CONCEPT
Nonlocality (Hyperobject Property)
Hyperobjects are not located in any single place but distributed across many places simultaneously, manifesting differently at each node.
Nonlocality is the second of Morton's five hyperobject properties. A hyperobject cannot be visited. You cannot travel to climate change; you are always already inside it, experiencing a local manifestation. Applied to AI, nonlocality explains why resistance through local action is structurally insufficient. The smooth does not reside in any specific platform, device, or tool. It is the aggregate condition emerging from every algorithmic mediation simultaneously. Refusing a smartphone refuses a local access point; the entity persists. The gallery installation — a phone on a pedestal labeled 'The entire world. Actual size' — captures nonlocality's ontological claim: the access point is not the entity.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Climate change is not 'in' the Arctic or the Sahel. It is in both, in neither, in every place between. One cannot point to it. One points to local effects — melting ice, expanding desert — that are manifestations of an entity whose totality is constitutively inaccessible. This is nonlocality: distribution so thorough that location becomes meaningless. The AI hyperobject exhibits