Abstract

Climate change, pandemics, digitalization – there are many hyperobjects, as Timothy Morton describes them, that are too big and too complex for any one of us to fully grasp. On the one hand, these objects affect all of us, creating a need for “the immanence of thinking to the physical,” while at the same time being so large, complex, and beyond our metalanguage capabilities that they create an “absence of anything meaningfully like a ‘world.’” The language and data of science do not do justiceto the personal appropriation of these issues – we are not experiencing r-factors and infection vectors; we are personally affected
by living with social distancing measures and the breakdown on social contracts.
So, in order to grasp these hyperobjects and make sense of what the future will hold, the paper argues, we need to move beyond the modeling of pure scientific data and instead turn towards the social, political, and cultural aspects of each of these hyperobjects. We need to simulate the impact of scientific facts onto the fabric of our lives. And for this purpose, fictions are needed that leave behind the data driven empiricism and instead model a new social reality – and the paper argues, this is the purview of science fiction.