Read The hoof and the horse. by Ethan Marcotte (ethanmarcotte.com)
On objects and slices; on design systems and scale.

Robin brings a helpful name to this problem, by way of the philosopher Timothy Morton: hyperobject. A hyperobject is an entity whose scale is too big, too sprawling for any single person to fully appreciate their scale. Climate change, financial markets, socioeconomic classes, design systems—they’re systems we move through, but their scale dwarfs our own. ❧

Hyperobject is an interesting neologism and concept
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 08:47AM

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

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  1. We are obliged to do something about them, because we can think them. ❧

    Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 08:56AM

    It’s very difficult to talk about something you cannot see or touch, yet we are obliged to do so, since global warming affects us all. ❧

    It’s also difficult to interact with those things when we’re missing the words and vocabulary to talk about them intelligently.
    Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 09:00AM

    Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University in Houston. He is the author of Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End Of The World. ❧

    want to read these
    Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 10:10AM

    Or global warming. I can’t see or touch it. What I can see and touch are these raindrops, this snow, that sunburn patch on the back of my neck. I can touch the weather. But I can’t touch climate. So someone can declare: “See! It snowed in Boise, Idaho, this week. That means there’s no global warming!” We can’t directly see global warming, because it’s not only really widespread and really really long-lasting (100,000 years); it’s also super high-dimensional. It’s not just 3-D. It’s an incredibly complex entity that you have to map in what they call a high-dimensional- phase space: a space that plots all the states of a system. In so doing, we are only following the strictures of modern science, laid down by David Hume and underwritten by Immanuel Kant. Science can’t directly point to causes and effects: That would be metaphysical, equivalent to religious dogma. It can only see correlations in data. This is because, argues Kant, there is a gap between what a thing is and how it appears (its “phenomena”) that can’t be reduced, no matter how hard we try. We can’t locate this gap anywhere on or inside a thing. It’s a transcendental gap. Hyperobjects force us to confront this truth of modern science and philosophy. ❧

    A short, and very cogent argument here.
    Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 10:07AM
    Hat tip: Ethan Marcotte #

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