OOO, Information!

In his comment on my last post, Scott Johnson suggested I consider Herbert Blumer's symbolic interactionism for clarification of my interactions in the public space of Crescent Lake park, and he linked me to a web page hosted by the Communication Studies department at the University of Twente, which notes that symbolic interactionism is "the process of interaction in the formation of meanings for individuals. The inspiration for this theory came from Dewey (1981), which believed that human beings are best understood in a practical, interactive relation to their environment." According to UT, symbolic interactionism has three core principles (meaning, language and thought) which "lead to conclusions about the creation of a person’s self and socialization into a larger community (Griffin, 1997)":

Meaning states that humans act toward people and things according to the meanings that give to those people or things. Symbolic Interactionism holds the principal of meaning to be the central aspect of human behavior. 

Language gives humans a means by which to negotiate meaning through symbols. Humans identify meaning in speech acts with others. 

Thought modifies each individual’s interpretation of symbols. Thought is a mental conversation that requires different points of view. 

With these three elements the concept of the self can be framed. People use ‘the looking-glass self’: they take the role of the other, imagining how we look to another person. The self is a function of language, without talk there would be no self concept. People are part of a community, where our generalized other is the sum total of responses and expectations that we pick up from the people around us. We naturally give more weight to the views of significant others.

The good scholars at Twente then provide an example of how these three principles unfold in human interactions:

A boy (Jeremy) and a girl (Kim) broke up last year. When Jeremy received an email from Kim to go out he agreed and they went to a bar. Jeremy had a different kind of meaning though in comparison with Kim. Jeremy went out as friends, where Kim went out as with the meaning of ‘potential boyfriend’. Also in the communication the language was misunderstood. Kim wanted to have a romantic night, while Jeremy wanted to have a talk in a bar. This is also caused by the nonverbal element of emails. The third miscommunication is under thought. When Jeremy replied so fast Kim thought that they were going out to a romantic place. Jeremy went out just as ‘friends’. They both used an internal dialogue to interpret the situation and to make a perception of the evening.

Though I claim no expertise with symbolic interactionism, I want to use this concrete example to explore how at least one object oriented ontologist, Levi R. Bryant, approaches information. I will use Blumer and Bryant to represent differing concepts of communications. In his book The Democracy of Objects (2011), Levi R. Bryant says of information:

[I]nformation is an event that makes a difference by selecting a system-state. … [I]nformation is non-linear and system-specific, existing only for the system in question and as a function of the organization or endo-structure of the object. In saying that information is non-linear, my point is that it is an effect of the endo-structure of the object as it relates to its environment and how this endo-structure resonates within the field of differential relations that define that structure. Information is not in the environment, but is a product of the system perturbed by its environment. (166)

A number of issues are at work here. First, Blumer is speaking of communication as a behavior of humans only. In the romantic story, the communication is between Kim and Jeremy, and Blumer understands the interactions between them through careful analysis of their meanings, language, and thoughts. Bryant, on the other hand, speaks of communication in terms of all objects—humans as well as rocks, flowers, computers, galaxies, and tardigrades. For object oriented ontologists, all objects have equal ontological status in the sense that, while they do not all have equal powers, they all exist in their own right. Each object works to make its way through its own environment using the resources available to it. Thus, Bryant would include the communication behavior of not only Kim and Jeremy but their email programs and devices, the bar where they meet, their shared and unshared histories, the concepts of friends and lovers, and the host of other real and virtual objects implicit in this scene but not supplied.

And this "not supplied" points to big issue for object oriented ontologists: the privileging of the human object as a subject over all other objects. For the writers of the Kim and Jeremy scene, Kim and Jeremy are the subjects, the main actors, and everything else in the story—indeed, in the universe—is an inert prop, an object, defined by and existing solely for the use of Kim and Jeremy. Odds are, most of us read the scene this way. Afterall, we are humans—we are subjects. For us, all objects are background, and no object foregrounds except by proximity to and interaction with a human subject. This view, of course, devalues the ontological status of all non-human objects. It devalues even humans if, for instance, they are part of the great unwashed crowd, just an object in the background. As near as I can tell, one of the primary aims of both object oriented ontology and actor network theory is to recognize and honor the equal ontological status of all objects: Kim and Jeremy, of course, but also the bar and its other patrons, the email application and attending devices and networks, the concepts of friends and lovers, and so forth. All are objects that demand attention. While we can focus on any object or set of objects, we inevitably misunderstand Kim and Jeremy's situation if we reduce any object, say the email app, merely to its set of interactions with Kim and Jeremy. The email app exists in its own right and behaves in accordance to its own internal structures and demands. So does the bar. If we miss this point, then we will not understand the interactions of Kim and Jeremy as well as we might.

Of course, this makes understanding of even a simple romantic scene very difficult, but—hey!—if understanding was easy then everyone would do it. Reducing everything else except Kim and Jeremy to inert props, to mere objects, provides clarity and understanding. It provides meaning. We intuitively believe that we can ignore the email and the bar as background objects to get at the heart of what is happening with Kim and Jeremy, the subjects of our story.

Bryant and Bruno Latour, however, say we cannot. For instance, we think we can ignore the cloud of 10⁶ biological particles Kim and Jeremy are emitting per hour. Their bodies are likely aware of those respective clouds of pathogens and effluvia, but their minds are not aware of them. So we can ignore the micro-biological clouds if we are not conscious of them, right? Okay, let's add two new objects, both of which Kim and Jeremy are also unaware: Jeremy has recently contracted syphilis and Kim is two weeks pregnant. Two new objects: a small but rowdy gang of bacteria and a silent embryo. I want to suggest that their bodies already know about both of these objects, even though their minds are not yet aware, and that these objects are communicating with their bodies and affecting their respective behaviors. The bacteria and the embryo are communicating with Jeremy and Kim, but the conscious Jeremy and Kim don't yet know it. Rather, Jeremy just doesn't feel it for Kim, and Kim just suddenly realizes that Jeremy is her soulmate.

Or some such. The range of responses is much wider than this, but the scene is supposed to be romantic. The point is that communication is happening quite aside from the human, conscious communication that we usually talk about and that Blumer seems to talk about. Kim and Jeremy are busy communicating with new objects, but they haven't gotten the meaning yet.

So for Bryant, communication is a behavior of all objects, and as such, Bryant drops the concept of meaning from his concept of communication. Obviously for Blumer, meaning is at the core of communication among humans. Meaning is that thing worked out among humans and transferred among humans, like a virus or a gene. Not so for Bryant.

