Hey, welcome to It could happen here. I'm Garrison, and today I'm gonna be talking about some really big things and ideas, but hopefully I'll be talking with them in a way that contextualizes them and makes you remember that, despite their magnitude, they're still very real things that you can interact with. Anyway, I'll get started and eventually it will kind of make sense. So right now we are all living in one massive liminal space. For those less online than I am, I'll explain what I mean. Liminal spaces became an online meme around late twenty nineteen as a term to describe a certain type of picture that features architecture or like just a place that looks off familiar, eerie, lonely, yet mesmerizing and beautiful. I've been an avid lurker on the liminal space subpreddit for a while now, and there's an undeniable allure to these dreamlike photos of buildings and rooms and the effect that they have on me. Describing what makes a liminal space photo a liminal space photo as opposed to just any other regular photo of a building or a room can be tricky, because, in part, the point is to elicit a certain feeling without thinking too much about the why they're not spooky or scary in the traditional sense. The gist of a liminal space photo and where it gets its name liminality is a good place to begin to understand what type of feelings these pictures are supposed to produce. Liminal refers to a transitional phase and the ambiguity and disorientation associated with being inside of a threshold, not on either one side, per se, but some where in between. Now, that threshold can be many things. A literal transitionary threshold between certain places is a common one. This can include stuff like hallways and airports. One of my favorites, though, is a threshold between time, an ambiguous, unspecific nostalgia you can't quite place, but it feels awfully familiar, like a dream from childhood. Pictures of weird, indoor, squishy playgrounds do this for me. The other threshold is a threshold between purpose and use, like a building or room designed for a very specific special purpose but now no longer serving that it's empty and out of date, an abandoned mall or cheery birthday party room at an arcade, photographed desolate and in the dark. There's two other aspects of liminal space. Photos that complement the various thresholds we've mentioned. Usually have no visible people, and there's a sense of artificiality, like a lot of fluorescent and artificial lighting. And even when there is a sunny outside, it looks fake, like a Windows computer screen saver. One of the most popular liminal space photos is of an underground bunker in Las Vegas that was painted and decorated to look like it's outside despite being buried deep within the ground. It's such a great example of liminal spaces because it elicits a certain type of cognitive dissonance and a distinct lack of synchronicity that is difficult to describe Otherwise. Almost never is quote unquote nature the subject of these photos. They nearly exclusively focus on very human constructs, particularly ones that no longer serve their intended use, or maybe never did in the first place. So what do I mean by we're all in one huge liminal space right now? Well, we are in between an historic economic and technological boom, one that's produced machines that resemble the magic of old. But on the other side of this valley is global climate catastrophe and destruction and change the likes of which humans have possibly never seen or at least remembered. We're in the transitionary period between these two states, and that disassociation of not being fully in either one, that that cognitive dissonance can be kind of mind boggling. It's like the nervous anticipation right before the roller coaster goes over the peak, or that weird feeling of being alone in an empty church nursery at night. Similar to liminal space photos, climate change transcends a regular perception of time space, and with that cause and effect, it's more than just a regular thing, phenomenon, or object. While specifically thinking about climate change, philosopher to with the Morton dubbed these massive spacetime altering objects as hyper objects. Now Morton often writes about things that can't be talked about directly, so really the only way to discuss it or get into the topic is to orbit around it, associating with adjacent ideas or words to get close enough to the topic to partially understand it, even if you can't get quite there. Other possible examples of hyper objects besides climate change, can include stuff like black holes, the biosphere or the solar system. But hyper objects don't need to be just massive celestial things. They can also be the sum total of all nuclear materials on Earth, or the very long lasting product of direct human manufacture, such as all of the styroform of plastic bags in the world. It can also be the sum of all the worling machinery of capitalism, or the state. Hyper objects, then, are hyper just in relation to some other entity, whether they're directly manufactured by humans or not. And hyper objects aren't just collections, systems or assemblages of other objects. They are things in their own right, and they affect more than just humans. They don't come into being just because humans notice them. They will have effects on the world whether or not they are observed. One of the more obvious differences between hyper objects and ordinary objects that you can't ever actually see a hyper object in its totality. You can only ever witness a small extension or piece of a hyper object. Now, this makes thinking about them kind of intrinsically tricky. It's like only seeing a fragmented shadow of a thing and the effects that that thing has on all other things. Now, the more contrarian listeners might protest that we never see all of any object, even ordinary ones. Now, it's obviously true that everything we see has a negative side, the part behind that we can't actually always look at, but can reasonably assume is there. Now the difference is that hyper objects transcend not only a regular conception of physical reality, but more so our temporal reality. You can hold a coffee monk and rotate it around in a pretty short amount of time and witness each side and angle. Or if you want to get really fancy, you could make a three sixty scan so you can see a projected version of the entire object, or you know more, simply just get three people in a room to all look at different sides of the mug, thus forming a consensual reality based understanding of the whole object. Now, not only can you not hold a hyper object, but even if you could, the temporal effects would make it impossible to rotate it around to witness the totality of what's being held, and it would be way too big for multiple people to ever witness all sides of the thing. Quoting from Morton's book hyper Objects, The Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Quote, consider raindrops You can feel them on your head, but you can't perceive the actual raindrop in itself. You can only ever perceive your particular anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isn't this similar to the rift between weather, which I can feel falling on my head, and global climate, not the older idea of local patterns of weather, but the entire system. I can think of an compute climate in this sense, but I can't directly see or touch it. The gap between the phenomenon and the thing yawns wide open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world. Humans have been aware of enormous entities, some realism imagined, for