Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to It could happen here. I'm Garrison, and
Speaker 1: today I'm gonna be talking about some really big things
Speaker 1: and ideas, but hopefully I'll be talking with them in
Speaker 1: a way that contextualizes them and makes you remember that,
Speaker 1: despite their magnitude, they're still very real things that you
Speaker 1: can interact with. Anyway, I'll get started and eventually it
Speaker 1: will kind of make sense. So right now we are
Speaker 1: all living in one massive liminal space. For those less
Speaker 1: online than I am, I'll explain what I mean. Liminal
Speaker 1: spaces became an online meme around late twenty nineteen as
Speaker 1: a term to describe a certain type of picture that
Speaker 1: features architecture or like just a place that looks off familiar, eerie, lonely,
Speaker 1: yet mesmerizing and beautiful. I've been an avid lurker on
Speaker 1: the liminal space subpreddit for a while now, and there's
Speaker 1: an undeniable allure to these dreamlike photos of buildings and
Speaker 1: rooms and the effect that they have on me. Describing
Speaker 1: what makes a liminal space photo a liminal space photo
Speaker 1: as opposed to just any other regular photo of a
Speaker 1: building or a room can be tricky, because, in part,
Speaker 1: the point is to elicit a certain feeling without thinking
Speaker 1: too much about the why they're not spooky or scary
Speaker 1: in the traditional sense. The gist of a liminal space
Speaker 1: photo and where it gets its name liminality is a
Speaker 1: good place to begin to understand what type of feelings
Speaker 1: these pictures are supposed to produce. Liminal refers to a
Speaker 1: transitional phase and the ambiguity and disorientation associated with being
Speaker 1: inside of a threshold, not on either one side, per se,
Speaker 1: but some where in between. Now, that threshold can be
Speaker 1: many things. A literal transitionary threshold between certain places is
Speaker 1: a common one. This can include stuff like hallways and airports.
Speaker 1: One of my favorites, though, is a threshold between time,
Speaker 1: an ambiguous, unspecific nostalgia you can't quite place, but it
Speaker 1: feels awfully familiar, like a dream from childhood. Pictures of weird, indoor,
Speaker 1: squishy playgrounds do this for me. The other threshold is
Speaker 1: a threshold between purpose and use, like a building or
Speaker 1: room designed for a very specific special purpose but now
Speaker 1: no longer serving that it's empty and out of date,
Speaker 1: an abandoned mall or cheery birthday party room at an arcade,
Speaker 1: photographed desolate and in the dark. There's two other aspects
Speaker 1: of liminal space. Photos that complement the various thresholds we've mentioned.
Speaker 1: Usually have no visible people, and there's a sense of artificiality,
Speaker 1: like a lot of fluorescent and artificial lighting. And even
Speaker 1: when there is a sunny outside, it looks fake, like
Speaker 1: a Windows computer screen saver. One of the most popular
Speaker 1: liminal space photos is of an underground bunker in Las
Speaker 1: Vegas that was painted and decorated to look like it's
Speaker 1: outside despite being buried deep within the ground. It's such
Speaker 1: a great example of liminal spaces because it elicits a
Speaker 1: certain type of cognitive dissonance and a distinct lack of
Speaker 1: synchronicity that is difficult to describe Otherwise. Almost never is
Speaker 1: quote unquote nature the subject of these photos. They nearly
Speaker 1: exclusively focus on very human constructs, particularly ones that no
Speaker 1: longer serve their intended use, or maybe never did in
Speaker 1: the first place. So what do I mean by we're
Speaker 1: all in one huge liminal space right now? Well, we
Speaker 1: are in between an historic economic and technological boom, one
Speaker 1: that's produced machines that resemble the magic of old. But
Speaker 1: on the other side of this valley is global climate
Speaker 1: catastrophe and destruction and change the likes of which humans
Speaker 1: have possibly never seen or at least remembered. We're in
Speaker 1: the transitionary period between these two states, and that disassociation
Speaker 1: of not being fully in either one, that that cognitive
Speaker 1: dissonance can be kind of mind boggling. It's like the
Speaker 1: nervous anticipation right before the roller coaster goes over the peak,
Speaker 1: or that weird feeling of being alone in an empty
Speaker 1: church nursery at night. Similar to liminal space photos, climate
