Climate Change As a Hyperobject

The destruction of the world and how to stop it was always meant to be beyond your grasp.

A hyperobject is a concept coined by philosopher Timothy Morton to describe phenomena so massively distributed in time and space that they defy human comprehension.

And that is the predicament we are dealing with when it comes to climate change — the planet rapidly warming, honey bees dying in droves, and the end of everything and everyone we have ever known.

To contemplate this self-inflicted end-of-it-all is to contemplate the asteroid that hit 65 million years ago in what we know as Mexico — immediately preceding our last great extinction event. It’s too big, it’s too painful to even begin to grasp. It’s like trying to contemplate the breakup of Pangaea, and thermonuclear war, and your salad tasting less flavorful all at the same time.

In sharp contrast, our quantifiable personal lives can be sources of comfort. 401ks and college funds have event horizons and targets. Saving up for your children’s braces, or paying off your car can be done on some sort of time scale. We know the players and the stakes. But soon, under climate change, none of those targets will be possible, much less will they matter.

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

Climate change is so very all-encompassing, so impossibly overwhelming, that we have, depressingly, given up on even trying to solve it.

And when you do your research, it is debatable whether we even tried at all.

And that’s by design. General Motors killed the electric car, Reagan ripped up the solar panels on the White House roof. Every attempt to make the world better in the 80s was strangled in the crib to give birth to our unimaginative, neoliberal, market driven reality.

To be alive right now in America is like lying on a massive bed held together by gum and duct tape. When you reach out you cannot feel the edge, and it begins to terrify you as you continue to thrash about, searching for it, but all you ever feel is more coarse fabric. It is panic inducing.

There’s no end to consumerism, to war, to the consumption of meat and gasoline. To wanting to buy your niece a barbie doll and know it will wind up in a swirling ocean of trash.

And that is what it is meant to feel like. It is supposed to feel impossible to imagine the end of this simulacrum that we have all decided to believe in. This lifestyle we engage in will end us all if we let it.

As what it means to be human becomes purposely obscured by the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who insist that our humanity is something that can be readily dispensed with in favor of a cyborg life form yet to be defined. We stare at our phones and attempt to process the hockey-stick-graphs of carbon dioxide, the spiking charts that signify the end of it all. And, individually, there is no way to combat this. We must unite to take on something this existential.

So I write this to give voice to what it feels like to confront a hyperobject: something so purposely made to feel insurmountable by our overlords.

We can and will show you ledges to grab onto, so we can pull ourselves out of this frightening morass. So we can put an end to the endless entropy. So we can begin to finally fight back.

Join us, our future depends on it.

---