as long as we have existed, but this book has argueing that there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate. These entities directly cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos. Perhaps this is the most fundamental issue. Hyper objects seem to force something on us, something that affects some core idea of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is. There's no doubt that cosmic phenomenon such as meteors and blood red moons tsunami's, tornadoes, and earthquakes have terrified humans. In the past, meteors and comets were known as disasters. Literally, a disaster is a fallen, dysfunctional, or dangerous or evil star disaster. But such disasters take place against a stable backdrop. There is the Ptolemaic Aristolian machinery of the stars, which hold fixed stars in place. It seems as if there's something about hyper objects that is more deeply challenging than these disasters. The worry is not whether the world will end, as in the old models of the disaster, but whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps it might have already taken place. A deep shuttering of temporality then occurs. For one thing, we are inside hyper objects, like Jonah in the whale. This means that every decision we make is in some sense related to hyper objects. These decisions are not merely limited to sentences in texts about hyper objects. When I turned the key in the Ignition of my car, I am relating to global warming. When a novelist writes about the immigration to Mars, they are relating to global warming. I am one of the entities caught in the hyper object that I hear call global warming. Different hyper objects have numerous properties in common, but for our purposes we're going to discuss the five main points of similarity. Hyper Objects are viscous, meaning they stick to beings that are involved with them. They are nonlocal, in other words, and any local manifestation of the hyper object is not directly the hyper object. They involve very different temporalities than the human scale ones that were used to. In particular, some very very large hyper objects have a genuine Gaussian temporality. They generate space time vortexes due to general relativity, and hyper objects occupy a higher dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for structures of time. And they exhibit their effects inter objectively. That is, they can be detected in a space that consists of inter relationships between aesthetic properties of objects. The hyper object is not just a function of our knowledge. It is also hyper relative to worms, lemons, and ultra violet rays as well as humans. Now I'm going to go into the five different points of similarity in more detail to kind of help flesh out what these things hyper objects, what they are, and how they might actually be a useful way to think about really big stuff. So, first off, viscous hyper objects adhere to any object they touch, no matter how hard the objects tries to resist. In this way, hyper objects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyper object, the more glued to the hyper object it becomes. Now, the more you learn about any big topic, the more you'll end up noticing it in the world. This is the law of synchronicity. But the more you know about climate change, the more you realize how perversive it is. The more you discover about evolution, the more you realize how much our entire physical being is caught in its meshwork. Immediate intimate symptoms of hyper objects are very real, vivid, and often painful, Yet they carry with them this trace of unreality. A good example of hyper object viscosity would be radioactive materials. The more you try to get rid of them, the more you realize you can't. They seriously undermine the notion of a way there is no away. Flushing vomit down the toilet doesn't make it disappear. It makes its way to the ocean or the water treatment facility, and and eventually just back to us again. I'll quote from the book hyper Objects quote late itself is the most viscous thing of all, since nothing can surpass its speed. Radiation is Sartra's jar of honey, Part excellence, a luminous honey that reveals our bone structure as it seeps around us. Again, it's not a matter of making some suicidal leap into the honey, but discovering that we are already inside it. This is it, folks, this is the ecological interconnectedness. Come in and join the fun. But I see that you're already here. Unquote. Yeah, that is a that's fun. The next point of similarity where to discussed is the molten or Gaussian quality. Hyper Objects are time stretched to such an extent that they become impossible to hold in the mind. Hyper objects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent. The size of hyper objects can make them basically invisible just because they're so big. It's like swimming in Crater Lake in southern Oregon, one of the deepest lakes in the world. But it's not just deep, it's also very very clear. So the water is so deep yet so clear. It's like you're swimming in the sky. It's like you're swimming and nothing. It would be like if you approach an object and more and more objects emerge because we can't see the end of them. Hyper objects are necessarily uncanny. They have to be just like my favorite liminal space photos. Hyper objects seem to beckon us further into themselves, making us realize that we're already lost inside them. The recognition of being caught in hyper objects is precisely a feeling of strange familiarity and a familiar strangeness. Next up is non locality. Hyper objects are massively distributed in time and space, such as any particular local manifestation never actually reveals the totality of the hyper object. For example, climate change is a high project that impacts meteorological conditions such as tornado formations. Objects don't feel climate change, but instead experienced tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the manner in which a hyper object becomes more substantial than the local manifestations that they produce. Quoting Moreton again, for a flower, nuclear radiation turns its leaves a strange shade of red. Global warming for the tomato farmer rots the tomatoes plastic for the bird strangles it as it becomes entangled in a set of six pack rings. What we are really dealing with here are just the aesthetic effects that are directly causal. The octopus of the hyper object amits a cloud of ink as it withdrawals from access. Yet this cloud of ink is a cloud of its effects and effects these phenomenon themselves are not global warming or radiation. S action at a distance is involved. It's like confusing the map with the territory paper. Objects cannot be thought up as occupying a series of now points in time or space. They confound the social and psychic instruments we use to measure them. Even digital devices have trouble. Global warming is not just a function of our measuring devices. Yet, because it's distributed across the biosphere and beyond, it's hard to see it as a unique entity. And yet there it is raining down on us, burning down on us, quaking the earth, spawning giant hurricanes. Global warming is an object of which many things are distributed pieces. The rain drops falling on my head in northern California, the tsunami that pours through the streets, of Japanese towns, the increasing earthquake activity based on changing pressure on the ocean floor like a moving illusion picture. Global warming is real, but it involves a massive, counterintuitive perspective shift for us to see it. Convincing some people of its existence is like convincing