Speaker 1: change transcends a regular perception of time space, and with
Speaker 1: that cause and effect, it's more than just a regular thing, phenomenon,
Speaker 1: or object. While specifically thinking about climate change, philosopher to
Speaker 1: with the Morton dubbed these massive spacetime altering objects as
Speaker 1: hyper objects. Now Morton often writes about things that can't
Speaker 1: be talked about directly, so really the only way to
Speaker 1: discuss it or get into the topic is to orbit
Speaker 1: around it, associating with adjacent ideas or words to get
Speaker 1: close enough to the topic to partially understand it, even
Speaker 1: if you can't get quite there. Other possible examples of
Speaker 1: hyper objects besides climate change, can include stuff like black holes,
Speaker 1: the biosphere or the solar system. But hyper objects don't
Speaker 1: need to be just massive celestial things. They can also
Speaker 1: be the sum total of all nuclear materials on Earth,
Speaker 1: or the very long lasting product of direct human manufacture,
Speaker 1: such as all of the styroform of plastic bags in
Speaker 1: the world. It can also be the sum of all
Speaker 1: the worling machinery of capitalism, or the state. Hyper objects, then,
Speaker 1: are hyper just in relation to some other entity, whether
Speaker 1: they're directly manufactured by humans or not. And hyper objects
Speaker 1: aren't just collections, systems or assemblages of other objects. They
Speaker 1: are things in their own right, and they affect more
Speaker 1: than just humans. They don't come into being just because
Speaker 1: humans notice them. They will have effects on the world
Speaker 1: whether or not they are observed. One of the more
Speaker 1: obvious differences between hyper objects and ordinary objects that you
Speaker 1: can't ever actually see a hyper object in its totality.
Speaker 1: You can only ever witness a small extension or piece
Speaker 1: of a hyper object. Now, this makes thinking about them
Speaker 1: kind of intrinsically tricky. It's like only seeing a fragmented
Speaker 1: shadow of a thing and the effects that that thing
Speaker 1: has on all other things. Now, the more contrarian listeners
Speaker 1: might protest that we never see all of any object,
Speaker 1: even ordinary ones. Now, it's obviously true that everything we
Speaker 1: see has a negative side, the part behind that we
Speaker 1: can't actually always look at, but can reasonably assume is there.
Speaker 1: Now the difference is that hyper objects transcend not only
Speaker 1: a regular conception of physical reality, but more so our
Speaker 1: temporal reality. You can hold a coffee monk and rotate
Speaker 1: it around in a pretty short amount of time and
Speaker 1: witness each side and angle. Or if you want to
Speaker 1: get really fancy, you could make a three sixty scan
Speaker 1: so you can see a projected version of the entire object,
Speaker 1: or you know more, simply just get three people in
Speaker 1: a room to all look at different sides of the mug,
Speaker 1: thus forming a consensual reality based understanding of the whole object. Now,
Speaker 1: not only can you not hold a hyper object, but
Speaker 1: even if you could, the temporal effects would make it
Speaker 1: impossible to rotate it around to witness the totality of
Speaker 1: what's being held, and it would be way too big
Speaker 1: for multiple people to ever witness all sides of the thing.
Speaker 1: Quoting from Morton's book hyper Objects, The Philosophy and Ecology
Speaker 1: after the End of the World. Quote, consider raindrops You
Speaker 1: can feel them on your head, but you can't perceive
Speaker 1: the actual raindrop in itself. You can only ever perceive
Speaker 1: your particular anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isn't this similar
Speaker 1: to the rift between weather, which I can feel falling
Speaker 1: on my head, and global climate, not the older idea
Speaker 1: of local patterns of weather, but the entire system. I
Speaker 1: can think of an compute climate in this sense, but
Speaker 1: I can't directly see or touch it. The gap between
Speaker 1: the phenomenon and the thing yawns wide open, disturbing my
Speaker 1: sense of presence and being in the world. Humans have
Speaker 1: been aware of enormous entities, some realism imagined, for as
Speaker 1: long as we have existed, but this book has argueing
Speaker 1: that there is something quite special about the recently discovered
Speaker 1: entities such as climate. These entities directly cause us to
Speaker 1: reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos.
