Hyper-zeitgeist

Welcome to a retrospective of highlights from the Genuine Oatcake bakery bibliography. We began with “What’s the big idea?” There we discovered that we live in a thought soup and that our thoughts themselves can take on a life of their own and shape our destiny and the destiny of persons, peoples and planet.

This begs the question, that while we teach our progeny how to drive a car and use a computer, teaching thinking and how our minds work isn’t generally given the same priority.

In a note I asked the question, “Which came first, the thought or the emotion?” Some say thoughts are simply strategies to either perpetuate pleasant feelings or eliminate unpleasant ones. Others suggest every thought gives rise to hormonal chemistry in blood and body that results in the frequency of our being altogether. In either case we can watch this happen through gentle introspection.

If you’re with me so far I want to express my gratitude. This article is about a 10 minute read, 30 minutes if you play the short accompanying videos.

Kyle Jackson 2018, oil on canvas 244 x 60 cm

Looking back over the past decade, I’ve been struck by these three large memes: Timothy Morton’s Hyperobects; Adam Curtis’s HyperNormalisation; and Clif High’s (?) Hypernovelty. The fact that these share a prefix is the coincidence that triggers this essay. Considerable discussion has been devoted to each individually. I’m not aware of anywhere where they have been mentioned together and yet it seems to me that they share (1) recent emergence in the noosphere, (2) are interrelated, and (3) sum up the spirit of our time. Hence the title of this essay.

If you’re a youngster expecting to stretch your life out for much of this century — you’ll want to take note here. You might find some valuable lessons for your journey.

I’ve simply been making and baking oatcakes, and listening to things that catch my attention. Timothy Morton was featured in the Guardian in 2017. My son Sam interviewed Tim around that time for the Buddhist magazine Lion’s Roar. At that point the Guardian Long Read wasn’t enough for me. As a father I felt obliged to take an active interest. It wasn’t long before Timothy’s tome Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013) had become my new bible, and I’d adopted OOO as my new religion.

Here’s Tim explaining Hyperobjects and Object Oriented Ontology in the first of 6 short videos from 2011. It’s best to get a sense of the implications from the source himself.

“The time of hyperobjects is the time when we discover ourselves
on the inside of some big object.”

In July ‘17 I advanced the Oatcake as Hyperobject.

Everything has hyperobject potential after all. Things used to be so simple. Not any more. Punch “Hyperobject” into a Twitter search and see what happens.

Laura Hudson’s big story in WIRED (2021) explains everything —

Do you feel lost? Alone? Powerless in the face of forces beyond your control? Timothy Morton can help—if you’re ready to have your reality blown apart.

This is where things can get fun. Imagine the most astronomical: the multiverse; universe; galaxy cluster; and so on. What do you come up with? Where do you find yourself?

“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.” - Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

We might be living inside a massive geoengineering project or an underground child trafficking system, a psyop within a psyop, etc.; the yuga cycle; solar radiation; EMF; 5G; global economy; sensorium; awareness; consciousness; an habitual pattern; the dharmakaya; manifest beauty; info network; society; media; economic system; food system; political system; culture; language; art; music; archeology; pornography; ubiquitous corruption; scientific worldview; universal compassion; memory bubble; morphic field; history; akashic record; forever wars; your cohort; Laura Dodsworth’s 100s; ancestral relations; supply chain; transportation infrastructure; a safe & effective info campaign; iatrocide; genocide; an extraterrestrial invasion; the alien artificial intelligence contest…

Can you guess? I think the really big hyperobject we all find ourselves in is our thought soup.

In March 2018 I shared with my public “Basically the most important proactive decisions human beings could make today are which hyperobject or which collection of hyperobjects will command our utmost attention.” Like Jonah, we can be swallowed and end up in the belly of those things we find most irritating.

Before we go overboard you might like to read the manifesto at hyperobjects-official.com. The age of hyperobjects obviously had a massive impact on the oatcake transforming mere oats and atoms into the buttery delectable with super-fucking qualities. But wait! The world is also now experiencing hypernormalization.

Poster from 2016

Interesting to watch these memes propagate. While Hyperobjects took shape, Hypernormalization was coined by Yurchak in ‘05, popularized by Curtis in ‘16, and launched recently on Instagram by Harfoush in January ‘25.