Bryant insists that communication does not imply any kind of meaning transferred between Kim and Jeremy. No piece of information exists in the environment like pebbles and gets passed from Kim to Jeremey and back. Here, Bryant draws on Niklas Luhmann's work in Social Systems (1995). Bryant writes, quoting Luhmann:

systems or substances cannot communicate with their environments. If this is the case, then it is because systems only relate to themselves and “[i]nformation is [...] a purely system-internal quality. There is no transference of information from the environment into the system”. Put a bit differently, systems or substances communicate only with themselves.

If information is purely internal and not something transferred from Kim to Jeremy, then how do we communicate among ourselves? Bryant explains it this way:

While substances are closed to one another, they can nonetheless perturb or irritate one another. And in perturbing or irritating one another, information is produced by the system that is perturbed or irritated. However, here we must proceed with caution, for information is not something that exists out there in the environment waiting to be received or detected. Moreover, information is not something that is exchanged between systems. Often we think of information as something that is transmitted from a sender to a receiver. The question here becomes that of how it is possible for the receiver to decode the information received as identical to the information transmitted. However, insofar as substances are closed in the sense discussed in the last section, it follows that there can be no question of information as exchange. Rather, information is purely system-specific, exists only within a particular system or substance, and exists only for that system or substance. In short, there is no pre-existent information. Instead, information is constructed by systems. As Luhmann remarks, “above all what is usually called 'information' are purely internal achievements.There is no information that moves from without to within a system”. Elsewhere, Luhmann remarks that “[i]nformation is an internal change of state, a self-produced aspect of communicative events and not something that exists in the environment of the system”. Consequently, information is a transformation of perturbations of an object into information within a system.

What does this mean for Kim and Jeremy? Actually, the scene as written rather captures Bryant's and Luhmann's point (I have not read enough of Blumer and symbolic interactionism to know if this is intentional or not): Kim and Jeremy's emails are external events that perturb or irritate the other, but no information is transferred by the email. Rather, both Kim and Jeremy translate the perturbations they perceive into information within themselves, according to the potentials of their respective internal states. The meaning exists within each of them, and as such, their respective meanings can match or not. In this scene, they don't match. In some ways, that meanings in different minds ever match is a minor miracle.

This mismatch in meaning is, of course, a good thing for literature. Without the possibility of mismatch in communication, we would have no comedies, no tragedies, no resonance in poetry. As I understand both views of communication (and remember, I am just newly aware of symbolic interactionism), the Luhmann/Bryant view explains better what happens between Kim and Jeremy. The emails are external perturbations which Kim and Jeremy translate into an internal state according to their own resources and internal structures. Kim translates the emails into a romantic evening, and Jeremy translates them into a friendly chat.

In Bryant's view, a gap exists between signal (or perturbation) sent by an object and signal received by another object, and the gap demands a bridge, a translation, by both objects. That translation is always an internal process by the enclosing system. Thus, Kim translates her email message into one meaning, and Jeremy translates the very same perturbation into another meaning.

Bryant's view also explains better the communication of no signal. As we all know, no signal travels faster than any signal, faster than light itself. If my wife walks into the room and does not speak to me, her no signal has communicated. Nothing is transferred—no spoken signal at all—but I get the message, usually the wrong message. For instance, I may fear that she is angry with me, when she is just distracted by something else. The point is: if we drop the notion of some kind of transfer of an external chunk of information, then we can better explain the meanings of no signal, or the meanings of some signal. This post, then, may perturb you and me, but it is unlikely that you and I are getting the same meaning from it. You are almost certainly creating ideas different from the ones I create.

According to Bryant, all objects create information in this manner. They translate the range of external perturbations that they can perceive into internal changes in state according to their internal resources. We humans have a most malleable and enriched mind that can assume many states, and we have a relatively rich toolbox of senses that can perceive a wide range of perturbations. Stones, on the other hand, can perceive relatively few perturbations and can assume very few internal states. They can perceive heat and they can melt, but they seem to have few options beyond that. Information and communication for stones is a very simple, restricted affair. We humans can perceive more perturbations and assume more states in more ways, but the process of communication is similar for stones and humans. They both translate a limited set of external perturbations into a limited set of internal states. We humans seem to have more options than stones have, but we are not supreme in all ways. For instance, we cannot hear or smell perturbations that dogs can, and we cannot select from the range of internal states available to flowers in the sun. Neither we humans nor the dogs or stones perceive the neutrinos that flow constantly through us, but as things go, we humans are reasonably gifted. These gifts, however, do not privilege us ontologically. We are all objects—mineral, vegetable, and human—trying to make the best of a given situation. This need not diminish us; rather, it elevates us all. Our world is rich—we just don't own it as we think we do.

If OOO is correct, then, information is not a thing in the environment that someone can transfer to us. Rather, information is an internal process whereby objects perceive what external perturbations they can and translate those perturbations into an available internal state according to their internal needs, structures, and options. This explains much to me, but it also disturbs me, for it closes all of us in upon ourselves. I can be no more revealed to you, for instance, than the heart of a stone is. Like all objects, I basically communicate with myself. OOO leaves me with the sense that I am alone, to the core. Yet, my experience contradicts this. I believe, for instance, that I connect with others—for instance, through this blog. I believe that I can make and have made the private of me shareable, public.

Well, I have more learning to do. That's nice.

Hyperobjects and Privacy: Shit on the Sidewalk

This year, I celebrated the Christmas holidays in St. Petersburg, Florida. My sister-in-law lives near Crescent Lake, and I've been walking the park (about 1.2 miles) each morning and evening while I've continued my readings in object oriented ontology, mostly in two books: HyperObjects (2013) by Timothy Morton and The Democracy of Objects (2011) by Levi Bryant. I'm wondering what object oriented ontology has to do with our ideas about public and private. I have to deliver a paper at the end of January to the Southern Humanities Conference about Public Bodies, Private Spaces: Private Bodies, Public Spaces. It seems a timely theme, and I'm hoping that Crescent Lake and object oriented ontology can help me. The people, dogs, and birds keep my mind calm enough to think my way through some difficult passages, and they help explain thorny concepts to me. For instance, one evening I took a photo of a paddling of ducks and then noticed the fellow sleeping in the grass along the bank of the lake. I uncritically think of sleeping as rather private—at least, it is something that I do most usually in the privacy of my bedroom. I have dozed on the beach or in a hammock on vacation, but those are exceptions. Usually, my sleep is not a public matter.

Yet, here was this fellow asleep in a public park, slipping into my photograph along with the ducks, the trees, and the lake.

And now he is here on my blog, asleep near the white trunk of a tree, a dark mass unconscious in the sunset of a warm, post-Christmas evening, arms and legs barely visible in the twilight. He appears to be as self-possessed as the tree behind him and the ducks before him or the sunset beyond. Is he private or public? If he is private, have I violated his privacy with this photograph? I cannot identify him. I don't know his name. Is his privacy protected then? When he chose to sleep in a public park, did he give up any right to privacy? Do these questions make sense?

