CZM Rewind: Hyperobjects & Our Liminal Reality

The end of the world already happened, but we haven't yet arrived at our new reality. Hyperobjects can help us along the path.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, welcome to It could happen here. This is Garrison.
We'll be taking this week off from work so we
can finally have a break from the daily grind of
putting out, putting out episodes. So we're gonna be playing
some reruns for you of some choice older episodes that we,
you know, still think about. The one that I chose

(00:23):
is my old Hyperobjects and Liminal Spaces episode from Geez,
almost like two years ago. Now. I think it's a
it's a fun one. It's it's it's a very simple
overview of a very complex topic. I've been working on
a sequel to this episode ever since it first came
out that kind of goes more in depth into the

(00:43):
other kind of more niche aspects of Timothy Morton's Hyperrobjects
book and other kind of object oriented ontology types of stuff,
along with like hontology and Uncanny Valley like theories. It's
I don't know, it's I've I have been slowly building
out a Google doc which will eventually resultant and probably
a series of sequels to this episode. So I thought

(01:04):
I might put this one back in circulation in case
some new listeners haven't heard it. To prepare you for
the unbridled, and to prepare you for the next batch
of kind of a kind of unhinged. Garrison reads very
silly kind of ontology books, series episodes that I have

(01:25):
planned in the works. So yeah, here we go, hyper
objects and our liminal reality. 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

(01:47):
be talking with them in a way that contextualizes them
and makes you remember that, despite their magnitude, there's still
very real things that you can interact with. Anyway, I'll
get started an event. 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

(02:11):
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

(02:34):
space subredit 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

(02:57):
is to elicit a certain feeling without thinking 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

(03:21):
phase and the ambiguity and disorientation associated with being inside
of a threshold, not on either one side, per se,
but somewhere 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

(03:45):
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 square
playgrounds do this for me. The other threshold is a
threshold between purpose and use, like a building or room

(04:08):
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.

(04:30):
Usually they 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 screensaver. 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

(04:53):
outside despite being buried deep within the ground. It's such
a great example of liminal space is 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

(05:14):
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 a historic economic and technological boom,

(05:35):
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
dissociation of not being fully in either one, that that

(05:57):
cognitive dissonance can be kind of minding. 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

(06:19):
that cause an effect. It's more than just a regular thing, phenomenon,
or object. While specifically thinking about climate change, philosopher Timothy
Morton dubbed these massive space time altering objects as hyper objects. Now,
Morton often writes about things that can't be talked about directly,

(06:41):
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

(07:02):
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 styroformoplastic bags in the world. It can also be
the sum of all the whirling machinery of capitalism or

(07:24):
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

(07:47):
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 hyperobjects and ordinary
objects is 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

(08:11):
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 contrary 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

(08:33):
part behind that we can't actually always look at, but
can reasonably assume is there. Now, the difference is that
hyperobjects transcend not only a regular conception of physical reality,
but more so our temporal reality. You can hold a
coffee munk and rotate it around in a pretty short
amount of time and witness each side an angle, Or

(08:57):
if you wanted to get really fancy, you could make
a three to sixty scan so you could 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

(09:20):
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 Hyperobjects, The Philosophy and Ecology after
the End of the World, quote, consider rain drops. You

(09:44):
can feel them on your head, but you can't perceive
the actual rain drop in itself. You can only ever
perceive your particular anthropomorphic translation of the rain drops. 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.

(10:08):
I can think of and 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 reels imagined, for
as long as we have existed, but this book is

(10:29):
arguing 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 Hyperobjects
seem to force something on us, something that affects some
core idea of what it means to exist, what Earth is,

(10:52):
what society is. There's no doubt that cosmic phenomenons such
as meteors and blood red moons, tsunamis, 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

(11:17):
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 hyperobjects that is
more deeply challenging than these disasters. The worry is not

(11:38):
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 shuddering of temporality than occurs. For
one thing, we are inside hyperobjects, like Jonah in the whale.