some two dimensional flatland people of the existence of apples based on the appearance of a morphing circular shape in their world. Next point of similarity is phasing. So our sense of being in a time and inhabiting a place depends on forms of regularity, the periodic rhythms of day and night, the sun coming up, Only now we know that it doesn't really come up. It's now common knowledge that the Moon's phases are just the relationship between the Earth and the Moon as they circumnavigate to the Sun. Hyper objects seem to phase in and out of the human world. They occupy a higher dimensional phase space that makes them impossible to see as a whole on our regular There a three dimensional human scale basis, but they might appear differently to an observer with a higher dimensional view. We can only see pieces of a hyper object at a time. The reason why they appear non local and temporarily for shortened is precisely because of this trans dimensional quality. We can only see pieces of them at once, like a tsunami or a taste of radiation sickness. If an apple were to invade a two dimensional world, first the stick people would see some dots as the bottom of the apple touched their universe, and then a rapid succession of shapes that would appear like an expanding and contracting circular blob, diminishing into a tiny circle, possibly a point, and then disappearing. That's why you can't directly see climate change. You would need to occupy some higher dimensional space to see the hyper object unfolding explicitly. Like the people in the two dimensional flat land, we can only see brief patches of this gigantic object as it intersects with our world. The brief patch called hurricane destroys the infrastructure of New Orleans. The brief patch called drought burns the planes of Russia and the midwestern United States to a crisp our. Bodies itch with yesterday's sunburn. But don't relegate hyper objects as a simple abstract notion. Thin game of hyper objects as transdimensional real things is valuable global warming is not simply a mathematical abstraction that doesn't really pertain to this world. Hyper Objects don't just inhabit some conceptual beyond in our heads or out there. They are real objects that affect other objects. We tend to only think about hyper objects as they phase in and connect to other, more static objects. This is a mistake and contributes to non action. Whether or not we perceive objects and hyper objects connecting doesn't affect the existence and the inevitable effects of the hyper object. What we experience as the slow periodic re occurrence of a celestial event such as an eclipse or a comet, is a continuous entity whose imprint simply shows up on our social and cognitive space for a while. The gaps I perceive between moments at which my mind is aware of the hyper object and moments at which it isn't do not matter in relation to the hyper object itself. Okay, and now onto our final point of similarity. Inter Objective hyper objects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, objects are only able to perceive the imprint or footprint of a hyper object upon other objects revealed as information. It's all an ecological mesh of interconnectedness and inter objectivity. For example, climate changes formed by interactions between the sun, fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, economic growth, among other things. Yet climate change is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and the sea level rising, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models rather than connected to an object that predates its own measurement. Hyper objects exist in and between objects and things we deal with every day, but it's not simply those objects. Plastic bags are not climate change, but those things are both intertwined. Hurricanes are not climate change, but they can be a shadow like local manifestation of it. A mesh consists of relationships between criss crossing strands and the gaps between strands. Meshes are a potent metaphor for the strange interconnectedness of things, an interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect, lossless transmission of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences. When an object is born, it is instantly meshed into a relationship with other objects in the mesh. The mesh isn't inside of all things, but it's on the edge or floats on top of all things. Inter objective mesh is the extra connecting layer between the mass and the mask of all objects, almost like a universal skin fascia. Inter objectivity provides a space that is ontologically in front of objects, in which relational phenomenon can emerge. The massiveness and distribution of hyper objects simply force us to take note of this fact. Hyper objects provide great examples of inter objectivity, namely the way in which nothing has ever experienced directly, but only as mediated through other entities in some shared consensual space. We never hear the wind in itself, only the wind in the door, the wind in the trees. This means that for every objective system, there is at least one entity that is withdrawn from the relationship. We see the footprint of a dinosaur left in some ancient rock that was once a pool of mud. The dinosaur's reality exists inter objectively. There is some form of shared space between the rock, ourselves, and the dinosaur, even though the dinosaur isn't there directly. The print of a dinosaur's foot in the mud is seen as a foot shaped hole in a rock by humans sixty five million years later. There is some sensuous connection then, between the dinosaur, the rock, and the human despite their vastly differing time scales. The dinosaur footprint in fossilized mud is not a dinosaur. Rather, the footprint is a trace of the hyper object evolution that joins me the dinosaur and the mud together, along with the intentional act of holding them in the mind. I found the hyper object banner as a useful tool to help my brain think about things that are just too big, things that have effects so spaced out in time that using in our ordinary models of thought are just inadequate. You can also reconcile the opposing views that cast climate change as the very real series of disasters or a complicated, interlocking mess of systems that can feel very unreal and overwhelming. Just thinking of big things as abstract systems has the habit of divorcing you from the real world impacts things like hyper objects can cause. Sometimes we forget that climate change is a thing we interact with every day and can inform choices we make now the almost impossible to comprehend totality of our situation. It's not great for mental well being. You can end up tail spinning down a black hole of fate, conspiracy, coping, denial, and doom. It's very easy to trip and fall into a void of negation. Things that are hyper objects fundamentally break our conception of reality temporality and cause an effect. And it's already a really weird time to try to suss out reality. We're constantly being bombarded with products and services trying to usurp the real That's what marketing is, you know. First we had the Internet with its limitless possibilities as a digital universe. Then we got the world of social media with all of its fractured and fractal realities. There's immersive gaming and the allure of getting lost within thousands of unique worlds. And now we have VR a R and the metaverse, more layers of digital fabrication trying to be passed off as an almost hyper reality, a promise to make a reality even more real and immersive than our status quo. The Internet itself is