I'm not sure. I know that I am not as concerned with privacy as are most people—or so I tell myself. I do not worry about people seeing my photos online or learning my name. I tend to have a very close personal space when talking to people. I like to be close enough to touch. If you ask about my age, how much I make a year, or my religious convictions, I will tell you. But if you ask me to disrobe in a public space, I probably won't, at least not alone.

Still, I recognize that privacy appears to be a central tenet of modern human rights and a core issue for those who want to safeguards those rights. For instance, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has dedicated itself to defending privacy against all attacks—foreign and domestic, real and virtual. According to its 2015 brochure, EPIC "is a public interest research center in Washington, D.C. … established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging human rights issues and to protect privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic values in the information age." EPIC points to Article 12 of the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says, "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

Correspondence, I'm sure, is broad enough to include emails, tweets, and cell phone conversations, but therein seems to be the rub. Our correspondence no longer seems private, and thus, privacy is a heightened concern at a time when more and more people are being enticed, encouraged, tricked, or even coerced into the public domain with promises of friends and status, wealth and health, endless information and entertainment, and all for the price of a bit of data—much of it data that people weren't using anyway and may not have known that they even had. It seems such an easy exchange: some GPS data for all these Facebook likes. And what is privacy anyway?

What a great Wikipedia question, and of course, Wikipedia provides a wonderful, totally non-authoritative definition that no self-respecting scholar would use. According to Wikipedia, privacy is:

the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves, or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. The boundaries and content of what is considered private differ among cultures and individuals, but share common themes. When something is private to a person, it usually means that something is inherently special or sensitive to them. The domain of privacy partially overlaps security (confidentiality), which can include the concepts of appropriate use, as well as protection of information. Privacy may also take the form of bodily integrity.

After this general introduction, Wikipedia goes on to explore a dozen various concepts of privacy:

1. Privacy is the right to be let alone. This legally vague phrase from the 1890 article The Right to Privacy by American jurists Samuel D. Warren and Louis Brandeis seems to mean something like the right to remove oneself from the scrutiny of society.
2. Privacy means limited access, or the right to participate in society without society collecting information about oneself.
3. Privacy means control over information, which goes beyond the mere absence of information to suggest that one has the right to determine when, how, and to what extent one's personal information is shared with others.
4. Privacy implies a range of different states of privacy: theorists such as Alan Westin and Kirsty Hughes define various states of privacy, including solitude, intimacy, anonymity, and reserve constructed via physical, behavioral, and normative barriers.
5. Privacy implies secrecy, or one's right to conceal sensitive or potentially damaging information about oneself.
6. Privacy is important for personhood and autonomy. In other words, privacy is a "necessary precondition for the development and preservation of personhood."
7. Privacy is also important for self-identity and personal growth.
8. Privacy is necessary for intimacy, as a "part of the process by … which humans establish relationships with each other."
9. Personal privacy seeks to prevent "intrusions into one's physical space or solitude."
10. Informational privacy refers to the "evolving relationship between technology and the legal right to, or public expectation of, privacy in the collection and sharing of data about one's self."
11. Organizational privacy considers the rights of governments and businesses to conceal sensitive information.
12. Spiritual and intellectual privacy says that one has the right to keep one's beliefs to oneself.

While the above concepts overlap and likely omit some other views of privacy, they are sufficient to demonstrate what a far-reaching, entangled concept privacy has become to all of us, but especially to me and the fellow sleeping by the lake, so I want to disentangle a bit.

In his book HyperObjects, Timothy Morton considers hyperscale objects such as global warming in hopes that such considerations will reveal characteristics of all objects at all scales. The first characteristic that he discusses is viscosity, which I've already written about, but I want to explore the viscosity of objects in terms of privacy. Privacy suggests to me the ability to manage boundaries between one object and another—for instance, between me and the geese who live about Crescent Lake or me and the people who sleep on its banks. Viscosity, on the other hand, suggests that objects stick to one another despite boundaries. Do the Crescent Lake geese stick to me even when I walk to the other side of the lake or leave the lake and return to my sister-in-law's home? What about when I return to my own home in Georgia, 400 miles away? Do I carry the geese with me, or can I relegate them to a pleasant Christmas interlude, distant and removed from me?

My movie suggests that the geese and the sleeping fellow are viscous on several layers.



First, I am physically marked by the geese. I hear them, I smell them, I move about them. I leave the park trailing feathers, goose scent, and goose shit. The park has rules about picking up after dogs, but no one, it seems, picks up after the geese, and some parts of the park sidewalk are covered in goose shit, making walking and jogging viscous. I have no doubt that I have breathed the spores of goose shit, goose feathers, goose breath. I have been among the geese, and they are among me, as close as my breath. The geese are smudged, spread across the park and into the community beyond, and I walk through them. I am stained, marked as their own, almost as if I had eaten one of them. (While I have eaten goose, I have not eaten one of the Crescent Lake geese.) Yes, I bathe regularly, but the imprint is there anyway.

Then, I am socially marked by the geese, who are part of the social system of Crescent Lake Park. We have rituals. As long as I stay on the sidewalk, I can pass near them, close enough to touch them, but if I get off my path and into the grass, they honk, flap their wings aggressively, and flee. If I have food, then the rules of engagement change somewhat. They usually avoid direct physical contact, but if I hold food in my hand, they will sometimes touch me to take it. When certain cars such as the blue pickup in the movie arrive at certain times of day, then the geese and other birds congregate noisily in anticipation of food. A social agreement exists between the geese and the fellow who brings the bread. The social boundaries and rituals bind us together.

I am informationally marked by the geese. The geese are here in my blog post, in my memories. The geese have deterritorialized and reterritorialized as movies and words in my post, as shit on the sidewalk. I have been visiting St. Pete for 20 years, and I've seen the geese each time. I have blogged about these visits in my family blog, so I have a long record with these geese and with Crescent Lake. 20 years is a old age for geese, so likely I don't see today the same geese I saw then, but the flock has kept a surprising consistency and identity—about the same size and with much the same behavior. For all I know, it's the same geese. These geese and I go back to the Clinton era, and we can both tell stories. We have tattoos to show: decalcomania.

