hyperobject

Morton says, is our encounter with the reality of hyperobjects – the term he coined to describe things such as ecosystems and black holes, which are “massively distributed in time and space” compared to individual humans.

'A reckoning for our species': the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene Alex Blasdel 2021

Robin brings a helpful name to this problem, by way of the philosopher Timothy Morton: hyperobject. A hyperobject is an entity whose scale is too big, too sprawling for any single person to fully appreciate their scale. Climate change, financial markets, socioeconomic classes, design systems—they’re systems we move through, but their scale dwarfs our own.

The hoof and the horse. — ethanmarcotte.com 2023

Morton is best known for coining the term hyperobject (noun): things and ideas so vast and slippery and distributed across time and space that we can’t contain them physically or even fully understand them (e.g., all the carbon in the sky, plastics, fake news).

How to Live in a Catastrophe Elizabeth Weil 2022

He argues that a distinctive feature of our world is the presence of ginormous things he calls “hyperobjects” – such as global warming or the internet – that we tend to think of as abstract ideas because we can’t get our heads around them, but that are nevertheless as real as hammers.

'A reckoning for our species': the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene Alex Blasdel 2021

In 2008, I invented a word to describe all kinds of things that you can study and think about and compute, but that are not so easy to see directly: hyperobjects. Things like: not just a Styrofoam cup or two, but all the Styrofoam on Earth, ever. All that Styrofoam is going to last an awfully long time: 500 years, maybe. It’s going to outlive me by a great extent. Will my family’s descendants even be related to me in any kind of meaningful way by 2514? There is so much more Styrofoam on Earth right now than there is Timothy Morton. So hyperobjects outlast me, and they out-scale me in the here and now.

Introducing the idea of ‘hyperobjects’ Timothy Morton 2023

Many people have told me, “Oh, now I have a term for this thing I’ve been trying to grasp!” We can see, for instance, that global warming has the properties of a hyperobject. It is “viscous” — whatever I do, wherever I am, it sort of “sticks” to me. It is “nonlocal” — its effects are globally distributed through a huge tract of time. It forces me to experience time in an unusual way. It is “phased” — I only experience pieces of it at any one time. And it is “inter-objective” — it consists of all kinds of other entities but it isn’t reducible to them.

Introducing the idea of ‘hyperobjects’ Timothy Morton 2023

Over the past few months, I’ve been listening to talks from Timothy Morton, the philoso­pher who popular­ized the term “hyperobject”, which is an object massively distrib­uted in space and time.

Truthfeel 2023

Hyperobjects exist “interobjectively,” which is to say that they consist, of, yet are not reducible to, interactions between a large number of entities.

What Does Hyperobjects Say? Andrew Varano 2023