Speaker 1: Perhaps this is the most fundamental issue. Hyper objects seem
Speaker 1: to force something on us, something that affects some core
Speaker 1: idea of what it means to exist, what Earth is,
Speaker 1: what society is. There's no doubt that cosmic phenomenon such
Speaker 1: as meteors and blood red moons tsunami's, tornadoes, and earthquakes
Speaker 1: have terrified humans. In the past, meteors and comets were
Speaker 1: known as disasters. Literally, a disaster is a fallen, dysfunctional,
Speaker 1: or dangerous or evil star disaster. But such disasters take
Speaker 1: place against a stable backdrop. There is the Ptolemaic Aristolian
Speaker 1: machinery of the stars, which hold fixed stars in place.
Speaker 1: It seems as if there's something about hyper objects that
Speaker 1: is more deeply challenging than these disasters. The worry is
Speaker 1: not whether the world will end, as in the old
Speaker 1: models of the disaster, but whether the end of the
Speaker 1: world is already happening, or whether perhaps it might have
Speaker 1: already taken place. A deep shuttering of temporality then occurs.
Speaker 1: For one thing, we are inside hyper objects, like Jonah
Speaker 1: in the whale. This means that every decision we make
Speaker 1: is in some sense related to hyper objects. These decisions
Speaker 1: are not merely limited to sentences in texts about hyper objects.
Speaker 1: When I turned the key in the Ignition of my car,
Speaker 1: I am relating to global warming. When a novelist writes
Speaker 1: about the immigration to Mars, they are relating to global warming.
Speaker 1: I am one of the entities caught in the hyper
Speaker 1: object that I hear call global warming. Different hyper objects
Speaker 1: have numerous properties in common, but for our purposes we're
Speaker 1: going to discuss the five main points of similarity. Hyper
Speaker 1: Objects are viscous, meaning they stick to beings that are
Speaker 1: involved with them. They are nonlocal, in other words, and
Speaker 1: any local manifestation of the hyper object is not directly
Speaker 1: the hyper object. They involve very different temporalities than the
Speaker 1: human scale ones that were used to. In particular, some
Speaker 1: very very large hyper objects have a genuine Gaussian temporality.
Speaker 1: They generate space time vortexes due to general relativity, and
Speaker 1: hyper objects occupy a higher dimensional phase space that results
Speaker 1: in their being invisible to humans for structures of time.
Speaker 1: And they exhibit their effects inter objectively. That is, they
Speaker 1: can be detected in a space that consists of inter
Speaker 1: relationships between aesthetic properties of objects. The hyper object is
Speaker 1: not just a function of our knowledge. It is also
Speaker 1: hyper relative to worms, lemons, and ultra violet rays as
Speaker 1: well as humans. Now I'm going to go into the
Speaker 1: five different points of similarity in more detail to kind
Speaker 1: of help flesh out what these things hyper objects, what
Speaker 1: they are, and how they might actually be a useful
Speaker 1: way to think about really big stuff. So, first off,
Speaker 1: viscous hyper objects adhere to any object they touch, no
Speaker 1: matter how hard the objects tries to resist. In this way,
Speaker 1: hyper objects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an
Speaker 1: object tries to resist a hyper object, the more glued
Speaker 1: to the hyper object it becomes. Now, the more you
Speaker 1: learn about any big topic, the more you'll end up
Speaker 1: noticing it in the world. This is the law of synchronicity.
Speaker 1: But the more you know about climate change, the more
Speaker 1: you realize how perversive it is. The more you discover
Speaker 1: about evolution, the more you realize how much our entire
Speaker 1: physical being is caught in its meshwork. Immediate intimate symptoms
Speaker 1: of hyper objects are very real, vivid, and often painful,
Speaker 1: Yet they carry with them this trace of unreality. A
Speaker 1: good example of hyper object viscosity would be radioactive materials.