(11:59):
This means that every decision we make is in some
sense related to hyperobjects. These decisions are not merely limited
to sentences and texts about hyperobjects. When I turn 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

(12:22):
one of the entities caught in the hyperobject that I
here call global warming. Different hyperobjects have numerous properties in common,

(12:42):
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 hyperobject
is not directly The hyperobject involve very different temporalities than

(13:02):
the human scale ones that we're used to. In particular,
some very very large hyper objects have a genuine Gaussian temporality.
They generate space time vortex is due to general relativity,
and hyper objects occupy a higher dimensional phase space that
results in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time,

(13:24):
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 ultraviolet rays as well
as humans. Now I'm going to go into the five

(13:49):
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 object tries to resist. In this way, hyperobjects

(14:12):
overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries
to resist a hyperobject, 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,

(14:36):
the more you realize how much our entire physical being
is caught in its meshwork. Immediate intimate symptoms of hyperobjects
are very real, vivid, and often painful, yet they carry
with them this trace of unreality. A good example of
hyperobject viscosity would be radioactive materials. The more you try

(14:59):
to get rid of them, the more you realize you
can't they seriously undermine the notion of away. 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 eventually just back to us again. I'll

(15:20):
quote from the book Hyperobjects quote light itself is the
most viscous thing of all, since nothing can surpass its speed.
Radiation is Sartra's jar of honey par 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

(15:41):
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 we're to discussed is the molten

(16:03):
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 space time 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

(16:26):
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
in nothing. It'd be like if you approach an object
and more and more objects emerge because we can't see

(16:47):
the end of them. Hyperobjects 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

(17:08):
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

(17:29):
hyperobject that impacts meteorological conditions such as tornado formations. Objects
don't feel climate change, but instead experience tornadoes as they
cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the manner
in which a hyperobject becomes more substantial than the local

(17:49):
manifestations that they produce. Putting Morton 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

(18:10):
dealing with here are just the aesthetic effects that are
directly causal. The octopus of the hyperobject emits 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 action

(18:31):
at a distance is involved. It's like confusing the map
with the territory. Hyper 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

(18:53):
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

(19:16):
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.

(19:36):
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

(20:00):
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. Hyperobjects seem

(20:20):
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 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

(20:42):
why they appear non local and temporarily foreshortened is precisely
because of this transdimensional quality. We can only see pieces
of them at once, like a tsunami or a case
of radiation sickness. If an apple we're to invade a
two dimensional world, veristic people would see some dots as
the bottom of the apple touched their universe, and then

(21:05):
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.

(21:26):
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 body's itch with yesterday's sunburn.

(21:49):
But don't relegate hyper objects as a simple abstract notion.
The gay hyperobjects 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

(22:11):
real objects that affect other objects. We tend to only
think about hyperobjects 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 hyperobjects
connecting doesn't affect the existence and the inevitable effects of

(22:33):
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

(22:54):
is aware of the hyperobject 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
hyperobjects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently,
objects are only able to perceive the imprint or footprint

(23:17):
of a hyperobject upon other objects revealed as information. It's
all an ecological mesh of interconnectedness and interobjectivity. For example,
climate change is formed by interactions between the sun, fossil fuels,
carbon dioxide, economic growth, among other things. Yet climate change

(23:40):
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,

(24:01):
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

(24:26):
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

(24:49):
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 Fashia. Interobjectivity provides
a space that is ontologically in front of objects in

(25:13):
which relational phenomenon can emerge. The massiveness and distribution of
hyperobjects simply force us to take note of this fact.
Hyper objects provide great examples of interobjectivity, namely the way
in which nothing has ever experienced directly, but only as
mediated through other entities in some shared consensual space. We

(25:37):
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.

(26:01):
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

(26:24):
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 hyperobject evolution that joins me the dinosaur,

(26:44):
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

(27:07):
effects so spaced out in time that using our ordinary
models of thought are just inadequate. It can also reconcile
the opposing views that cast climate change as the very
real series of disasters or a complicated, interlocking mesh of
systems that can feel very unreal and overwhelming. Just thinking
of big things as abstract systems has the habit of

(27:30):
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 is not great for mental well being.