another hyper object, and all of this extra reality can take a strain on the human mind. De realization the perception that actual waking reality is an artificial construct, the feeling of being de attached from your surroundings, like the world's made of cardboard, or you're looking at everything through a cloud of fog is becoming more and more common, especially among so called gen Z, the generation that drew up with the Internet being a staple of life. Now. How we got here is a disassociation between humans and what we call nature or the environment. The problems are getting fixed because we're so disassociated from the effects, just as the effects are from the cause. That resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. All of the worst effects of climate change aren't going to be felt for hundreds of years. And that is a weird feeling. That is cognitive dissonance that I don't know how to understand that, and that makes making decisions about our situation now feel distant yet also urgent. It's both and it's neither, and it's confusing. The resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. It produces this lack of immediate and close in proximity consequences. We must purposely remove these layers of separation and abandoned our anthropocentric thinking. Nature isn't other from us. We are nature, It's the same thing. We are all part of this big mesh. This, this sacred idea of nature isn't natural and can never be naturalized. We have to learn how to have an ecology without nature, with without nature as a separate thing. To have a genuine ecological view, we must relinquish this idea that nature being separate from us once and for all. We have to kill the anthroprasyne in our own head. A quote from one of Morton's other books titled Ecology Without Nature. Putting something called nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of a woman. It's a paradoxical act of sadistic, possessive admiration. Unquote. So within Morton's branch of philosophy, reification, the making of a thing into a thing is precisely the reduction of a real object to its sense will appearance for another object. Realification is reduction of one's entity to another's fantasy about it. Nature is a realification in this sense, and that's why we need an ecology without nature. Maybe if we turn nature into something more fluid, it might work. Now, most of our modern political discourse can be boiled down to what things are real and what things are not. Hyper objects and climate change don't just play into this debate. But crash into it, decimating all the other toys in this sandbox. As Morton says, the threat of global warming is not only political but also ontological. The threat of unreality is the very sign of reality itself. And oh boy, do we be experiencing this simultaneous disillusionment of reality and the overwhelmingly real presence of hyper objects which stick to us, which are us. The worry is not whether the world will end, but whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps it might have already taken place. The idea of the end of the world is very active in environmentalism, but the way it's usually framed kind of fosters its own negation. The end of the world is coming idea is not really effective, since to all types of purposes, the being that we are supposed to feel anxiety about and care for is actually already gone. This does not mean that there's no hope for ecological politics and ethics and a better future. Far from it. In fact, Morton and I would argue that the strongly held belief that the world's about to end unless we act now is paradoxically one of the most powerful factors that inhibit a full engagement with our ecological coexistence here on Earth. The strategy of the ecological hyperoject concept is to then awaken us from this dream that the world is about to end, because action on Earth, like the real Earth depends on it, the end of the world has already happened. Using the hyper object idea helps sort out these overly systematic things into a package that I can actually think about. There's something about discovering the language for a feeling, being able to name it that is empowering a way of finding handhold in the dim light of confusion, rather than scrambling around in the dark. So how would you convince two dimensional flatland people of the existence of apples based on the occasional phasing appearance of a morphing circular shape in their world. Now, hyper objects can really assist in understanding the cognitive dissonance around to climate to denial, you can't point to something like rising sea levels and say that is climate change, because yeah, that isn't climate change. The high poor object rising sea levels are just an environmental effect, and since the effects are so disattached from the cause, that fosters a lot of room for cognitive dissonance. When people point at extreme weather and call it something else. It's our lack of ecology. Are seeing of interconnected things as separate problems or manifestations, missing the fact that almost all of our problems don't have a shared root cause, but instead are just part of a massive, shared bungee cord like mesh network. When so many local manifesting problems and actual disasters are blamed on climate change, even if you believe climate change is the cause, which you know it is, it still feels weird because climate change isn't just a simple thing. It's such an amorphous shape shifting time traveling idea that for the climate denier or climate skeptic, seeing very real physical effects be blamed on such an abstract thing is hard for them and their understanding of reality. For many people, rejecting hyper objects is a lot easier than thinking about them, because once you start thinking about them, finding solutions to problems so displaced in time it's not only difficult, but encourages procrastination. The greenhouse gas emissions up there in the air right now won't reach their full effects for decades and centuries. That's not downplaying the urgency of the problem. In fact, that should make the problem more urgent. The cause is our brief luxury and the effect is terror forming the world. And we are right now caught in between the uncanny hyper object of all liminal spaces. The end of the world has already happened. We are on the path and about to enter a new world. We are in the liminal space hallway of all liminal space. Always the door behind us is closed, and at the other end of the hallway is a black hole. We cannot backtrack and re enter the door behind us. Already are we getting sucked forward into the hallway. But there are many doors ahead of us, and we get to choose which one to open. At this point, we have passed some of the prettier doors, but don't be tricked into thinking that there are none left. We must not focus on preserving an old way of life, but instead need to carefully carve out our new reality. We need to pick our new door. Well, that is my essay. Read Thing episode amalgamation about hyper objects, liminal spaces and our new reality. I hope you found some of the ideas useful um despite their kind of abstract and anti abstract nature. If you want to learn more about this, I would recommend reading Timothy Morton's book hyper objects Um. It is an academic read, but it's not that bad. I would I would recommend picking up if you want to learn more about these things. I'm sure I'll talk about them more in the future. Thank you for listening. Everybody, see you on the other side. It Could Happen Here is a production of pool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