Speaker 1: The more you try to get rid of them, the
Speaker 1: more you realize you can't. They seriously undermine the notion
Speaker 1: of a way there is no away. Flushing vomit down
Speaker 1: the toilet doesn't make it disappear. It makes its way
Speaker 1: to the ocean or the water treatment facility, and and
Speaker 1: eventually just back to us again. I'll quote from the
Speaker 1: book hyper Objects quote late itself is the most viscous
Speaker 1: thing of all, since nothing can surpass its speed. Radiation
Speaker 1: is Sartra's jar of honey, Part excellence, a luminous honey
Speaker 1: that reveals our bone structure as it seeps around us. Again,
Speaker 1: it's not a matter of making some suicidal leap into
Speaker 1: the honey, but discovering that we are already inside it.
Speaker 1: This is it, folks, this is the ecological interconnectedness. Come
Speaker 1: in and join the fun. But I see that you're
Speaker 1: already here. Unquote. Yeah, that is a that's fun. The
Speaker 1: next point of similarity where to discussed is the molten
Speaker 1: or Gaussian quality. Hyper Objects are time stretched to such
Speaker 1: an extent that they become impossible to hold in the mind.
Speaker 1: Hyper objects are so massive that they refute the idea
Speaker 1: that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent. The size of
Speaker 1: hyper objects can make them basically invisible just because they're
Speaker 1: so big. It's like swimming in Crater Lake in southern Oregon,
Speaker 1: one of the deepest lakes in the world. But it's
Speaker 1: not just deep, it's also very very clear. So the
Speaker 1: water is so deep yet so clear. It's like you're
Speaker 1: swimming in the sky. It's like you're swimming and nothing.
Speaker 1: It would be like if you approach an object and
Speaker 1: more and more objects emerge because we can't see the
Speaker 1: end of them. Hyper objects are necessarily uncanny. They have
Speaker 1: to be just like my favorite liminal space photos. Hyper
Speaker 1: objects seem to beckon us further into themselves, making us
Speaker 1: realize that we're already lost inside them. The recognition of
Speaker 1: being caught in hyper objects is precisely a feeling of
Speaker 1: strange familiarity and a familiar strangeness. Next up is non locality.
Speaker 1: Hyper objects are massively distributed in time and space, such
Speaker 1: as any particular local manifestation never actually reveals the totality
Speaker 1: of the hyper object. For example, climate change is a
Speaker 1: high project that impacts meteorological conditions such as tornado formations.
Speaker 1: Objects don't feel climate change, but instead experienced tornadoes as
Speaker 1: they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the
Speaker 1: manner in which a hyper object becomes more substantial than
Speaker 1: the local manifestations that they produce. Quoting Moreton again, for
Speaker 1: a flower, nuclear radiation turns its leaves a strange shade
Speaker 1: of red. Global warming for the tomato farmer rots the
Speaker 1: tomatoes plastic for the bird strangles it as it becomes
Speaker 1: entangled in a set of six pack rings. What we
Speaker 1: are really dealing with here are just the aesthetic effects
Speaker 1: that are directly causal. The octopus of the hyper object
Speaker 1: amits a cloud of ink as it withdrawals from access.
Speaker 1: Yet this cloud of ink is a cloud of its
Speaker 1: effects and effects these phenomenon themselves are not global warming
Speaker 1: or radiation. S action at a distance is involved. It's
Speaker 1: like confusing the map with the territory paper. Objects cannot
Speaker 1: be thought up as occupying a series of now points
Speaker 1: in time or space. They confound the social and psychic
Speaker 1: instruments we use to measure them. Even digital devices have trouble.
Speaker 1: Global warming is not just a function of our measuring devices. Yet,
Speaker 1: because it's distributed across the biosphere and beyond, it's hard
Speaker 1: to see it as a unique entity. And yet there
Speaker 1: it is raining down on us, burning down on us,
Speaker 1: quaking the earth, spawning giant hurricanes. Global warming is an
Speaker 1: object of which many things are distributed pieces. The rain
Speaker 1: drops falling on my head in northern California, the tsunami
Speaker 1: that pours through the streets, of Japanese towns, the increasing
Speaker 1: earthquake activity based on changing pressure on the ocean floor
Speaker 1: like a moving illusion picture. Global warming is real, but
Speaker 1: it involves a massive, counterintuitive perspective shift for us to
Speaker 1: see it. Convincing some people of its existence is like
Speaker 1: convincing some two dimensional flatland people of the existence of
Speaker 1: apples based on the appearance of a morphing circular shape
Speaker 1: in their world. Next point of similarity is phasing. So
Speaker 1: our sense of being in a time and inhabiting a
Speaker 1: place depends on forms of regularity, the periodic rhythms of
Speaker 1: day and night, the sun coming up, Only now we
Speaker 1: know that it doesn't really come up. It's now common
Speaker 1: knowledge that the Moon's phases are just the relationship between
Speaker 1: the Earth and the Moon as they circumnavigate to the Sun.