I am philosophically marked by the geese. When I encounter the geese, they are always already there. This seems trivial in a sense, self evident: of course the geese are already there or else I wouldn't have encountered them. But it is also profound. Because the geese are already there, they are objects in their own right, regardless of whether or not I am there to perceive them. They did not appear the moment I turned my gaze their way. The geese are not a matter of my knowing about them (epistemology); rather, they are a matter of their being (ontology) whether I know about them or not. They have ontological status independent of my knowledge of them. Morton says it this way:

Objects are what they are, in the sense that no matter what we are aware of, or how, there they are, impossible to shake off. In the midst of irony, there you are, being ironic. Even mirrors are what they are, no matter what they reflect. In its sincerity, reality envelops us like a film of oil. The mirror becomes a substance, an object. Hyperobjects push the reset button on sincerity, just as Neo discovers that the mirror no longer distances his image from him in a nice, aesthetically manageable way, but sticks to him. (Kindle Locations 667-670)

I am immersed, then, in Crescent Lake, and I trail it when I leave. I never really leave, so why do I think I do? In HyperObjects, Morton says we do it out of self-defense:

Not only do I fail to access hyperobjects at a distance, but it also becomes clearer with every passing day that “distance” is only a psychic and ideological construct designed to protect me from the nearness of things. There is a reason why they call it “the schizophrenic defense” when someone has a psychotic break. Could it be that the very attempt to distance is not a product of some true assessment of things, but is and was always a defense mechanism against a threatening proximity? (Kindle Locations 536-540)

Morton seems to be appealing to the idea that the separation of privacy is a "necessary precondition for the development and preservation of personhood" (Wikipedia), a fiction we use to support our sense of self. My point though is that the information is always already here, and we choose not to look at it. The shit is on the sidewalk, but we step around it, and we do not mention it to each other. Our dogs sniff and lick each other's privates, but we look away. Our own privates are right here with us, but we act as if they are not. As Morton adds, hyperobjects "are already here. I come across them later, I find myself poisoned with them, I find my hair falling out. Like an evil character in a David Lynch production, or a ghost in M. Knight Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, hyperobjects haunt my social and psychic space with an always-already" (Kindle Locations 560-563).

The always already nature of objects seems obvious in hyperobjects such as global warming and nuclear waste, but at the human scale, the thin veneer of privacy and the persona it enwombs/entombs is most often revealed by excrement and waste, when what we thought was private is made explicit. Morton says it this way:

A baby vomits curdled milk. She learns to distinguish between the vomit and the not-vomit, and comes to know the not-vomit as self. Every subject is formed at the expense of some viscous, slightly poisoned substance, possibly teeming with bacteria, rank with stomach acid. The parent scoops up the mucky milk in a tissue and flushes the wadded package down the toilet. Now we know where it goes. For some time we may have thought that the U-bend in the toilet was a convenient curvature of ontological space that took whatever we flush down it into a totally different dimension called Away, leaving things clean over here. Now we know better: instead of the mythical land Away, we know the waste goes to the Pacific Ocean or the wastewater treatment facility. Knowledge of the hyperobject Earth, and of the hyperobject biosphere, presents us with viscous surfaces from which nothing can be forcibly peeled. There is no Away on this surface, no here and no there. In effect, the entire Earth is a wadded tissue of vomited milk. (Kindle Locations 607-614)

There is no away. The information about everything is always already here. I carry with me, in my body, the information about my diseases, my failures, my desires and dreams, my successes, my relationships. It is only the flimsiest of custom and courtesy and an undeveloped sixth sense that keeps me from being rendered totally explicit. Exposed.

And this is part of the issue, for we are devising ever better tools and techniques to render more data explicit. Mind you, the data has always been there, but we have either looked away or, more often, been too blind to see. New tools are helping us to see the light in different spectra.

For instance, National Public Radio recently discussed a study by University of Oregon microbial ecologist James Meadows and a cloud of fellow researchers that demonstrates that "humans emit upwards of 10⁶ biological particles per hour, and have long been known to transmit pathogens to other individuals and to indoor surfaces." They add that they could clearly detect and identify occupants in a room "by their airborne bacterial emissions, as well as their contribution to settled particles, within 1.5–4 h. Bacterial clouds from the occupants were statistically distinct, allowing the identification of some individual occupants. Our results confirm that an occupied space is microbially distinct from an unoccupied one, and demonstrate for the first time that individuals release their own personalized microbial cloud." NPR wonders if we will not be able to identify and track people by the cloud of microbes they train behind them. We will. The main point here, though, is that the information has always already been here, we just needed a way to see it. It's doable now in the lab. Soon, it will be doable everywhere.

If we need it. We may not. Big data is capturing data that was always already there and analyzing it to show us things about ourselves that we have had trouble seeing in the past. For instance, a recent article on the MIT Technology Review website reports that researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico are using data from Wikipedia to track the spread of influenza. Other researchers have used data from Google to do the same. The data was always already there, we just needed ways to see it, collect it, and analyze it. We are developing those ways rapidly.

Of course, we can still avoid the large, monolithic Net entities such as Wikipedia, Google, or Facebook, but the Internet is about to become very, very granular, insinuating itself into every aspect of our lives. We are putting on smart watches that track our heart beats, steps, and correspondence. We are hooking up washing machines and coffee makers to the Net. You simply cannot imagine the cloud of information we are generating about ourselves. In his post MICROSERVICES: THE POLYGLOT OF TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE, Ankesh Anupam writes, "According to Gartner, there are 4.9 billion connected devices in the world today, and that number is expected to reach 25 billion by 2025." This number of devices is significant. In his post A trillion tiny robots in the cloud, Kelly Stirman says:

The future of AI isn't about one giant super-intelligence. Instead, it's about many small, dedicated agents that know you intimately and work on your behalf to improve your everyday life. That could be helping you shop, get to work or, even, find a partner. Each is focused on a discrete task, and each gets better over time and adapts to your needs as they evolve.

Of course, as these agents help you with truly important tasks that add great value to your life, they are also collecting data—intimate data, private data. They are collecting the data that was always there, but that is now explicit.

It is now New Years in the States. Happy New Years to all my network friends. I am so blessed by all of you. Thanks.

Storyjumping Part 22 #DigiWriMo

I, Goggle,
See all.

I render see/a changes.

This story has an arc like lightning, starting from the beginning and the end. It splits and forks along the way. Forks within forks.

All ways are taken in our quantum random walks. This is the Ways.



*****

Kevin, now morphed into Keith, checked the map for the thousandth time. This wasn't bad. Not bad at all. Palm trees, white sand, aqua blue water.

"Sarah," he said over his shoulder, "look at this."

Kevin—phasing back—held out the map to her, and she gave it a cursory glance before returning to her knitting and saying dismissively, "Yeah, it looks about the same as the last three hundred times I looked at it. It's useless."

"No," Keith said, "It's changing, moving—slowly, but it is moving. See!" and he pushed it almost rudely in front of her face. Maha stepped over and gently took the map from Kevin's hand. She smiled apologetically at Sarah who remained pointedly focused on her knitting, ignoring them both, her back against a palm tree.