Hey, welcome to It could happen here. I'm Garrison, and today I'm gonna be talking about some really big things and ideas, but hopefully I'll be talking with them in a way that contextualizes them and makes you remember that, despite their magnitude, they're still very real things that you can interact with. Anyway, I'll get started and eventually it will kind of make sense. So right now we are all living in one massive liminal space. For those less online than I am, I'll explain what I mean. Liminal spaces became an online meme around late twenty nineteen as a term to describe a certain type of picture that features architecture or like just a place that looks off familiar, eerie, lonely, yet mesmerizing and beautiful. I've been an avid lurker on the liminal space subpreddit for a while now, and there's an undeniable allure to these dreamlike photos of buildings and rooms and the effect that they have on me. Describing what makes a liminal space photo a liminal space photo as opposed to just any other regular photo of a building or a room can be tricky, because, in part, the point is to elicit a certain feeling without thinking too much about the why they're not spooky or scary in the traditional sense. The gist of a liminal space photo and where it gets its name liminality is a good place to begin to understand what type of feelings these pictures are supposed to produce. Liminal refers to a transitional phase and the ambiguity and disorientation associated with being inside of a threshold, not on either one side, per se, but some where in between. Now, that threshold can be many things. A literal transitionary threshold between certain places is a common one. This can include stuff like hallways and airports. One of my favorites, though, is a threshold between time, an ambiguous, unspecific nostalgia you can't quite place, but it feels awfully familiar, like a dream from childhood. Pictures of weird, indoor, squishy playgrounds do this for me. The other threshold is a threshold between purpose and use, like a building or room designed for a very specific special purpose but now no longer serving that it's empty and out of date, an abandoned mall or cheery birthday party room at an arcade, photographed desolate and in the dark. There's two other aspects of liminal space. Photos that complement the various thresholds we've mentioned. Usually have no visible people, and there's a sense of artificiality, like a lot of fluorescent and artificial lighting. And even when there is a sunny outside, it looks fake, like a Windows computer screen saver. One of the most popular liminal space photos is of an underground bunker in Las Vegas that was painted and decorated to look like it's outside despite being buried deep within the ground. It's such a great example of liminal spaces because it elicits a certain type of cognitive dissonance and a distinct lack of synchronicity that is difficult to describe Otherwise. Almost never is quote unquote nature the subject of these photos. They nearly exclusively focus on very human constructs, particularly ones that no longer serve their intended use, or maybe never did in the first place. So what do I mean by we're all in one huge liminal space right now? Well, we are in between an historic economic and technological boom, one that's produced machines that resemble the magic of old. But on the other side of this valley is global climate catastrophe and destruction and change the likes of which humans have possibly never seen or at least remembered. We're in the transitionary period between these two states, and that disassociation of not being fully in either one, that that cognitive dissonance can be kind of mind boggling. It's like the nervous anticipation right before the roller coaster goes over the peak, or that weird feeling of being alone in an empty church nursery at night. Similar to liminal space photos, climate change transcends a regular perception of time space, and with that cause and effect, it's more than just a regular thing, phenomenon, or object. While specifically thinking about climate change, philosopher to with the Morton dubbed these massive spacetime altering objects as hyper objects. Now Morton often writes about things that can't be talked about directly, so really the only way to discuss it or get into the topic is to orbit around it, associating with adjacent ideas or words to get close enough to the topic to partially understand it, even if you can't get quite there. Other possible examples of hyper objects besides climate change, can include stuff like black holes, the biosphere or the solar system. But hyper objects don't need to be just massive celestial things. They can also be the sum total of all nuclear materials on Earth, or the very long lasting product of direct human manufacture, such as all of the styroform of plastic bags in the world. It can also be the sum of all the worling machinery of capitalism, or the state. Hyper objects, then, are hyper just in relation to some other entity, whether they're directly manufactured by humans or not. And hyper objects aren't just collections, systems or assemblages of other objects. They are things in their own right, and they affect more than just humans. They don't come into being just because humans notice them. They will have effects on the world whether or not they are observed. One of the more obvious differences between hyper objects and ordinary objects that you can't ever actually see a hyper object in its totality. You can only ever witness a small extension or piece of a hyper object. Now, this makes thinking about them kind of intrinsically tricky. It's like only seeing a fragmented shadow of a thing and the effects that that thing has on all other things. Now, the more contrarian listeners might protest that we never see all of any object, even ordinary ones. Now, it's obviously true that everything we see has a negative side, the part behind that we can't actually always look at, but can reasonably assume is there. Now the difference is that hyper objects transcend not only a regular conception of physical reality, but more so our temporal reality. You can hold a coffee monk and rotate it around in a pretty short amount of time and witness each side and angle. Or if you want to get really fancy, you could make a three sixty scan so you can see a projected version of the entire object, or you know more, simply just get three people in a room to all look at different sides of the mug, thus forming a consensual reality based understanding of the whole object. Now, not only can you not hold a hyper object, but even if you could, the temporal effects would make it impossible to rotate it around to witness the totality of what's being held, and it would be way too big for multiple people to ever witness all sides of the thing. Quoting from Morton's book hyper Objects, The Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Quote, consider raindrops You can feel them on your head, but you can't perceive the actual raindrop in itself. You can only ever perceive your particular anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isn't this similar to the rift between weather, which I can feel falling on my head, and global climate, not the older idea of local patterns of weather, but the entire system. I can think of an compute climate in this sense, but I can't directly see or touch it. The gap between the phenomenon and the thing yawns wide open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world. Humans have been aware of enormous entities, some realism imagined, for