On the Ethereum network as hyperobject
“In The Ecological Thought I coined the term hyperobjects to refer to things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans. A hyperobject could be a black hole. A hyperobject could be the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador, or the Florida Everglades. A hyperobject could be the biosphere, or the Solar System. A hyperobject could be the sum total of all the nuclear materials on Earth; or just the plutonium, or the uranium. […] Hyperobjects, then, are “hyper” in relation to some other entity, whether they are directly manufactured by humans or not. Hyperobjects have numerous properties in common. They are viscous, which means that they “stick” to beings that are involved with them. They are nonlocal; in other words, any “local manifestation” of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject. […] Hyperobjects occupy a high-dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time. And they exhibit their effects interobjectively; that is, they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects. The hyperobject is not a function of our knowledge: it’s hyper relative to worms, lemons, and ultraviolet rays, as well as humans.” - Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects
Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobject is illustrative in the discussion of NFTs and blockchain technology.
Hyperobjects are a category of things whose scale and size dwarfs human life. Hyperobjects can be planets, weather systems, or black holes. Concepts of individual agency melt and bend in relation to them.
Hyperobjects can be made, as much as they can be found. It’s instructive to think of the Ethereum network as a sort of hyperobject. Through a planet-scale network of financial incentives, a planet-scale network of actors have created a computing system that is supra-national in size. That the electricity consumption of blockchain networks surpasses that of Argentina is by design, rather than by accident. The supra-national size inoculates the network against smaller sovereignties. The self-regulating incentives perpetuate the object
The Ethereum Virtual Machine is a sort of stargate portal, via which mere digital / virtual objects are made part of the 21st century’s newest hyperobject—a sort of baptising or christening device.
The NFT is the virtual object imbued with hyperobjectivity, with provenance and ownership likewise hyperobjectively secured.