowledge, and machine intelligence are not disparate problems but aspects of a single philosophical inquiry.

The ethical consequences are distinctive. Information ethics, as Floridi develops it, extends the moral community beyond human beings to informational objects as such: every entity is to be respected in its informational nature, and actions that degrade, corrupt, or destroy information — including misinformation, disinformation, and the "infocidal" destruction of information ecosystems — are morally wrong. This gives a principled basis for contemporary concerns about data protection, algorithmic bias, the integrity of knowledge, and the health of public information environments.

Critics have asked whether the extension of moral standing to information stretches ethics beyond its proper scope, and whether "information is the fabric of reality" is a metaphor or a testable thesis. Yet the sentence captures something undeniable about the present: humanity now lives in an environment it has built out of information, and the way we build, care for, and govern that environment is a moral and political question of the first order. The infosphere is the new environment in which humanity lives — and the philosophy of information is the attempt to understand, and to take responsibility for, the reality we are making.

Sources

• Floridi, Luciano. The Ethics of Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• "Information." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed August 17, 2026. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information/