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)