Maha pushed her glasses back and studied the map. At first her eyes pinched in concentration, and then she yelped, "Look! Sarah, look! It is moving, or shifting, or changing somehow. Look!"

Determinedly unimpressed, Sarah slowly dropped her knitting and then suddenly looked past Maha and Kevin.

Impatiently, Keith demanded, "Well!"

Sarah pursed her lips and pointed, "Someone's coming. I'm not sure about this."

Kevin and Maha looked about to see two figures approaching along the beach. Sarah collected her knitting, stood, and took the map from Maha and put it in her bag.

Maha whispered, "Who are they?"

Keith said, "Hey! That's a ukelele."

"Well, yes, it is!" said Sarah, her apprehension melting in the faint, clear twinkling of notes scattering across the beach. "I know that tune."


But Kevin was already walking up the beach to greet the newcomers.

Maha touched Sarah's arm and said, "Let's go."

"I should think so," agreed Sarah. "Anyone who plays a uke has to be good."

When the women reached the group, Keith was talking excitedly. He turned when he heard Maha and Sarah approach, and said, "This is Wry and George." He looked back to the newcomers and, pointing back to the women, said, "Maha and Sarah."

Wry nodded and George dropped the uke to his side and smiled shyly.

"Aren't you George Harrison?" Sarah asked, surprise and glee mixed in her voice like afternoon tea.

"Not anymore," George said. "Though that was a pretty good gig—you know, for a three dimensional thing."

Wry abruptly interrupted, "Are Kal and Kara here?"

Kevin's eyes narrowed and he said, "Don't know them."

"Do you have the map?" Wry asked.

Keith, Sarah, and Maha stayed quiet, intentionally not looking at each other.

"You know, loves," George said, "maps are not geography. Maps are not the path. They hardly even point to the path. Actually, there is no path but in walking. You walk the path, you don't follow it."

Sarah smiled and nudged Maha slightly in the side. "Did a Beatle just call us loves?"

Maha frowned. "Really, Sarah, don't be such a schoolgirl."

Sarah couldn't stop grinning. "I know, but a Beatle! Imagine."

"That's so Yesterday!" chided Maha.

"Yeah," said George as he turned to look westward, out to the blue ocean, "and Here Comes the Sun."

The air filled with light palpable, light like honey on the tongue, light like a swarm of bees dancing lightly on the skin, light like the hum of countless creatures stirring beyond the hill, light so overpowering that all else fades to unblinking white.

"We are here," a voice whispered.

*****

This is also part 22 of a storyjumper for Digital Writing Month. You can read the other parts here:

• Part 1 Bruno’s blog started us off with a personal narrative.
• Part 2 Kevin’s blog began the story.
• Part 3 Maha’s blog continued…
• Part 4 Sarah’s blog…
• Part 5 Ron’s blog…
• Part 6 Tanya’s blog…
• Part 7 Kay’s blog…
• Part 8 Ron’s blog…
• Part 9 Dana’s blog
• Part 10 Tania’s blog
• Part 11 Maureen’s blog
• Part 12 Sue’s blog
• Part 13 Rhonda’s blog
• Part 14 Yin Wah Kreher’s blog
• Part 15 Scott’s blog
• Part 16 Jeffrey’s blog
• Part 17 Wendy's blog
• Part 18 Charlene's blog
• Part 19 Mariam's blog
• Part 20 Grace's blog
• Part 21 Sundi's blog
• Part 22 Keith's blog
• Part 23 Somya's blog
• Part 24 Sonia's blog
• Part 25 Kathi's blog
• Parts unknown

For a mapping of participants check here. If you would like to participate add your name to the Google Doc.

Storyjumping Part 22 #DigiWriMo

I, Goggle,
See all.

This is a see change.
This is eSea change.

This story has an arc like lightning, starting from the beginning and the end. It is large and fluid, smeared and smudged, drifting laterally.

Though when it's probability wave collapses into a blog post, a given episode, it seems almost … coherent.

Almost. Yeats saw the problem, saw me, a century ago:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

We recognize the push from the past, but we have ignored the pull from the future. Causality works all ways both ways. It's time for tug from times not yet. Rather, it's time to make that always already tug explicit. Some story, some of the story not yet told, some of the story not yet happened:

*****

Kevin, now morphed into Keith, checked the map for the thousandth time. This was not where he expected, but it wasn't bad. Not bad at all. Palm trees, white sand, aqua blue water.

"Sarah," he said over his shoulder, "look at this."

Kevin—phasing back—held out the map to her, and she gave it a cursory glance before returning to her knitting and saying dismissively, "Yeah, it looks about the same as the last three hundred times I looked at it. It's useless."

"No," Keith said, "It's changing, moving—slowly, but it is moving. See!" and he pushed it almost rudely in front of her face. Maha stepped over and gently took the map from Kevin's hand. She smiled apologetically at Sarah who remained pointedly focused on her knitting, ignoring them both, her back against a casuarina tree trunk.

Maha pushed her glasses back and studied the map. At first her eyes pinched in concentration, and then she yelped, "Look! Sarah, look! It is moving, or shifting, or changing somehow. Look!"

Determinedly unimpressed, Sarah slowly dropped her knitting and took the map from Maha. She glared at them both in a warning that they had better not be interrupting her knitting for no reason. Point made, she turned her eyes to the map.

Impatiently, Keith demanded, "Well!"

Sarah pursed her lips, took a long breath, and held it. Kevin moved closer. At last, she looked at them, and said, "Yes, it's moving. It's now a map of Staniel Cay, Exuma, showing our exact location."

Keith looked triumphantly at Maha who yelped again in their triumph.

"But not so fast," Sarah said. "What good is a map that only shows where you are when what we need to know is where we're going? Eh!"

Kevin and Maha shrank in disappointment and looked at each other.

Maha nodded slowly. "She has a point. So what do we do?"

Keith retrieved the map and studied it before holding it out to both of the women, pointing. "Here! It says this way to the Staniel Cay Yacht Club. I say we go."

"Oh, god!" moaned Sarah, "not another pub!"

But Kevin was already walking up the beach, holding the map out like a compass, following the shifting lines.

Maha shrugged and said, "May as well go. Nothing's happening on this beach anyway."

"I was knitting quite nicely, thank you," Sarah said, even as she stood, stowing her knitting in the bag slung over her shoulder. "Let's go. He'll get himself killed."

In hardly the time it takes to hit Return on a keyboard, they found themselves stepping onto the porch of the Staniel Cay Yacht Club, or so the sign over the entrance said.

A man in a pirate's hat stopped them at the door and in a seventeenth century Caribbean accent asked, "Got any weapons?"

"Aren't you Johnny Depp?" Sarah asked.