as long as we have existed, but this book has argueing that there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate. These entities directly cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos. Perhaps this is the most fundamental issue. Hyper objects seem to force something on us, something that affects some core idea of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is. There's no doubt that cosmic phenomenon such as meteors and blood red moons tsunami's, tornadoes, and earthquakes have terrified humans. In the past, meteors and comets were known as disasters. Literally, a disaster is a fallen, dysfunctional, or dangerous or evil star disaster. But such disasters take place against a stable backdrop. There is the Ptolemaic Aristolian machinery of the stars, which hold fixed stars in place. It seems as if there's something about hyper objects that is more deeply challenging than these disasters. The worry is not whether the world will end, as in the old models of the disaster, but whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps it might have already taken place. A deep shuttering of temporality then occurs. For one thing, we are inside hyper objects, like Jonah in the whale. This means that every decision we make is in some sense related to hyper objects. These decisions are not merely limited to sentences in texts about hyper objects. When I turned the key in the Ignition of my car, I am relating to global warming. When a novelist writes about the immigration to Mars, they are relating to global warming. I am one of the entities caught in the hyper object that I hear call global warming. Different hyper objects have numerous properties in common, but for our purposes we're going to discuss the five main points of similarity. Hyper Objects are viscous, meaning they stick to beings that are involved with them. They are nonlocal, in other words, and any local manifestation of the hyper object is not directly the hyper object. They involve very different temporalities than the human scale ones that were used to. In particular, some very very large hyper objects have a genuine Gaussian temporality. They generate space time vortexes due to general relativity, and hyper objects occupy a higher dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for structures of time. And they exhibit their effects inter objectively. That is, they can be detected in a space that consists of inter relationships between aesthetic properties of objects. The hyper object is not just a function of our knowledge. It is also hyper relative to worms, lemons, and ultra violet rays as well as humans. Now I'm going to go into the five different points of similarity in more detail to kind of help flesh out what these things hyper objects, what they are, and how they might actually be a useful way to think about really big stuff. So, first off, viscous hyper objects adhere to any object they touch, no matter how hard the objects tries to resist. In this way, hyper objects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyper object, the more glued to the hyper object it becomes. Now, the more you learn about any big topic, the more you'll end up noticing it in the world. This is the law of synchronicity. But the more you know about climate change, the more you realize how perversive it is. The more you discover about evolution, the more you realize how much our entire physical being is caught in its meshwork. Immediate intimate symptoms of hyper objects are very real, vivid, and often painful, Yet they carry with them this trace of unreality. A good example of hyper object viscosity would be radioactive materials. The more you try to get rid of them, the more you realize you can't. They seriously undermine the notion of a way there is no away. Flushing vomit down the toilet doesn't make it disappear. It makes its way to the ocean or the water treatment facility, and and eventually just back to us again. I'll quote from the book hyper Objects quote late itself is the most viscous thing of all, since nothing can surpass its speed. Radiation is Sartra's jar of honey, Part excellence, a luminous honey that reveals our bone structure as it seeps around us. Again, it's not a matter of making some suicidal leap into the honey, but discovering that we are already inside it. This is it, folks, this is the ecological interconnectedness. Come in and join the fun. But I see that you're already here. Unquote. Yeah, that is a that's fun. The next point of similarity where to discussed is the molten or Gaussian quality. Hyper Objects are time stretched to such an extent that they become impossible to hold in the mind. Hyper objects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent. The size of hyper objects can make them basically invisible just because they're so big. It's like swimming in Crater Lake in southern Oregon, one of the deepest lakes in the world. But it's not just deep, it's also very very clear. So the water is so deep yet so clear. It's like you're swimming in the sky. It's like you're swimming and nothing. It would be like if you approach an object and more and more objects emerge because we can't see the end of them. Hyper objects are necessarily uncanny. They have to be just like my favorite liminal space photos. Hyper objects seem to beckon us further into themselves, making us realize that we're already lost inside them. The recognition of being caught in hyper objects is precisely a feeling of strange familiarity and a familiar strangeness. Next up is non locality. Hyper objects are massively distributed in time and space, such as any particular local manifestation never actually reveals the totality of the hyper object. For example, climate change is a high project that impacts meteorological conditions such as tornado formations. Objects don't feel climate change, but instead experienced tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the manner in which a hyper object becomes more substantial than the local manifestations that they produce. Quoting Moreton again, for a flower, nuclear radiation turns its leaves a strange shade of red. Global warming for the tomato farmer rots the tomatoes plastic for the bird strangles it as it becomes entangled in a set of six pack rings. What we are really dealing with here are just the aesthetic effects that are directly causal. The octopus of the hyper object amits a cloud of ink as it withdrawals from access. Yet this cloud of ink is a cloud of its effects and effects these phenomenon themselves are not global warming or radiation. S action at a distance is involved. It's like confusing the map with the territory paper. Objects cannot be thought up as occupying a series of now points in time or space. They confound the social and psychic instruments we use to measure them. Even digital devices have trouble. Global warming is not just a function of our measuring devices. Yet, because it's distributed across the biosphere and beyond, it's hard to see it as a unique entity. And yet there it is raining down on us, burning down on us, quaking the earth, spawning giant hurricanes. Global warming is an object of which many things are distributed pieces. The rain drops falling on my head in northern California, the tsunami that pours through the streets, of Japanese towns, the increasing earthquake activity based on changing pressure on the ocean floor like a moving illusion picture. Global warming is real, but it involves a massive, counterintuitive perspective shift for us to see it. Convincing some people of its existence is like convincing