Hyperobjects

Description

1.

Timothy Morten "defines such objects as being massively distributed in time and space, existing far beyond the scale of an individual human, and making themselves known by intruding into human life." (http://blog.echovar.com/?p=3588)

2.

"The philosopher Timothy Morton uses a term to describe “events or systems or processes that are too complex, too massively distributed across space and time, for humans to get a grip on.” He calls such things hyperobjects." (https://arcdigital.media/will-the-bitcoin-bubble-pop-or-will-it-envelop-us-all-5d5d9ed94503)

Examples

"black holes are hyperobjects; nuclear materials such as uranium and plutonium, with their deep-time half-lives, are hyperobjects; global warming and mass species extinction are hyperobjects. We know, we live with, the local effects of these phenomena, but mostly they are quite literally beyond our ken." (https://arcdigital.media/will-the-bitcoin-bubble-pop-or-will-it-envelop-us-all-5d5d9ed94503)

Discussion

Bitcoin as a hyperobject

Eric Hoel:

"Bitcoin is such a hyperobject, the first of its kind. Bitcoin expands across spacetime, a growing chain of ordered megabyte blocks, both everywhere and nowhere. Its fluid physical manifestations sprout up to gobble up cheap electricity, frigid warehouses stacked with buzzing thermodynamical demons solving computational puzzles that exist only to play a guessing game that is purposefully pointless. Input/output ports, like exchanges, or peer-to-peer sales, or accepting merchants, reach upward like tendrils from this ineffable otherworld where Bitcoin really exists. People in the community call the Bitcoin protocol “the honey badger” because it simply will not die. All this from a distributed ledger no more complicated in its contents than an Excel document.

Those contents — the information on them — also mark it as a hyperobject. Like other hyperobjects, blockchains violate normal rules and transcend old paradoxes. For instance, some philosophers of mind have wondered how a physical object like the brain can contain information that isn’t read-out subjectively by an observer. But the information contents of blockchains seem fundamentally fixed and definite in a way most other information is not. The distributed ledger composed of wallets and their holdings has a particular consensus — it is agreed upon by all — and this consensus is enforced by proof-of-work. Perhaps one fanciful hypothesis is that the brain itself works kind of like an organic blockchain, replicating its model of self and world across its hemispheres and modules, with consciousness being the current decentralized neural consensus of the state of that model.

Even the actual value of an individual bitcoin denotes the protocol as a hyperobject. " (https://arcdigital.media/will-the-bitcoin-bubble-pop-or-will-it-envelop-us-all-5d5d9ed94503)

Its the Hyperobjects that make us go 'meta'

Zak Stein:

"We know not what we do. We are basically being made to fight because of the mysterious hyperobjects all around us—the massive and yet invisible objects that are so hard to speak of, but which are looming behind every conversation. Global warming, global capital, dark energy, superstorms, planetary-scale computation, genetic code—the list goes on and on of the new and amazing things that make us scared and thus more likely to prefer fighting over talking about our actual situation.

It is not my fault I am “going meta”—the hyperobjects made me do it

I almost can’t have a simple conversation anymore about things like the weather. There is no shared framework in the public culture because everyone knows meta than me. They don’t know better, just differently in such a way that there is no clearly shared frame of reference. Something I hold as dear you can easily “go meta” on, such as “global warming.” No, “it’s called climate change, and it is much more complex than just warming.” No, “it is called a massive hoax pulled off by elites to usher in a global government.” Really? All I wanted was to talk about the weather, but I end up talking about something meta.