Speaker 1: Hyper objects seem to phase in and out of the
Speaker 1: human world. They occupy a higher dimensional phase space that
Speaker 1: makes them impossible to see as a whole on our
Speaker 1: regular There a three dimensional human scale basis, but they
Speaker 1: might appear differently to an observer with a higher dimensional view.
Speaker 1: We can only see pieces of a hyper object at
Speaker 1: a time. The reason why they appear non local and
Speaker 1: temporarily for shortened is precisely because of this trans dimensional quality.
Speaker 1: We can only see pieces of them at once, like
Speaker 1: a tsunami or a taste of radiation sickness. If an
Speaker 1: apple were to invade a two dimensional world, first the
Speaker 1: stick people would see some dots as the bottom of
Speaker 1: the apple touched their universe, and then a rapid succession
Speaker 1: of shapes that would appear like an expanding and contracting
Speaker 1: circular blob, diminishing into a tiny circle, possibly a point,
Speaker 1: and then disappearing. That's why you can't directly see climate change.
Speaker 1: You would need to occupy some higher dimensional space to
Speaker 1: see the hyper object unfolding explicitly. Like the people in
Speaker 1: the two dimensional flat land, we can only see brief
Speaker 1: patches of this gigantic object as it intersects with our world.
Speaker 1: The brief patch called hurricane destroys the infrastructure of New Orleans.
Speaker 1: The brief patch called drought burns the planes of Russia
Speaker 1: and the midwestern United States to a crisp our. Bodies
Speaker 1: itch with yesterday's sunburn. But don't relegate hyper objects as
Speaker 1: a simple abstract notion. Thin game of hyper objects as
Speaker 1: transdimensional real things is valuable global warming is not simply
Speaker 1: a mathematical abstraction that doesn't really pertain to this world.
Speaker 1: Hyper Objects don't just inhabit some conceptual beyond in our
Speaker 1: heads or out there. They are real objects that affect
Speaker 1: other objects. We tend to only think about hyper objects
Speaker 1: as they phase in and connect to other, more static objects.
Speaker 1: This is a mistake and contributes to non action. Whether
Speaker 1: or not we perceive objects and hyper objects connecting doesn't
Speaker 1: affect the existence and the inevitable effects of the hyper object.
Speaker 1: What we experience as the slow periodic re occurrence of
Speaker 1: a celestial event such as an eclipse or a comet,
Speaker 1: is a continuous entity whose imprint simply shows up on
Speaker 1: our social and cognitive space for a while. The gaps
Speaker 1: I perceive between moments at which my mind is aware
Speaker 1: of the hyper object and moments at which it isn't
Speaker 1: do not matter in relation to the hyper object itself. Okay,
Speaker 1: and now onto our final point of similarity. Inter Objective
Speaker 1: hyper objects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently,
Speaker 1: objects are only able to perceive the imprint or footprint
Speaker 1: of a hyper object upon other objects revealed as information.
Speaker 1: It's all an ecological mesh of interconnectedness and inter objectivity.
Speaker 1: For example, climate changes formed by interactions between the sun,
Speaker 1: fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, economic growth, among other things. Yet
Speaker 1: climate change is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes,
Speaker 1: and the sea level rising, making it seem as if
Speaker 1: global warming is a product of scientific models rather than
Speaker 1: connected to an object that predates its own measurement. Hyper
Speaker 1: objects exist in and between objects and things we deal
Speaker 1: with every day, but it's not simply those objects. Plastic
Speaker 1: bags are not climate change, but those things are both intertwined.