(27:53):
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 hyperobjects 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

(28:16):
bombarded with products and services trying to usurp the real
That's what marketing is. 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 fractaled realities. There's immersive gaming and the allure of

(28:36):
getting lost within thousands of unique worlds. And now we
have vr AR and the metaverse, more layers of digital
fabrication trying to be passed off as an almost hyperreality,
a promise to make a reality even more real and
immersive than our status quo. The Internet itself is another

(28:59):
hyper object, and all of this extra reality can take
a strain on the human mind. Derealization 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

(29:19):
of fog, is becoming more and more common, especially among
so called gen Z, the generation that grew up with
the Internet being a staple of life. Now. How we
got here is a dissociation between humans and what we
call nature or the environment. The problems aren't getting fixed
because we're so disassociated from the effects, just as the

(29:42):
effects are from the cause. That resulting alienation of all
things makes this worse. All of the worst effects of
climate change aren't gonna be felt for hundreds of years.
And that is a weird feeling. That is cognitive dissonance
that I don't know how to so understand that, and
that makes making decisions about our situation now feel distant

(30:05):
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 anthprocentric thinking. Nature isn't other from us. We are nature.

(30:28):
It's the same thing. We are all part of this
big mesh. This sacred idea of nature isn't natural and
can never be naturalized. We have to learn how to
have an ecology without nature, without nature as a separate thing.
To have a genuine ecological view, we must relinquish this

(30:49):
idea that nature being separate from us, once and for all.
We have to kill the anthepra scene in our own head.
A quote from one of Morton's 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

(31:11):
the figure of a woman. It's a paradoxical act of sadistic,
possessive admiration. 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 sensual appearance. For
another object, raification is reduction of one's entity to another's

(31:36):
fantasy about it. Nature is a reification 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.

(31:59):
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 onto logical. The threat
of unreality is the very sign of reality itself. And

(32:19):
oh boy, do we be experiencing this simultaneous disillusionment of
reality and the overwhelmingly real presence of hyperobjects 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

(32:43):
world is very active in environmentalism, but the weights usually
framed kind of fosters its own negation. The end of
the world is coming idea is not really effective, since
to all kinds 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

(33:06):
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 hyperdobject

(33:29):
concept is to then awaken us from this dream that
the world's about to end, because action on Earth, like
the real Earth depends on it, the end of the
world has already happened. Using the hyperobject idea helps sort
out these overly systematic things into a package that I
can actually think about. There's something about discovering the language

(33:51):
for a feeling, being able to name it that is empowering,
a way of finding a handhold in the dim light
of confusion, rather than scrambling around in the dark. So
how would you convince two dimensional flat land people of
the existence of apples based on the occasional phasing appearance

(34:12):
of a morphing circular shape in their world? Now, hyper
objects can really assist in understanding the cognitive dissonance around
climate 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 hyperobject rising sea levels are just

(34:32):
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, our seeing
of interconnected things as separate problems or manifestations, missing the
fact that almost all of our problems don't have a

(34:55):
shared root cause, but instead are just part of a massive,
shared bungee cord like mesh network. When so many local
manifesting problems and natural disasters are blamed on climate change,
even if you believe climate change is the cause, which
it it is, it still feels weird because climate change

(35:15):
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 hyperobjects is a

(35:37):
lot easier than thinking about them, because once you start
thinking about them, finding solutions to problems so displaced in
time is 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

(35:58):
downplaying the earthy of the problem. In fact, that should
make the problem more urgent. The cause is our brief luxury,
and the effect is terraforming the world. And we are
right now caught in between the uncanny hyperobject of all
liminal spaces. The end of the world has already happened.

(36:22):
We are on the path and about to enter a
new world. We are in the liminal space hallway of
all liminal space hallways. 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.

(36:42):
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.

(37:02):
We need to pick our new door. Well. That is
my essay. Read Thing episode Amalgamation about hyper objects, limital spaces,
and our New Reality. I hope you found some of
the ideas useful, despite their kind of abstract and anti

(37:25):
abstract in nature. If you want to learn more about this,
I would recommend reading Timothy Morton's book hyper Objects. It
is an academic read, but it's not that bad. Would
I would recommend picking it 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

(37:52):
as a production of pool Zone Media. For more podcasts
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It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com
slash sources. Thanks for listening.