hyperobject

plural hyperobjects

1. A thing that is so global that its effects can generally only be felt in parts, spread across time and space.

   We can see, for instance, that global warming has the properties of a hyperobject.

   2015 January 19, Timothy Morton, “Introducing the idea of ‘hyperobjects’”, in High Country News

   4 more examples

   [Timothy] Morton's prime example of a hyperobject is global warming. As a hyperobject, global warming is characterised by an absence of distance between the implicated bodies: raindrops on our face is global, just as the act of flushing away our toilet waste thinking that it ends somewhere away.

   2017, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, “Critical Environmental Law in the Anthropocene”, in Louis Kotzé, editor, Environmental Law and Governance for the Anthropocene, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 127

   Hyperobjects happen everywhere at one, but we can only experience them in the local environment. […] Climate change is a hyperobject, but so is nuclear radiation, evolution, and the internet.

   2018, James Bridle, “Climate”, in The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, Verso Books, →ISBN, page 73

   [James] Bridle borrows Timothy Morton’s modish conception of the “hyperobject” as a way of discussing our inability to apprehend the totality of the risks embodied in such vast phenomena as machine intelligence and global warming – but I’m not sure that acknowledging the ungraspable nature of anything really helps us to grasp it.

   2018 June 30, Will Self, “New Dark Age by James Bridle review – technology and the end of the future”, in The Guardian

   Every civilization that grows at the speed of reason must at some point face hyperobjects.

   2021, Michael Stevens, Vsauce: The Future Of Reasoning

2. raregeometryA hyperspatial object.