some two dimensional flatland people of the existence of apples based on the appearance of a morphing circular shape in their world. Next point of similarity is phasing. So our sense of being in a time and inhabiting a place depends on forms of regularity, the periodic rhythms of day and night, the sun coming up, Only now we know that it doesn't really come up. It's now common knowledge that the Moon's phases are just the relationship between the Earth and the Moon as they circumnavigate to the Sun. Hyper objects seem to phase in and out of the human world. They occupy a higher dimensional phase space that makes them impossible to see as a whole on our regular There a three dimensional human scale basis, but they might appear differently to an observer with a higher dimensional view. We can only see pieces of a hyper object at a time. The reason why they appear non local and temporarily for shortened is precisely because of this trans dimensional quality. We can only see pieces of them at once, like a tsunami or a taste of radiation sickness. If an apple were to invade a two dimensional world, first the stick people would see some dots as the bottom of the apple touched their universe, and then a rapid succession of shapes that would appear like an expanding and contracting circular blob, diminishing into a tiny circle, possibly a point, and then disappearing. That's why you can't directly see climate change. You would need to occupy some higher dimensional space to see the hyper object unfolding explicitly. Like the people in the two dimensional flat land, we can only see brief patches of this gigantic object as it intersects with our world. The brief patch called hurricane destroys the infrastructure of New Orleans. The brief patch called drought burns the planes of Russia and the midwestern United States to a crisp our. Bodies itch with yesterday's sunburn. But don't relegate hyper objects as a simple abstract notion. Thin game of hyper objects as transdimensional real things is valuable global warming is not simply a mathematical abstraction that doesn't really pertain to this world. Hyper Objects don't just inhabit some conceptual beyond in our heads or out there. They are real objects that affect other objects. We tend to only think about hyper objects as they phase in and connect to other, more static objects. This is a mistake and contributes to non action. Whether or not we perceive objects and hyper objects connecting doesn't affect the existence and the inevitable effects of the hyper object. What we experience as the slow periodic re occurrence of a celestial event such as an eclipse or a comet, is a continuous entity whose imprint simply shows up on our social and cognitive space for a while. The gaps I perceive between moments at which my mind is aware of the hyper object and moments at which it isn't do not matter in relation to the hyper object itself. Okay, and now onto our final point of similarity. Inter Objective hyper objects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, objects are only able to perceive the imprint or footprint of a hyper object upon other objects revealed as information. It's all an ecological mesh of interconnectedness and inter objectivity. For example, climate changes formed by interactions between the sun, fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, economic growth, among other things. Yet climate change is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and the sea level rising, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models rather than connected to an object that predates its own measurement. Hyper objects exist in and between objects and things we deal with every day, but it's not simply those objects. Plastic bags are not climate change, but those things are both intertwined. Hurricanes are not climate change, but they can be a shadow like local manifestation of it. A mesh consists of relationships between criss crossing strands and the gaps between strands. Meshes are a potent metaphor for the strange interconnectedness of things, an interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect, lossless transmission of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences. When an object is born, it is instantly meshed into a relationship with other objects in the mesh. The mesh isn't inside of all things, but it's on the edge or floats on top of all things. Inter objective mesh is the extra connecting layer between the mass and the mask of all objects, almost like a universal skin fascia. Inter objectivity provides a space that is ontologically in front of objects, in which relational phenomenon can emerge. The massiveness and distribution of hyper objects simply force us to take note of this fact. Hyper objects provide great examples of inter objectivity, namely the way in which nothing has ever experienced directly, but only as mediated through other entities in some shared consensual space. We never hear the wind in itself, only the wind in the door, the wind in the trees. This means that for every objective system, there is at least one entity that is withdrawn from the relationship. We see the footprint of a dinosaur left in some ancient rock that was once a pool of mud. The dinosaur's reality exists inter objectively. There is some form of shared space between the rock, ourselves, and the dinosaur, even though the dinosaur isn't there directly. The print of a dinosaur's foot in the mud is seen as a foot shaped hole in a rock by humans sixty five million years later. There is some sensuous connection then, between the dinosaur, the rock, and the human despite their vastly differing time scales. The dinosaur footprint in fossilized mud is not a dinosaur. Rather, the footprint is a trace of the hyper object evolution that joins me the dinosaur and the mud together, along with the intentional act of holding them in the mind. I found the hyper object banner as a useful tool to help my brain think about things that are just too big, things that have effects so spaced out in time that using in our ordinary models of thought are just inadequate. You can also reconcile the opposing views that cast climate change as the very real series of disasters or a complicated, interlocking mess of systems that can feel very unreal and overwhelming. Just thinking of big things as abstract systems has the habit of divorcing you from the real world impacts things like hyper objects can cause. Sometimes we forget that climate change is a thing we interact with every day and can inform choices we make now the almost impossible to comprehend totality of our situation. It's not great for mental well being. You can end up tail spinning down a black hole of fate, conspiracy, coping, denial, and doom. It's very easy to trip and fall into a void of negation. Things that are hyper objects fundamentally break our conception of reality temporality and cause an effect. And it's already a really weird time to try to suss out reality. We're constantly being bombarded with products and services trying to usurp the real That's what marketing is, you know. First we had the Internet with its limitless possibilities as a digital universe. Then we got the world of social media with all of its fractured and fractal realities. There's immersive gaming and the allure of getting lost within thousands of unique worlds. And now we have VR a R and the metaverse, more layers of digital fabrication trying to be passed off as an almost hyper reality, a promise to make a reality even more real and immersive than our status quo. The Internet itself is