An object or event whose dimensions in space and time are massive in relation to a human life, eg. a black hole, the Amazon forest, an oilfield, and especially climate. Coined by Timothy Morton in his book The Ecological Thought (2010), the concept was originally intended to frame a discussion about human actions that have consequences on a global scale and will outlive the generation or generations responsible. It is in this sense an extension of Beck, Ulrichâs concept of risk society. Morton was particularly concerned to find a way to conceptualize lastingly toxic human creations such as plastic and plutonium that will contaminate the planet for centuries to come, therefore demanding that we find ways to accommodate them into human existence and human ways of thinking today. Our awareness of the world is thus inseparable from our sense that âweâ as humans are destroying it, which means, Morton argues, contra Fukuyama, Francis, that we have (only just) reached the beginning of history rather than its end. Clearly influenced by Heidegger, Martinâs thinking (specifically his notion of âbeing-towards-deathâ), Mortonâs position is that it is only now that we have taken cognizance of the fact that humansâ actions are propelling us toward our end as a species that we can begin the reclamation work (a term he takes from psychoanalysis) of building a post-capitalist existence. But, as he clarifies in a book-length treatment, Hyperobjects (2013), he does not hold to the ideology of âunless we act nowâ the world is going to end; his strategy is rather to say the world has already ended: now let us get on with building a new world. Morton dates the end of the world with the patenting of the coal-powered steam engine by James Watt in 1784, but he rejects the notion that this precipitated âclimate changeâ, preferring instead to speak only of âglobal warmingâ because the former is in fact an effect of the latter. Hyperobjects place a demand to act on us, and in this way can be understood as a form of humiliation, a displacement equivalent to the Copernican turn because it amounts to the loss of the idea that humans are masters of their own destiny. Morton describes the effect of hyperobjects as a form of âbeing-quakeâ, a shuddering at the very foundations of ontology. Hyperobjects are not problems that can be solved, if by that one means restoring a previously existing order, so they are literally postmodern in the sense that they belong to an era that no longer believes human ingenuity is capable of solving all problems by means of technology.