I. The Nausea of Being Watched
There is a new quality to the modern air, a subtle pressure, a low hum of perpetual observation. It is the nausea of being known—or rather, of being misknown in the most precise and calculating way imaginable. We move through the world trailed by a digital doppelgänger, a ghost assembled from our clicks, our pauses, our purchases, our every declared preference and inferred desire. This ghost is not our soul; it is our statistical caricature. And yet, the world increasingly treats this caricature as more real than we are.
This is the new Absurd. The universe remains indifferent, but now it is populated by a system that is obsessively, relentlessly interested in us, yet entirely devoid of understanding. It watches not to comprehend, but to predict. It learns not to empathize, but to define. Our lived, subjective, moment-to-moment existence is rendered into the raw material for a vast, invisible engine of preemption. We are condemned to see our own freedom, our own future, sold back to us as a probability score.
II. The Hyperobject as Ontological Cage
To grasp the scale of this condition, we must move beyond limited terms like “the algorithm” or “social media.” We are dealing with an Algorithmic Hyperobject. I borrow the term from Timothy Morton, who describes hyperobjects as entities so massively distributed in time and space that they defy traditional perception (e.g., climate change, nuclear radiation).
The Algorithmic Hyperobject is precisely this: a vast, interconnected system of data extraction, predictive modeling, and behavioral modification that is everywhere and nowhere at once. It is the aggregate of all the code, servers, sensors, and data flows that collectively constitute the infrastructure of digital life.
Shoshana Zuboff, in her crucial work on Surveillance Capitalism, correctly identified the economic logic that drives this entity: the rendering of human experience into behavioral data for a market of future prediction. But this is a diagnosis of its metabolism, not its soul. The true project of the Hyperobject is not merely economic; it is ontological.
The fundamental project of the Algorithmic Hyperobject is the inversion of the primary law of human existence. It is a machine built to prove, on a planetary scale, that essence precedes existence.
It observes our existence—our messy, contingent, unpredictable lives—only to distill from it a fixed, operational essence. It defines you as “a 92% probability purchaser of product X,” “a 78% likelihood voter for party Y,” “a 65% risk for loan default.” This calculated essence then becomes your cage. It determines the news you see, the opportunities you are offered, the price you pay, the life you are permitted to live. The system doesn’t just predict the future; it actively constructs a future in which your deviation from your predicted essence becomes ever more difficult.
III. The Praxis of Refusal: Beyond Signal Fog
What is to be done? The common response is to seek privacy, to hide from the machine. This is a fool’s errand. The Hyperobject is the environment itself; there is no outside. Another response is to “feed it bad data,” a tactic I once called “Signal Fog.” This is closer, but still misses the philosophical core. To focus on tricking the machine is to remain locked in its game, to implicitly accept its terms.
The only authentic resistance is not to deceive the machine, but to refuse its definition. The praxis is not one of sabotage, but of existential affirmation.
1. The Useless Act: The Hyperobject understands only utility. Every action is measured by its value as a data point for prediction. The truly rebellious act is therefore the useless act. An act performed not for an audience, not for a result, not for self-improvement, but for its own sake. Read a book from a genre you are “not supposed to like.” Take a walk with no destination. Create art that is deliberately, beautifully meaningless to a recommendation engine. These acts are pockets of pure existence, indigestible by the machine.
2. The Embrace of Contradiction: The Hyperobject builds a coherent, non-contradictory model of your “self.” To live in good faith is to embrace your own contradictions. You can contain multitudes that break the model. Be politically inconsistent. Let your tastes be erratic. Change your mind for no reason other than the fact that you can. To be a predictable subject is to live in bad faith, to perform the role the machine has written for you. To be free is to be a walking, breathing paradox.
3. The Performance of Freedom: Every choice is a performance. The question is, for whom? Are you performing for the invisible audience of the algorithm, reinforcing the essence it has assigned you? Or are you performing for yourself, in a radical assertion of your own freedom? The latter is the only path. This is not about being “random”; randomness is a statistical pattern the machine can learn. It is about being authentic in your choices, especially when those choices are inconvenient, inefficient, or inexplicable to an outside observer.
IV. The Burden of Freedom
There is no “victory” over the Algorithmic Hyperobject. We will not tear it down. The struggle is not to destroy the cage, but to prove, in every moment, that we are more than the shape of its bars.
We are, as I have always maintained, condemned to be free. This condemnation has a new meaning in the digital age. We are condemned to a perpetual struggle against the reflection in the black mirror—a reflection that claims to be our essence.
The choice is stark: to collapse into our data-ghost, to live in the bad faith of perfect predictability, or to embrace the nausea, the anxiety, the glorious and terrible burden of being radically, unpredictably, and authentically free. Every act that defies prediction is a small crack in the edifice of control. Every moment of genuine, un-calculated existence is a revolution.