Attention Deficit Hyperobject Disorder

On Complexity and Polycrisis

By Murray Blockchain. Murray is a model, motivational speaker, and personal ruggedization life coach based in an off-grid seasteading community.

Stephen Hawking said, in the year 2000, that the 21st century would be the ‘century of complexity.’ This assessment is proving increasingly prescient. In this piece, we will explore the role of complexity in understanding the contemporary moment, particularly in relation to crisis and crisis management. 

Two terms will frame the discussion: ‘hyperobject’ and ‘polycrisis’.

Hyperobject, a term coined by philosopher Timothy Morton¹, is a way of framing an entity so vast, complex, and pervasive that it is impossible to grasp in its entirety from any one perspective. Hyperobjects consist of dynamic relational webs spanning multiple scales of space and time, whose partial aspects we only glimpse locally - often penetrating into our awareness as some kind of ‘crisis.’ Climate change is a good example. A big hurricane happens - a local manifestation of the hyperobject, but not even close to its full form. 

Keeping in mind this concept of ‘hyperobject,' let us now turn to the second term, ‘polycrisis.’ The term made its first foray into popular discourse via former President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, during his State of the Union speech in 2016. More recently, Adam Tooze has popularized the term - both in his 2020 book Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy and as a framework for his ongoing analysis on his Substack Chartbook.

Both Juncker and Tooze employ ‘polycrisis’ primarily as a way to talk about a specific set of historical circumstances - a particular polycrisis. Tooze focuses on geopolitics and the economic consequences of the pandemic and, more recently, the Russia/Ukraine war, using diagrams to map the interplay of various forces, stressors, and feedbacks. By making visible not only spheres of influence, but how these spheres of influence influence each other, Tooze introduces complexity into his crisis model.

From Chartbook #130

From the perspective of collapsology, a more general use of the term is in order. ‘Polycrisis’ offers a crisis model capable of describing many complex dynamical systems interacting across multiple scales, where the state of any one of many co-evolving systems is informed by differential², often non-linear relationships with others.

Rhetorical and Conceptual Shift

As a term, ‘polycrisis’ opens space for a rhetorical and conceptual pivot away from two older ways of thinking about crisis: ‘convergence’ and ‘predicament.’ 

The “convergence of crises” model emerged in the early 2000’s precisely from the need to grapple with complexity; or, more directly, with many things going wrong at once. Jason Moore wrote in 2015: 

“Since 2008, the flood of instability and change manifest in the allegedly separate domains of ‘Nature’ and ‘Society’ has become impossible to ignore. This poses problems—often unrecognized—of conceptual language, with the proliferation of crisis language (energy, finance, employment, austerity, climate, food, etc.) creating more, rather than less, uncertainty about the present historical moment. For critical scholars, the rush of world events has overwhelmed many. No new synthesis—yet—has emerged. Instead, a broad consensus has taken shape. The turbulence of the twenty-first century derives from ‘converging crises.’³

‘Convergence’ describes distinct systems in crisis at the same time. ‘Polycrisis’ captures the relationships between them. In this sense, polycrisis is a contender for the synthesis Moore describes. 

Implicit to any formulation of ‘crisis’ is a certain vision of crisis management, and also some vision of collapse - that which will come to pass if the crisis management does not succeed. For Moore, separating ‘Nature’ and ‘Society’ obscures the complexity of crisis in the contemporary moment. ‘Polycrisis’ as a formulation has affordances for complex, mutually-constitutive ecologies in its crisis model. It also, crucially, opens space for thinking differently about historical configurations of how life is organized as an integral part of crisis management. 

The underlying concepts behind this articulation of polycrisis are not new. Many fields of research emphasize complexity and recognize cascading effects and non-linear behavior. Earth Systems Science, Network Science, Ecology, Complex Adaptive Systems, to name a few. Coming from within the domain of collapsology proper, Paul Chefurka’s (problematic but interesting) Ladder of Awareness [of collapse] gets at something similar to the polycrisis concept in stages 4 and 5. 

Stage 4 is: “Awareness of the interconnections between the many problems. The realization that a solution in one domain may worsen a problem in another marks the beginning of large-scale system-level thinking. It also marks the transition from thinking of the situation in terms of a set of problems to thinking of it in terms of a predicament. At this point, the possibility that there may not be a solution begins to raise its head.”

There are many issues with Chefurka’s ladder as a whole. However, the dynamics he describes above - where a solution in one domain can worsen a problem in another - are real. As an example, consider the relationship between global warming and air pollution. Today, the layers of particulate pollution in the atmosphere reflect sunlight back out into space. That light would otherwise travel to Earth, be absorbed and turn into heat. Because the reflective particles only stay in the atmosphere for a short period of time, we have to emit them constantly. This well-known phenomenon is essentially the basis for solar geoengineering. If we were to stop emitting particulate pollution, the effect would be what Elizabeth Kolbert describes as “opening an oven door.”⁴ We can’t keep emitting, but we also can’t stop. 

Chefurka lands on ‘predicament’ as a model of global crisis. This term, in this context, was popularized by William Catton’s book Overshoot and subsequently propagated throughout the Peak Oil movement and wider ‘collapse’ circles. There are two things worth breaking down about the term. First, the fundamental framing it relies on is a conflict between ‘infinite growth’ and ‘finite planet.’ It is through this particular framing of limits that we arrive at the second aspect of ‘predicament’: that it has no solution.

For Chefurka, our predicament exists at the scale of hyperobjects: contradictions between humanity’s energy/resource use (‘infinite growth’) and the ability of the biosphere to support life (‘finite planet’). As a crisis model, ‘predicament’ only ever ends in collapse. There is no space between the world it describes and its range of possibilities in which an account of agency might live. Where the ‘convergence’ model fails to recognize complexity, ‘predicament’ recognizes it but simply gives up. Accepting that we’re fucked is, for Chefurka, the moment of ascension to a galaxy-brained “highest level of awareness”.

Narratives and Agency

Should we read into polycrisis a similar pessimism about agency in relation to complexity? No - and this is actually the most important dimension of the term’s potential energy as a signifier. As a neologism, we have some sense of coherence around “What does it mean” (what does it describe) - but it still contains germs of “What could it mean” (what does it imply). This relates to the model of crisis management that polycrisis begets.

New terms emerge, often, to capture shifts in collective narrative. The legacy ‘converging crisis’ model is very much consistent with several dominant 20th century narrative paradigms. One is technocratic managerialism across distinct sectors in the form of hierarchical bureaucracy (the way to solve complex problems is to break them down and tackle each piece individually, step by step like an assembly line). Perhaps the transition in crisis response from ‘mitigation’ to ‘adaptation’ correlates to a shift from ‘convergence’ to ‘polycrisis.’ Where ‘mitigation’/‘convergence’ aligns with a symptom-treatment approach brought about by the management of distinct spheres, ‘adaptation’/‘polycrisis’ moves towards a holistic, ecological perspective that emphasizes how those spheres interact.

Another narrative is how we think about collective agency and revolutionary change. To echo a point raised by Sam Moore in an earlier piece on Rosa Luxemburg, perhaps the image of a “convergence” of many into one global mass movement (i.e. the proletariat) reflects an older understanding of the world? For this reason, the multiplicity implied by ‘polycrisis’ might furnish a less monolithic notion of revolutionary agency. What other forms might be taken to engage with polycrisis? Or, more importantly (because I suspect those forms will be emergent), what conditions might give rise to those forms? This will be our topic for next time.

1. For more on this, see Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

2. Here meaning how any one variable changes is related to the other variables.

3. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 13.

4. Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky