>[!abstract] >In *The Ecological Thought*, [philosopher Timothy] Morton employed the term hyperobjects to describe objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity, such as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium. They have subsequently enumerated five characteristics of hyperobjects: > >1. **Viscous**: Hyperobjects adhere to any other object they touch, no matter how hard an object tries to resist. In this way, hyperobjects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyperobject, the more glued to the hyperobject it becomes. >2. **Molten**: Hyperobjects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent. >3. **Nonlocal**: Hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space to the extent that their totality cannot be realized in any particular local manifestation. For example, global warming is a hyperobject which impacts meteorological conditions, such as tornado formation. According to Morton, though, entities don't feel global warming, but instead experience tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the manner in which a hyperobject becomes more substantial than the local manifestations it produces. >4. Phased: Hyperobjects occupy a higher-dimensional space than other entities can normally **perceive**. Thus, hyperobjects appear to come and go in three-dimensional space, but would appear differently if an observer could have a higher multidimensional view. >5. **Interobjective**: Hyperobjects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, entities are only able to perceive the imprint, or "footprint," of a hyperobject upon other objects, revealed as information. For example, global warming is formed by interactions between the sun, fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide, among other objects. Yet global warming is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and ocean levels, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models, rather than an object that predates its own measurement. > > ([[Hudson, 2021]]; Wikipedia, 2025). >[!quote] On addressing only individual aspects of hyperobjects instead of the whole >COVID for me was the "come to Jesus moment" of reckoning with excessive specialization. Because what happened with COVID — it was a virus, right? It becomes an immunological problem, that becomes an epidemiological problem, which becomes a transport problem, which becomes an economic problem, which becomes a human well-being and professional problem, which becomes a school problem, etc. So, what happened during the course of the pandemic is that our sensibilities matured in understanding that what we are dealing with here was a complex system. There were other dimensions to this problem that were being neglected precisely because we were not reckoning with the interconnectedness of the system. So it's not just that it's the neglect, it's actually pathologically dangerous for the well-being of the planet that we do this kind of atomization all the time at the level of the disciplines ([[Big Think, 2023]]). >[!related] >- **North** (upstream): — >- **West** (similar): [[Lovecraftian horror]] >- **East** (different): — >- **South** (downstream): —