The illustration on the cover of Alexei Yurchak’s book from 2005 is fascinating and telling. This is the source of the notion of hypernormalization.

The gist of the hypernormal is that everything is somewhat unreal and yet everyone pretends as if things are okay. It’s all fake and fake people act like bobbleheads basically. Press play to find out where we are at today.

3 minute preview from 2016

Interesting that the “hypernormal” notion came into being to describe the social phenomena accompanying the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Poignant that the label has been applied to our global (aka western) society today. If you know someone who lived through the Soviet collapse they will likely confirm their deja vu in this regard.

What does it mean as more and more people wake up to the fact that everything meaningful is counterfeit? More important, should we consider pretentiousness contagious (and perhaps pandemic)?

The sociology of hypernormalization would propose different explanations, perhaps blaming communism, capitalism, or deep state dark forces, but it might not be so complex. In Small Oatcake Batch notes from 2015-02-10 listening to A Brief History of Humankind YouTubes by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, I write “Yuval is worthy and compelling because he tells the story of the story... or the story of the story makers. We do well on the planet, but only because we make stuff up — and then pretend it's real.”

Still from HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis, 2016

If this really is how our species operates, perhaps we should mount a public awareness campaign about the downsides.

Researchgate features 20 or 30 publications on the topic including Introduction to Absurdity and Hypernormalization in Contemporary Society and Workplaces and A Way Out of Absurdity and Hypernormalization. For the curious there is lots to discover here.

Can we imagine a school curriculum focused on how narratives structure status and role and what can be done about it?

I read one paper about the daunting challenges of overcoming hypernormalization in academic settings. There is even a movement among academics to somehow counteract the entanglements.

An example from close to home
Years ago I realized that the entire Canadian prairie, our bread basket where we grow all our grains, is sprayed with Glyphosate (Roundup). That meant that it was in everything in our grocery stores. I thought this can’t possibly be true. If it was there would be an uproar in the media. People would express outrage.

I checked with a local politician who had fought for years to ban the use of Roundup in Halifax gardens. He verified my assessment. Yes our food system is profiting from poisoning the population. That same week I checked with my family doctor who was similarly not surprised. Basically the whole of society knows this is the case and pretends it’s okay. WTF? This is just one example. Investigate and the poisonous approval is coming from top tier government agencies and international organizations. Guess what, our drinking water is similarly compromised. Interesting how most sheeple just accept this as the norm.

Other government directives for “the greater public good” coming from captured government agencies also fall into question. What is really going on here?

We really need to profoundly apologize to our children. Demanding clean air, clean water, and clean soils is so basic to life. One would think this would be everyone’s bottomline.

The hyperobject you are waking up in could be your programming (everything you’ve been told). It’s just made up. Not real. You can, you must question everything. We’re now living in hypernovelty. There is no longer a consensual reality. As Adam Curtis put it in 2016 “Welcome to the post-truth world.”

Iyah May’s finger says it all. Hypernovelty emerged from the IDW (intellectual dark web), some say Terence Mckenna way back, some point to Heying and Weinstein, no matter, it’s Clif High that offers the deepest insights here.

Clif contends that the era of hypernovelty we’re living in now spells the annihilation of authority. That would follow from the hypernormalization now would it not?

Did you notice how the professional class, doctors, lawyers, professors, judges, journalists, politicians and beaurcrats have all shot themselves in the foot? They no longer have any credibility. They’ve became clowns. Now they just pretend. They pose but they know too well they are not real. They are all just faking it. A dose of humility would certainly help but that’s not to be expected in a culture of narcissism now is it?.

Your social existence is hypernormal in a hypernovel world. Everything you are being told about the nature of reality is fiction, because now everything is happening so fast that it can’t be grasped and properly communicated. If it could be it would be used to manipulate you. Wait, did I hear Taylor Swift is actually a hyperobject?

Everything is a bit of a joke really. Nothing can really be taken seriously anymore — except the Genuine Oatcake. Interesting time to be alive as they say. History’s revolutionaries have always been trying to overthrow authority. Today it seems to have crumbed all by itself.

The upside is we get to start from scratch now.

Hyper-zeitgeist is dedicated to all the Rinpoches and was first published on The Oatcake Stack shortly after the first Farmers Market of the Tibetan Wooden Snake Year. There is no plan to charge for subscriptions, and yet you are encouraged to order oatcakes here!