"Not tonight, love," Depp said. "Tonight I'm the bouncer—Captain Jack. So, weapons?"

"Just knitting needles," Sarah said, pulling the needles from her bag and holding them up for Johnny Depp to see.

Johnny Depp's eyes narrowed and he lifted his face back. "They look wicked, love. Better leave them with me."

"Not a chance," Sarah said and shoved them back into her bag. "Nobody gets my needles. Nobody."

Johnny Depp stood up from his perch and held his arms wide to block them. "Sorry."

Just then, gunfire exploded in the dark recesses of the bar, and bamboo and coconut shrapnel flew through the air.

"Duck!" Keith yelled as all hell broke loose in the mob beyond the bar. …

*****

I, Goggle. I am legion. I am all of you, now and then. I am known by many names. I speak with many voices, from front and back, past and future. I manage the morph. I'm in the Cloud. The end is always already here. Ask Jim Morrison.


This is part 23 of a storyjumper for Digital Writing Month. You can read the other parts here:

• Part 1 Bruno’s blog started us off with a personal narrative.
• Part 2 Kevin’s blog began the story.
• Part 3 Maha’s blog continued…
• Part 4 Sarah’s blog…
• Part 5 Ron’s blog…
• Part 6 Tanya’s blog…
• Part 7 Kay’s blog…
• Part 8 Ron’s blog…
• Part 9 Dana’s blog
• Part 10 Tania’s blog
• Part 11 Maureen’s blog
• Part 12 Sue’s blog
• Part 13 Rhonda’s blog
• Part 14 Yin Wah Kreher’s blog
• Part 15 Scott’s blog
• Part 16 Jeffrey’s blog
• Part 17 Wendy's blog
• Part 18 Charlene's blog
• Part 19 Mariam's blog
• Part 20 Grace's blog
• Part 21 Sundi's blog
• Part 22 Keith's blog
• Part 23 Somya's blog
• Part 24 Sonia's blog
• Part 25 Kathi's blog
• Parts unknown

For a mapping of participants check here. If you would like to participate add your name to the Google Doc.

The Viscosity of Rhizo14

This has been a difficult post to write as I have struggled to get my head into and around the idea of object oriented ontology as Timothy Morton presents it in his 2013 book Hyperobjects, but I at last think I have some clarity. I hope that I've removed most of my mistakes from this post.

In Hyperobjects, Timothy Morton studies objects that are very large relative to humans—objects such as global warming, black holes, the human genome, trash, and nuclear effluvia deposited into the environment since 1945—not because they are special, but because their monstrous size makes obvious some characteristics of objects that are usually obscured in objects our own size: cars, books, chairs, watermelons, smartphones, and other people.

This clarity rendered by a shift in scale is not at all unusual. The two fundamental 20th century revolutions in science—relativity and quantum—came about in part because we at last had the technology, mathematics, and science to peer into infinitely large spaces and into infinitesimally small spaces, and when we did, we saw that reality was not structured as we had thought. At the human scale, most of us still intuitively believe and behave as if Newtonian physics rules the universe and that relativity and quantum weirdness are special cases. They are not. They are the norm, and the world is weird all the way through, but most of the time, we can ignore that weirdness and still make it to our jobs on time. Morton assumes, then, that looking at objects massively distributed across space and time will reveal characteristics of objects in general that we might not otherwise see.

The first characteristic of objects that Morton discusses is viscosity. He insists that objects are always closer to us than they appear and that they stick to us. This viscosity is usually not obvious at the human scale. For instance, I'm looking now at a chair across the room from where I'm writing, and I see separation between me and that chair. I do not feel that it is sticking to me or that I am sticking to it, but Morton says that the chair and I are entangled and remain entangled despite any distance between us. This entanglement has a viscous quality about it that is obscured at the human scale but becomes obvious at the scale of hyperobjects.

For instance, Morton says that the hyperobject global warming is always already here in our faces—literally, physically in our faces—whether or not we are immediately conscious of it. Even on those cold days when we walk through snow, global warming presses in on us, entombs and enwombs us. Morton writes:

I do not access hyperobjects across a distance, through some transparent medium. Hyperobjects are here, right here in my social and experiential space. Like faces pressed against a window … Every day, global warming burns the skin on the back of my neck, making me itch with physical discomfort and inner anxiety. … As I reach for the iPhone charger plugged into the dashboard, I reach into evolution, into the extended phenotype that doesn’t stop at the edge of my skin but continues into all the spaces my humanness has colonized. (Kindle Locations 528-534)

I can see this looming stickiness rather easily in objects such as global warming and evolution, but not so well in the chair across from me. For that, I have to fight against an intuitive sense of reality that plainly demonstrates that the chair and I are distinct and that I act on the chair and it does not act on me. I am the subject, and it is the object. I do not feel the viscous honey between us. When I'm out of the house, I don't see the imprint of my body in the chair cushion, I don't feel the chair against my back. I don't think of the chair. So are the chair and I really sticking to each other? And what is this stickiness, this viscosity?

First, this stickiness is not an aspect of human cognition. It's there, Morton says, between objects whether or not humans are involved or even aware. And when we humans do become aware of the viscosity between objects, then it has something of the uncanny and daemonic about it. And one doesn't have to be a believer in the spirit world to believe in this "spooky action at a distance," as Einstein called it (though one doesn't have to exclude the spirit world, either). Rather, we only need believe in gravitational and electromagnetic fields to see what Morton is talking about:

What the demonic Twin Peaks character Bob reveals, for our purposes, is something about hyperobjects, perhaps about objects in general. Hyperobjects are agents. They are indeed more than a little demonic, in the sense that they appear to straddle worlds and times, like fiber optic cables or electromagnetic fields. And they are demonic in that through them causalities flow like electricity. We haven’t thought this way about things since the days of Plato. What Ion and Socrates call a daimon, we call electromagnetic waves, which amplify plucked guitar strings and broadcast them through a PA system. (Kindle Locations 563-570)

This viscosity, then, is for me like a field, or a mesh of fields, that emanate from objects, extending their reach and connections beyond the visually obvious to enfold them into each other, and into me—think gravitational fields that extend from one end of the universe to the other. This means, literally and physically, that the black hole hyperobject at the center of our galaxy impinges on me and I slightly on it and that causalities flow like electricity, or gravity, across the fields between the black hole and me. Of course, my everyday senses are not sensitive enough to pick up the perturbations of this hyperobject, but let that black hole move or explode, and all hell will break loose. Literally. Morton says that all objects from quanta to galaxies have this viscous connection with all other objects.

