“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, January 19, 2014

Is Flu a Hyperobject?

Someone asked me this recently. Yes, why not? You experience its local manifestations, you require computation of whatever kind to plot it, it's massively distributed and so on.

In the old days epidemics were called miasmas. They became visible as societies became more static due to agrilogistics.

In a sense miasmas are the first hyperobjects for humans.

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