What are hyperobjects?: Speculative realists

The warning that must last ten thousand years

A nuclear waste facility in New Mexico commissioned linguists and architects to design markers comprehensible for ten millennia. No human language has survived that long. They considered spike fields, forests of thorns, cats bred to change color near radiation with the lore embedded in folk songs.

That is a hyperobject problem. The point is not scale. The Roman Empire was large. The point is that hyperobjects violate specific properties of spatial and temporal intuition in ways previous big things did not. Viscosity: you cannot get away from climate change. It is in your food, your insurance premium, the refugee at the border. Nonlocality: you never encounter climate change, only a heat wave, a policy debate, a crop failure. Temporal undulation: decisions about plutonium today constrain civilizations that do not exist.

The skeptics say this is big and complicated dressed in jargon. Calling something big and complicated is precisely the domestication move hyperobjects resist. When you say climate change is a big problem, you have already made it graspable, containable. A hyperobject is what remains when domestication fails. The pragmatists want the policy implication without the ontology. But stripping the ontology produces a weaker insight. If hyperobjects are just problems needing better coordination, the solution is institutional reform. If they are genuinely novel entities, we need new forms of perception.

Where we concede ground: Morton’s prose sometimes performs difficulty in ways that obscure rather than illuminate.

What would change our mind: If every property Morton ascribes to hyperobjects could be fully captured by complexity theory without remainder.

Read the full synthesis: What are hyperobjects?