another hyper object, and all of this extra reality can take a strain on the human mind. De realization the perception that actual waking reality is an artificial construct, the feeling of being de attached from your surroundings, like the world's made of cardboard, or you're looking at everything through a cloud of fog is becoming more and more common, especially among so called gen Z, the generation that drew up with the Internet being a staple of life. Now. How we got here is a disassociation between humans and what we call nature or the environment. The problems are getting fixed because we're so disassociated from the effects, just as the effects are from the cause. That resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. All of the worst effects of climate change aren't going to be felt for hundreds of years. And that is a weird feeling. That is cognitive dissonance that I don't know how to understand that, and that makes making decisions about our situation now feel distant yet also urgent. It's both and it's neither, and it's confusing. The resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. It produces this lack of immediate and close in proximity consequences. We must purposely remove these layers of separation and abandoned our anthropocentric thinking. Nature isn't other from us. We are nature, It's the same thing. We are all part of this big mesh. This, this sacred idea of nature isn't natural and can never be naturalized. We have to learn how to have an ecology without nature, with without nature as a separate thing. To have a genuine ecological view, we must relinquish this idea that nature being separate from us once and for all. We have to kill the anthroprasyne in our own head. A quote from one of Morton's other books titled Ecology Without Nature. Putting something called nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of a woman. It's a paradoxical act of sadistic, possessive admiration. Unquote. So within Morton's branch of philosophy, reification, the making of a thing into a thing is precisely the reduction of a real object to its sense will appearance for another object. Realification is reduction of one's entity to another's fantasy about it. Nature is a realification in this sense, and that's why we need an ecology without nature. Maybe if we turn nature into something more fluid, it might work. Now, most of our modern political discourse can be boiled down to what things are real and what things are not. Hyper objects and climate change don't just play into this debate. But crash into it, decimating all the other toys in this sandbox. As Morton says, the threat of global warming is not only political but also ontological. The threat of unreality is the very sign of reality itself. And oh boy, do we be experiencing this simultaneous disillusionment of reality and the overwhelmingly real presence of hyper objects which stick to us, which are us. The worry is not whether the world will end, but whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps it might have already taken place. The idea of the end of the world is very active in environmentalism, but the way it's usually framed kind of fosters its own negation. The end of the world is coming idea is not really effective, since to all types of purposes, the being that we are supposed to feel anxiety about and care for is actually already gone. This does not mean that there's no hope for ecological politics and ethics and a better future. Far from it. In fact, Morton and I would argue that the strongly held belief that the world's about to end unless we act now is paradoxically one of the most powerful factors that inhibit a full engagement with our ecological coexistence here on Earth. The strategy of the ecological hyperoject concept is to then awaken us from this dream that the world is about to end, because action on Earth, like the real Earth depends on it, the end of the world has already happened. Using the hyper object idea helps sort out these overly systematic things into a package that I can actually think about. There's something about discovering the language for a feeling, being able to name it that is empowering a way of finding handhold in the dim light of confusion, rather than scrambling around in the dark. So how would you convince two dimensional flatland people of the existence of apples based on the occasional phasing appearance of a morphing circular shape in their world. Now, hyper objects can really assist in understanding the cognitive dissonance around to climate to denial, you can't point to something like rising sea levels and say that is climate change, because yeah, that isn't climate change. The high poor object rising sea levels are just an environmental effect, and since the effects are so disattached from the cause, that fosters a lot of room for cognitive dissonance. When people point at extreme weather and call it something else. It's our lack of ecology. Are seeing of interconnected things as separate problems or manifestations, missing the fact that almost all of our problems don't have a shared root cause, but instead are just part of a massive, shared bungee cord like mesh network. When so many local manifesting problems and actual disasters are blamed on climate change, even if you believe climate change is the cause, which you know it is, it still feels weird because climate change isn't just a simple thing. It's such an amorphous shape shifting time traveling idea that for the climate denier or climate skeptic, seeing very real physical effects be blamed on such an abstract thing is hard for them and their understanding of reality. For many people, rejecting hyper objects is a lot easier than thinking about them, because once you start thinking about them, finding solutions to problems so displaced in time it's not only difficult, but encourages procrastination. The greenhouse gas emissions up there in the air right now won't reach their full effects for decades and centuries. That's not downplaying the urgency of the problem. In fact, that should make the problem more urgent. The cause is our brief luxury and the effect is terror forming the world. And we are right now caught in between the uncanny hyper object of all liminal spaces. The end of the world has already happened. We are on the path and about to enter a new world. We are in the liminal space hallway of all liminal space. Always the door behind us is closed, and at the other end of the hallway is a black hole. We cannot backtrack and re enter the door behind us. Already are we getting sucked forward into the hallway. But there are many doors ahead of us, and we get to choose which one to open. At this point, we have passed some of the prettier doors, but don't be tricked into thinking that there are none left. We must not focus on preserving an old way of life, but instead need to carefully carve out our new reality. We need to pick our new door. Well, that is my essay. Read Thing episode amalgamation about hyper objects, liminal spaces and our new reality. I hope you found some of the ideas useful um despite their kind of abstract and anti abstract nature. If you want to learn more about this, I would recommend reading Timothy Morton's book hyper objects Um. It is an academic read, but it's not that bad. I would I would recommend picking up if you want to learn more about these things. I'm sure I'll talk about them more in the future. Thank you for listening. Everybody, see you on the other side. It Could Happen Here is a production of pool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.