Morton (2013) points out that this is what hyperobjects like global warming do: they force us to “go meta.” This is why hyperobjects will be a recurring theme in metapolitics going forward. They can be described as the “objects” that our culture is just becoming aware of thanks to advances in science and philosophy. They are hyperobjects because they are so large, complex, long-lasting, and beyond human proportions that they disrupt our collective sense-making and individual self-understandings. Yet hyperobjects are not rare despite having these remarkable qualities; they are everywhere depending on how you look. For example, we used to agree about what the “ocean” was. Now we are trying to figure out what the ocean actually is and how it works. The once and former “ocean” was a sometimes scary and often beautiful thing that everyone could relate to easily by seeing it, swimming in it, surfing on it, sailing on it, or navigating it. You and I understand that ocean. But the Earth’s oceans have now come to be understood as a massively complex hyperobject with trends and tendencies such as temperatures, currents, and salt levels, the future of which will impact the biosphere profoundly.

The ocean is caught up in global warming, which is another and even larger and more complex hyperobject. Global warming has turned the “ocean” into something it never was before: a politicized scientific hyperobject that has become the focus of billions of dollars of research. I know that this other “hyper-ocean” is more real and somehow exists somehow inside my sunset view of the “ocean,” but I don’t understand or experience this other ocean. The “hyper-ocean” is an uncanny reality forced into my awareness by (post)modernity, and it is ruining the view. Moreover, so far as we can tell, our future depends on the quality and trustworthiness of the research about this bigger, massively complex “hyper-ocean.” So it is stressing me out too, when the sunset view of the ocean I knew before was simply relaxing.

The ocean was not political before today except perhaps as a theater of war and as a kind of territory. Indeed, it was only valuable as territory in relation to our use of the land. Now people engage in activism and stage protests to “save the ocean.” They argue it is valuable in new ways and that I need to see the ocean from a totally different perspective (i.e., as a thing tied up in the process of global warming). But which “ocean” are they talking about? How absurd it appears to one view: the modern “ocean” is basically a theater of war and fishery and will remain so as long as possible. And yet, there is another ocean that is the source and sustainer of the biosphere as we know it, and it may only be around for another decade. The ocean as a hyperobject has become a cause for metapolitcal reflection; the future of this “hyper-ocean” will likely force us to change “politics as usual.”

The hyperobjects revealed and created by (post)modernity become political because they appear to impact us (“we need the fish/oxygen/algae!”) and yet they are so large and complex in and of themselves that they embarrass our cognitive frameworks (not to mention that our access to them requires so much mediation that we often have to simply trust the experts and their scientific apparatuses). Therefore, something very close to home begins to appear uncanny and far away; the metamodern awareness of hyperobjects makes everything just kinda look meta. The biosphere unfolds over massive, mind-boggling scales of time and space. Scientists diligently report on trends going back only decades and only in a certain region; they work to piece together the shadow cast by a hyperobject that extends centuries backwards and forwards in time: “global warming.” The mystery of what is really going on eludes everyone and yet it is precisely everyone who is implicated in the mystery. Moreover, consider the sensor and computer networks now involved with climate change research. We have to “trust” these and the experts who use them. This is an important case of planetary-scale computation and measurement that is highly politicized (Stein, 2015). The point here is that because (post)modernity created these hyperobjects, and/or created our awareness of them, there are deep “political” stakes involved in disagreeing about them.

This is all just to say that questions such as, “Do you believe in global warming or not?” are a major metapolitical problem. Let me be clear: it is the question that is the problem; it is not what the question is about (i.e., “global warming”) that is the problem. It is also not a bad question because we “already know the answer;” I am not saying that we have already answered it and our problem is that the question keeps lingering. Rather, it is the form of the question itself that is the problem, as it does the classic (post)modern maneuver of forcing us to “go meta.” Why force me to talk about a hyperobject like “global warming” (or “systemic oppression,” or “global capital”) instead of asking me about something we are both actually looking at and can understand? For example, “do you care about this lake?” is a much better question to ask—no need to “go meta.” But it is only a good question if it is not a trick question that will eventually lead to the “real question” about global warming.

As it turns out, the best questions are about our shared valuing (or not) of the lake. Seeing this allows us to stop “going meta” for awhile and think together about the value of the lake. Instead of “going meta,” we meet. " (http://www.zakstein.org/be-careful-going-meta-metapolitical-practice-ii/)

More information

• Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.