Speaker 1: Hurricanes are not climate change, but they can be a
Speaker 1: shadow like local manifestation of it. A mesh consists of
Speaker 1: relationships between criss crossing strands and the gaps between strands.
Speaker 1: Meshes are a potent metaphor for the strange interconnectedness of things,
Speaker 1: an interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect, lossless transmission
Speaker 1: of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences.
Speaker 1: When an object is born, it is instantly meshed into
Speaker 1: a relationship with other objects in the mesh. The mesh
Speaker 1: isn't inside of all things, but it's on the edge
Speaker 1: or floats on top of all things. Inter objective mesh
Speaker 1: is the extra connecting layer between the mass and the
Speaker 1: mask of all objects, almost like a universal skin fascia.
Speaker 1: Inter objectivity provides a space that is ontologically in front
Speaker 1: of objects, in which relational phenomenon can emerge. The massiveness
Speaker 1: and distribution of hyper objects simply force us to take
Speaker 1: note of this fact. Hyper objects provide great examples of
Speaker 1: inter objectivity, namely the way in which nothing has ever
Speaker 1: experienced directly, but only as mediated through other entities in
Speaker 1: some shared consensual space. We never hear the wind in itself,
Speaker 1: only the wind in the door, the wind in the trees.
Speaker 1: This means that for every objective system, there is at
Speaker 1: least one entity that is withdrawn from the relationship. We
Speaker 1: see the footprint of a dinosaur left in some ancient
Speaker 1: rock that was once a pool of mud. The dinosaur's
Speaker 1: reality exists inter objectively. There is some form of shared
Speaker 1: space between the rock, ourselves, and the dinosaur, even though
Speaker 1: the dinosaur isn't there directly. The print of a dinosaur's
Speaker 1: foot in the mud is seen as a foot shaped
Speaker 1: hole in a rock by humans sixty five million years later.
Speaker 1: There is some sensuous connection then, between the dinosaur, the rock,
Speaker 1: and the human despite their vastly differing time scales. The
Speaker 1: dinosaur footprint in fossilized mud is not a dinosaur. Rather,
Speaker 1: the footprint is a trace of the hyper object evolution
Speaker 1: that joins me the dinosaur and the mud together, along
Speaker 1: with the intentional act of holding them in the mind.
Speaker 1: I found the hyper object banner as a useful tool
Speaker 1: to help my brain think about things that are just
Speaker 1: too big, things that have effects so spaced out in
Speaker 1: time that using in our ordinary models of thought are
Speaker 1: just inadequate. You can also reconcile the opposing views that
Speaker 1: cast climate change as the very real series of disasters
Speaker 1: or a complicated, interlocking mess of systems that can feel
Speaker 1: very unreal and overwhelming. Just thinking of big things as
Speaker 1: abstract systems has the habit of divorcing you from the
Speaker 1: real world impacts things like hyper objects can cause. Sometimes
Speaker 1: we forget that climate change is a thing we interact
Speaker 1: with every day and can inform choices we make now
Speaker 1: the almost impossible to comprehend totality of our situation. It's
Speaker 1: not great for mental well being. You can end up
Speaker 1: tail spinning down a black hole of fate, conspiracy, coping, denial,
Speaker 1: and doom. It's very easy to trip and fall into
Speaker 1: a void of negation. Things that are hyper objects fundamentally
Speaker 1: break our conception of reality temporality and cause an effect.
Speaker 1: And it's already a really weird time to try to
Speaker 1: suss out reality. We're constantly being bombarded with products and
Speaker 1: services trying to usurp the real That's what marketing is,
Speaker 1: you know. First we had the Internet with its limitless
Speaker 1: possibilities as a digital universe. Then we got the world
Speaker 1: of social media with all of its fractured and fractal realities.