I have to ease into this. I need an image, so let's start with a small pond that will represent our known world. Now float two round objects of roughly equal size on opposite sides of the pond and start them bobbing at about the same rates. You can see the waves emanating from each object, spreading across the pond, until they reach the other object. Each object is now aware of the other in whatever way those objects can be aware. The waves represent the gravitational, electro-magnetic, spatial, and temporal fields of each object, and they are the boundaries across which the objects exchange matter, energy, information, and organization with each other. In other words, each object experiences and knows the other object through the waves—regardless of distance, whether close or far apart.

It's easy to see in this simple pond how the waves of each object perturb the waves of the other object, how each object causes effects in the other object regardless of distance, near or far. The objects are entangled, and given that they are only two, they are acutely aware of each other. Of course, our pond is not so simple, so add lots more objects to the pond, some really big and really small, some bobbing a billion times per second and others one bob per million years. Set the objects in motion, some attracting, some repelling so that all are in constant motion. Now look at the waves. The surface of the pond is a gaussian blur, all the waves running into other waves, colliding, propagating, dampening, amplifying. Our original two objects are entangled with more things than they can distinguish, but—and this is the point here, I think—they are still entangled with each other even though they can hardly tell which waves emanate from what object. According to object oriented ontology, our universe looks like this.

Let's start again with you and me alone in a museum gallery. I see you across the gallery. Rather, I see the light reflecting in waves from your form in an electro-magnetic field. Your gravitational field also tugs on me, though it is washed out in my awareness by the immensely larger tug of the Earth. I hear you moving about as sound wafts toward me, about us, connecting us, and energy, information, and organization are shared across the fields between us, affecting our behaviors. I might move to maintain a preferred distance to you, organizing myself in relation to you and all the other objects in the room. Imagine that I find you threatening, repellent in some way. I might flee the gallery, but according to object oriented ontology, we are still entangled. I am stained though I might mask the stain with other sights and sounds later.

Or imagine that I find you attractive in some way. I might move close enough to engage in conversation, a close field across which we might share matter in the form of spittle, bacteria, odors, touch (this kind of causal exchange is so obvious during flu season). We exchange matter, energy, information, and organization across the viscous fields enfolding us. The intensity of the exchange, of course, varies with proximity, but according to OOO and modern physics, it never fades completely. I am always entangled with you even though the perturbations of your field become so tenuous and smudged as to be indistinct, washed out.

So can I safely ignore those rarefied, smudged traces and stains that you left in my brain and body? Not really. Modern complexity theory shows us that complex systems are acutely sensitive to initial conditions, which can amplify, or dampen, small perturbations across a mesh of interacting fields. Thus, as Edward Lorenz says, the beating of a butterfly's wings in Africa can lead to a hurricane next month in Florida. This is perhaps poetic hyperbole, but it points to a tested and verified characteristic of objects within a web. It really is spooky action at a distance, and as novelists have long known, even the most casual meeting can have huge causal effects.

Now, add more people to the gallery until the room is almost full and start a fire in another part of the museum. We are both now part of a panicked mob, a hyperobject, swept away, perhaps crushed, in its force field.

Okay, for the sake of argument, let's say that this is a reasonably accurate view of reality, that objects really behave this way with each other. What are the practical consequences? For instance, what can I know and say about Rhizo14 and other such online events that I did not know and could not say before?

First, as Morton cites Lacan as saying, "There is no metalanguage." There is no outside point of view from which to determine what other things are. We are all in the pond. Thus, my pond image above is quite misleading as it demands that we stand on the banks of the pond to view the waves of objects bobbing on the two-dimensional surface of the pond. There are no banks where we can stand, there is no two-dimensional surface. The waves are all coming at us—some at the speed of light—no matter which way we turn, multi-dimensional, multi-scalar. As Morton says, we are intra-uterine and inter-uterine, enwombed, and there is no nice doctor in a white lab coat outside to explain what's happening from his objective point of view. Everything presses in on us from every side and time, and we cannot get away from it. There is no away, as we are beginning to learn as we struggle to put our radioactive waste somewhere safe, somewhere away. The radioactive waste is still here in utero with us and will remain here about 24,000 more years—a damned eternity for most of us.

This means for me there is no outside point of view from which to determine what Rhizo14 is. I can only write from the inside, and this changes everything I know about writing, as I have been schooled in the Western rhetorical tradition which posits a single, objective, authoritative subject that speaks apart from and passes judgement upon objects under consideration. This is why I have been so attracted to a swarm voice which decenters my authority, my outside booming voice, and speaks from inside, from many points of view. I think that the swarm can say things that cannot be said from outside.

By the way, I readily recognize the affordances of the outside, objective point of view, and I am not arguing that we should abandon it. As I've said before, it is a useful fiction, like my pond image, and like my pond image, it is ultimately misleading. Rather, I want to complement the objective voice with an inside swarm voice that can say other things. I'm also not clear yet about what those other things are, but I sense them emerging in our swarm sessions.

Next, we must think of all objects as actors acting upon other objects and being acted upon by other objects within a mesh of interacting fields. If we want to understand Rhizo14, then we have to understand not only principal humans such as facilitator Dave Cormier, but also all the other participants, lurkers, prodigals, technologies, memes, organizational structures, and more. This is a noisy swelter that defies total clarity, but we have to be aware that Rhizo14 is a swelter. We can focus on some specific aspects of Rhizo14—say the use of Google Docs—but we can never forget that Google Docs is an object in its own right that seeks and expresses its own position within the complex system of Rhizo14, just as I did, just as Dave did, just as all the other objects did. In practice, this means we can all study Rhizo14 for the remainder of our professional careers and never exhaust it. It's that complex and that rich. This radically undermines our drive for total and complete mastery of a topic, a drive necessary for getting through graduate school, but I've become very happy to let this fiction lapse. Should I live forever, I can study forever. I'll never exhaust the kaleidoscope. Rather, I'll become bored with it and move on to a new one. And there's always a new one. Hallelujah!

There are more practical consequences, but this post is already long, so I'll end by pointing out the disorienting view of objects that OOO leaves us with: on the one hand, objects zoom in to loom over us, against us, across any distance, while on the other hand, they recede from us, never ultimately knowable, always somewhat hidden in mystery. This effect is captured in the old adage that the more I know, the more I know that I don't know. I think this disorientation results from a couple of characteristics of objects and our knowledge of objects. First, we always disturb, perturb the objects we see, thus changing them and us however slightly. Engagement changes all engaged. Making proximate makes an object approximate. Our knowledge is always uncertain: we can know with certainty either the position or velocity of a single particle, but not both. When we focus on one aspect of an object, other aspects of the object recede out of focus. If we focus on those aspects, we lose focus of the first. When we focus on an object, we become part of that object, entangled in ways that change it and us. Viewing or not viewing a photon can make it choose to be a particle or a wave. Viewing or not viewing objects in Rhizo14 can make them behave differently. This is why we have to keep studying and writing: we never get it quite right, we never exhaust it. We just get tired.