Speaker 1: There's immersive gaming and the allure of getting lost within
Speaker 1: thousands of unique worlds. And now we have VR a
Speaker 1: R and the metaverse, more layers of digital fabrication trying
Speaker 1: to be passed off as an almost hyper reality, a
Speaker 1: promise to make a reality even more real and immersive
Speaker 1: than our status quo. The Internet itself is another hyper object,
Speaker 1: and all of this extra reality can take a strain
Speaker 1: on the human mind. De realization the perception that actual
Speaker 1: waking reality is an artificial construct, the feeling of being
Speaker 1: de attached from your surroundings, like the world's made of cardboard,
Speaker 1: or you're looking at everything through a cloud of fog
Speaker 1: is becoming more and more common, especially among so called
Speaker 1: gen Z, the generation that drew up with the Internet
Speaker 1: being a staple of life. Now. How we got here
Speaker 1: is a disassociation between humans and what we call nature
Speaker 1: or the environment. The problems are getting fixed because we're
Speaker 1: so disassociated from the effects, just as the effects are
Speaker 1: from the cause. That resulting alienation of all things makes
Speaker 1: this worse. All of the worst effects of climate change
Speaker 1: aren't going to be felt for hundreds of years. And
Speaker 1: that is a weird feeling. That is cognitive dissonance that
Speaker 1: I don't know how to understand that, and that makes
Speaker 1: making decisions about our situation now feel distant yet also urgent.
Speaker 1: It's both and it's neither, and it's confusing. The resulting
Speaker 1: alienation of all things makes this worse. It produces this
Speaker 1: lack of immediate and close in proximity consequences. We must
Speaker 1: purposely remove these layers of separation and abandoned our anthropocentric thinking.
Speaker 1: Nature isn't other from us. We are nature, It's the
Speaker 1: same thing. We are all part of this big mesh. This,
Speaker 1: this sacred idea of nature isn't natural and can never
Speaker 1: be naturalized. We have to learn how to have an
Speaker 1: ecology without nature, with without nature as a separate thing.
Speaker 1: To have a genuine ecological view, we must relinquish this
Speaker 1: idea that nature being separate from us once and for all.
Speaker 1: We have to kill the anthroprasyne in our own head.
Speaker 1: A quote from one of Morton's other books titled Ecology
Speaker 1: Without Nature. Putting something called nature on a pedestal and
Speaker 1: admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy
Speaker 1: does for the figure of a woman. It's a paradoxical
Speaker 1: act of sadistic, possessive admiration. Unquote. So within Morton's branch
Speaker 1: of philosophy, reification, the making of a thing into a
Speaker 1: thing is precisely the reduction of a real object to
Speaker 1: its sense will appearance for another object. Realification is reduction
Speaker 1: of one's entity to another's fantasy about it. Nature is
Speaker 1: a realification in this sense, and that's why we need
Speaker 1: an ecology without nature. Maybe if we turn nature into
Speaker 1: something more fluid, it might work. Now, most of our
Speaker 1: modern political discourse can be boiled down to what things
Speaker 1: are real and what things are not. Hyper objects and
Speaker 1: climate change don't just play into this debate. But crash
Speaker 1: into it, decimating all the other toys in this sandbox.
Speaker 1: As Morton says, the threat of global warming is not
Speaker 1: only political but also ontological. The threat of unreality is
Speaker 1: the very sign of reality itself. And oh boy, do
Speaker 1: we be experiencing this simultaneous disillusionment of reality and the
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly real presence of hyper objects which stick to us,
Speaker 1: which are us. The worry is not whether the world
Speaker 1: will end, but whether the end of the world is
Speaker 1: already happening, or whether perhaps it might have already taken place.
Speaker 1: The idea of the end of the world is very
Speaker 1: active in environmentalism, but the way it's usually framed kind
Speaker 1: of fosters its own negation. The end of the world
Speaker 1: is coming idea is not really effective, since to all
Speaker 1: types of purposes, the being that we are supposed to
Speaker 1: feel anxiety about and care for is actually already gone.
Speaker 1: This does not mean that there's no hope for ecological
Speaker 1: politics and ethics and a better future. Far from it.