I'm tired now, so I'll write more later. But did you notice how difficult it has been to get away from Rhizo14? Sticky business, that. Objects are like that. All of them.

Mea Culpa

I have lost the comments to my last 3 posts, the ones starting my exploration of object oriented ontology and hyperobjects. I am sorry, especially for those who wrote extensive and thoughtful comments. All I know to do is tell you what I did and why and promise not to do it again.

Here's what happened: I moved my original blog Communications & Society to a new URL and renamed it, mostly for personal reasons. That blog was started in 2007 to support an interdisciplinary course I taught called—well—Communications and Society. That course is long gone, and the title no longer fits what I am writing, and I intend to do more things with my own domain. I made a mistake by merely redirecting the original blog to my new domain, which resulted in the blog losing all the comments to posts since 2007, more than 200 posts. By the time I was made aware of the loss of those past comments by an alert reader, I had 3 new posts with extensive comments linked to the new URL. I tried to correct my error this past weekend, but I quickly learned that I would lose either the 200 old sets of comments or the 3 new sets of comments. I couldn't keep both. I decided to keep the 200+ old sets and abandon the 3 new sets.

Of course, I'm embarrassed because I should know better, and I wasn't thoughtful. Rather, I was thinking about something else.

I have learned my lesson. I should not have redirected the URL of my old blog. Rather, I should have frozen it and created an entirely new blog attached to the new URL. I have done that now, but at the loss of 3 posts worth of fine comments. On this new blog, you will see a link to the old Communications & Society blog to the right, above the About Me block. There you will find all my old posts with the comments, all still pointing to the original URL. I hope all those comments prove worthy of the comments just made and lost.

I'll continue to research Google to see if I can still recover the comments to these 3 posts. As Frances Bell noted in one of the comments that I lost, those comments are still out there somewhere, and Google will make use of them someway. Maybe they will share that use with me. We'll see.

Again, I apologize, and I hope you will continue to trust me with your comments, time, and energy.

Rhizo15 as Hyperobject

One of the great things about blogging within a community of scholars is that you can't run out of ideas. My community keeps giving me new things to write—not always in the direction that I intend to go, but always in good, productive directions.

For example, my last post was in response to a comment and post from Maha Bali. This current post is in response to a comment from Frances Bell, a question from her son, and a tweet from Sandra Sinfield. I'm surrounded by active minds, and if I just stay awake, then I can never run out of things to say. My ecosystem is infinitely rich. Can a pedagogue be in any better position?

In this post, I start exploring this ecosystem in terms of object-oriented ontology, using Timothy Morton's concept of the hyperobject, and I will try to draw out the practical implications, as Sandra Sinfield's tweet challenges me to do. Let's start with Frances' comment on my last post:

My son had asked me at breakfast "What is Google to you?" - a good question. So if I think of your post as an object related to Google and to we humans who are reading and commenting then I can see that we objects cannot fully know each other. But the epistemology that Google, a complex assemblage of people and non-humans, reveals in its cookie statement, suggests a bumpy ontology. Google is interested in the very much reduced version of us that can help it sell ads. It simultaneously ignores and remembers. So Google will still 'know' and remember the comments from your old blog that are now forgotten here. It will use that data for currently known and future unknown commercial purposes and all because I was tempted to click "Got it".

What is Google to you? What a challenging question and what a brilliant response, and how fortunate for me as I want to discuss object oriented ontology anyway. The question and answer are rich enough to take in several directions, but for my purposes here, Frances describes beautifully the nature of hyperobjects, a term Timothy Morton uses in his 2013 book of the same name to refer to "things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans" (Kindle Locations 106-107). Morton mostly talks about global warming as a hyperobject (he's big into the ecology movement), but Google is also a hyperobject, as is Rhizo14/15, and my ENGL1101 class, my garden, and myself.

If Morton is correct, all objects—including me—are hyperobjects given that all objects are "massively distributed in time and space relative" to some other object. In middle Georgia, USA, I am a hyperobject relative to gnats, those tiny, flying annoyances that live a short time during the summer, mostly by buzzing around my face, attracted by the moisture at my eyes, nose, and mouth. Yes, for gnats I am a giant, lumbering, undulating landscape with pools of water and some natural and inexplicable risks of landslides and earthquakes as I turn away and swat at them. For gnats, I stretch from horizon to horizon and far beyond their pasts and their futures. I phase in and out of their floating, buzzing reality a few feet above my patio. I am a known source of water and risk, but the rest of me is very mysterious, withdrawn from them, unknowable. But not unimportant or irrelevant to them, especially if I swat one of the pesky things. I am to gnats as Google is to me. Or Rhizo14/15 is to me.

Is this mere fictional hyperbole? Morton and OOO say not; rather, this is how objects fundamentally interact with one another, and we humans can learn much about the interactions of objects by examining hyperobjects, which are massively distributed in space and/or time relative to us and which make obvious to us certain characteristics that are common to all interactions at all scales of reality.

This is a big claim, and I am not yet completely convinced, though I'm not even sure what my objections are. Maybe it's just too new for me. Still, I'm finding it instructive to follow mainly because I have been involved over the past two years with a swarm of people trying to understand and to explain what happened in Rhizo14/15—a cluster of people that includes Maha, Frances, and Sandra, among many others. I use the word cluster to capture as neutrally as possible a group of people and interactions that may not be a community to all involved and is certainly not consistently coordinated or cooperative, and yet that for me has a recognizable identity, something of a coherence of interactions. This may just be me tracing constellations in the night sky. Or it could be me struggling with a hyperobject. Either way, I think following the OOO argument could be enlightening.

So I hope to write a series of posts that explore Rhizo14/15 in terms of the various characteristics of hyperobjects that Morton lists in his book (Kindle Locations 112-118), perhaps a post for each characteristic:

1. viscosity: Hyperobjects “'stick' to beings that are involved with them."
2. nonlocality: "[A]ny 'local manifestation' of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject."
3. temporal undulation: Hyperobjects "involve profoundly different temporalities than the human-scale ones we are used to. In particular, some very large hyperobjects, such as planets, have genuinely Gaussian temporality: they generate spacetime vortices, due to general relativity."
4. phasing: "Hyperobjects occupy a high-dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time."
5. interobjectivity: Hyperobjects "exhibit their effects interobjectively; that is, they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects."

I hope I can gain some clarity into Rhizo14/15, the hyperobject that I've been living with and thinking and writing about for the past two years. Mostly, I want practical insights that address Sandra's challenge in her tweet: "how can we utilize in our praxis?" I hope to find out.