Speaker 1: In fact, Morton and I would argue that the strongly
Speaker 1: held belief that the world's about to end unless we
Speaker 1: act now is paradoxically one of the most powerful factors
Speaker 1: that inhibit a full engagement with our ecological coexistence here
Speaker 1: on Earth. The strategy of the ecological hyperoject concept is
Speaker 1: to then awaken us from this dream that the world
Speaker 1: is about to end, because action on Earth, like the
Speaker 1: real Earth depends on it, the end of the world
Speaker 1: has already happened. Using the hyper object idea helps sort
Speaker 1: out these overly systematic things into a package that I
Speaker 1: can actually think about. There's something about discovering the language
Speaker 1: for a feeling, being able to name it that is
Speaker 1: empowering a way of finding handhold in the dim light
Speaker 1: of confusion, rather than scrambling around in the dark. So
Speaker 1: how would you convince two dimensional flatland people of the
Speaker 1: existence of apples based on the occasional phasing appearance of
Speaker 1: a morphing circular shape in their world. Now, hyper objects
Speaker 1: can really assist in understanding the cognitive dissonance around to
Speaker 1: climate to denial, you can't point to something like rising
Speaker 1: sea levels and say that is climate change, because yeah,
Speaker 1: that isn't climate change. The high poor object rising sea
Speaker 1: levels are just an environmental effect, and since the effects
Speaker 1: are so disattached from the cause, that fosters a lot
Speaker 1: of room for cognitive dissonance. When people point at extreme
Speaker 1: weather and call it something else. It's our lack of ecology.
Speaker 1: Are seeing of interconnected things as separate problems or manifestations,
Speaker 1: missing the fact that almost all of our problems don't
Speaker 1: have a shared root cause, but instead are just part
Speaker 1: of a massive, shared bungee cord like mesh network. When
Speaker 1: so many local manifesting problems and actual disasters are blamed
Speaker 1: on climate change, even if you believe climate change is
Speaker 1: the cause, which you know it is, it still feels
Speaker 1: weird because climate change isn't just a simple thing. It's
Speaker 1: such an amorphous shape shifting time traveling idea that for
Speaker 1: the climate denier or climate skeptic, seeing very real physical
Speaker 1: effects be blamed on such an abstract thing is hard
Speaker 1: for them and their understanding of reality. For many people,
Speaker 1: rejecting hyper objects is a lot easier than thinking about them,
Speaker 1: because once you start thinking about them, finding solutions to
Speaker 1: problems so displaced in time it's not only difficult, but
Speaker 1: encourages procrastination. The greenhouse gas emissions up there in the
Speaker 1: air right now won't reach their full effects for decades
Speaker 1: and centuries. That's not downplaying the urgency of the problem.
Speaker 1: In fact, that should make the problem more urgent. The
Speaker 1: cause is our brief luxury and the effect is terror
Speaker 1: forming the world. And we are right now caught in
Speaker 1: between the uncanny hyper object of all liminal spaces. The
Speaker 1: end of the world has already happened. We are on
Speaker 1: the path and about to enter a new world. We
Speaker 1: are in the liminal space hallway of all liminal space.
Speaker 1: Always the door behind us is closed, and at the
Speaker 1: other end of the hallway is a black hole. We
Speaker 1: cannot backtrack and re enter the door behind us. Already
Speaker 1: are we getting sucked forward into the hallway. But there
Speaker 1: are many doors ahead of us, and we get to
Speaker 1: choose which one to open. At this point, we have
Speaker 1: passed some of the prettier doors, but don't be tricked
Speaker 1: into thinking that there are none left. We must not
Speaker 1: focus on preserving an old way of life, but instead
Speaker 1: need to carefully carve out our new reality. We need
Speaker 1: to pick our new door. Well, that is my essay.
Speaker 1: Read Thing episode amalgamation about hyper objects, liminal spaces and
Speaker 1: our new reality. I hope you found some of the
Speaker 1: ideas useful um despite their kind of abstract and anti
Speaker 1: abstract nature. If you want to learn more about this,
Speaker 1: I would recommend reading Timothy Morton's book hyper objects Um.
Speaker 1: It is an academic read, but it's not that bad.
Speaker 1: I would I would recommend picking up if you want
Speaker 1: to learn more about these things. I'm sure I'll talk
Speaker 1: about them more in the future. Thank you for listening. Everybody,
Speaker 1: see you on the other side. It Could Happen Here
Speaker 1: is a production of pool Zone Media. For more podcasts
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Speaker 1: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 1: monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening.