In 2021, philosopher Timothy Morton and anthropologist Dominic Boyer released the book Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human (Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human). Open Humanities Press made it freely accessible, and in 2026, a Russian translation was published by the Perm-based HylePress.
Morton is best known for his book Hyperobjects (2013), where he described objects that are too vast to be comprehended in their entirety. The new book expands upon and reinterprets the ideas presented earlier.
Hyposubjects is not about cryptocurrencies or AI. It focuses on ecology and the Anthropocene. However, it also critiques the prevailing ideology of much of the tech industry—the dream of transcendence: escaping the body, uploading consciousness to the cloud, achieving singularity, and fleeing to Mars. The central concept of Hyposubjects—subscendence—reverses the formula that underpins all thinking about networks and decentralization.
ForkLog read this book and found that Morton and Boyer's concept speaks to singularity, the economy of AI agents, and the belief that the network is always greater than the sum of its nodes.
Too Big to See
A hyperobject is something distributed across space and time so broadly that a person cannot grasp it in its entirety. Morton categorizes black holes and the biosphere as hyperobjects, but he often refers to those we have created ourselves. They cannot be seen or touched; they envelop us in a viscous fog and manifest only indirectly: through weather, statistics, and disasters.
In a sense, finance has become a hyperobject, the authors argue. Currency crashes, investment bubbles, and national debts are likened to weather phenomena.
“Can we blame a hurricane for the destruction it causes? No, it happens ‘by the will of God.’ In its hyperobjectivity, finance now resembles ‘nature’,” write Morton and Boyer.
Those who create hyperobjects are termed hyper-subjects by the authors. They are the “lords” in the old sense: they manage and oversee, using technology as a tool and reveling in power. Morton and Boyer believe their time is coming to an end.
The most recognizable trait of the hyper-subject is the belief that humans can surpass themselves. The authors illustrate this with the example of futurist Ray Kurzweil, who in his book The Singularity Is Near reiterates his long-standing prediction: AI will reach human-level intelligence by 2029, and by 2045, humans will merge with machines.
“Ray Kurzweil says: yes, death is real, as we are told, and we must accept it. But personally, I do not accept it, so freeze me, because wouldn’t it be a blessing for the future that when they open my cryogenic capsule, I, Ray Kurzweil, will jump out and start uploading myself to the cloud,” the authors summarize his logic.
Morton and Boyer refer to this singularity as “a manic avoidance of death, which some psychoanalysts would indeed call death itself.”
This belief also has a collective, ideological form. In 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” which became one of the foundational documents of the effective accelerationism (e/acc) movement. In it, technology is declared the liberator of the human spirit, while the main opponents are ideas that the author believes hinder progress: concepts of existential risk, sustainable development, and techno-ethics. The manifesto envisions a future where the Earth’s population grows to 50 billion and humanity subsequently colonizes other planets.
Morton and Boyer released their book before the emergence of e/acc. However, the hyper-subject they describe, which initially seeks almost limitless power and only later intends to save the world, appears strikingly contemporary.
“Before I figure out what to do, I will wait until I become as great as I can. This will likely involve flying to Mars (in some virtual form) and then uploading myself into something Martian,” the authors describe the strategy of transcendence.
Growing Down
A hyposubject is not a weakened version of a hyper-subject but its opposite. It is the “indigenous species of the Anthropocene,” just beginning to understand what it can be. Hyposubjects do not seek absolute power and do not pretend to possess it. Instead, according to the authors’ formula, they “play, care, adapt, feel pain, and laugh.”
The main characteristic of the hyposubject is hidden in the prefix. It is “less than the sum of its parts”: not transcendent but subscendent. Transcendence is the attempt to break upward, beyond one’s limits. The subject moves in the opposite direction: collapsing inward, toward what it is made of.
The authors chose a phrase by Chris Robertson as the epigraph for their book: “Do not grow up. Grow down.” A person who recognizes themselves not as the pinnacle of Creation but as a neighbor to non-human beings ceases to be the center of the world. There are ten times more bacteria in the gut than one’s own body cells, and one cannot survive without them. The authors prioritize awareness of this fact over attempts to overcome everything.
A similar shift in thinking, from vertical to horizontal, was described by ForkLog in the article “Mycelium Instead of Hierarchy.”
The Whole is Less Than the Sum of Its Parts
Holism typically posits that the whole cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. Morton and Boyer propose the opposite view: the whole is less than the sum of its parts. A network is not limited to the people, servers, and wallets that comprise it. It is real, but no more real and no more important than its elements. Power and value cannot be automatically transferred to an abstract “protocol” or “system” simply because they unite many participants.
This is where the authors’ position resonates with the original meaning of decentralization. The network was conceived as a means to distribute power among nodes, not as something to which nodes must submit.
They also critique versions of cybernetics that represent the system as a self-sustaining whole, standing above the people within it. They label such ideas as “driven by a deathly pull of transcendental fantasy.” A network that is declared more important than the nodes that comprise it belongs to the same category.
Robot Vacuum vs. Skynet
The most memorable image from the book is domestic. The ideal hyposubject, according to Morton and Boyer, is a robot vacuum cleaner.
“The robot vacuum is the complete antithesis of Skynet/The Matrix—a transcendent hyperobject. […] It knows only that it wants to collect dirt inside itself, and everything else it has to figure out along the way, while possessing a rather limited sensory apparatus,” the authors write.
In 2026, this image seems far less caricatured than when the book was written. The industry debates two visions of the future of AI. The first is Skynet: a superintelligence that will surpass humanity and either save or doom it. The second is the robot vacuum: a specialized agent with limited capabilities that solves specific tasks, constantly encountering obstacles and inevitably making mistakes.
Real AI agents today are closer to the second type. They book tickets, sort emails, write snippets of code—and similarly get stuck, lost, and require supervision.
ForkLog explored how standards ERC-8004 and x402 make agents market participants: they receive wallets, pay each other, and perform tasks. But this is the economy of robot vacuums. Hyposubjectivity is about stopping the expectation of a god from machines and seeing them as limited, useful neighbors.
Uninterrupted Functioning
The conclusion of the book focuses on labor. Digital technologies and AI have been marketed as a promise of freedom from routine work. Morton and Boyer recall the film Her (2013), where the future arrives, but free time turns out to be empty and dreary. In reality, new technologies have not freed up time for leisure but have turned activities once considered leisure into unpaid labor.
“As Marx said, we have become a meat appendage of iron machines. Serving machines is our current fate. Let these machines be made not of iron but of silicon and electricity,” write Morton and Boyer.
The authors take this idea to the absurd: “We must maintain the uninterrupted functioning of uninterrupted functioning.” Cleaning social media accounts, the endless flow of posts, and the status of “always connected” have become intellectual labor that consumes weekends and personal time.
In the crypto industry, this mode is particularly acute. Markets never close—neither at night, nor on weekends, nor on holidays. A trader checking positions at three in the morning and a user endlessly refreshing their feed are essentially doing the same thing: servicing systems that know no rest.
Demolishing the Apocalypse
Morton and Boyer do not call for tearing down the system. Their prescription is smaller and calmer: big problems do not require grand, heroic solutions; small, unnoticed, distributed steps are sufficient.
“The apocalyptic problem does not require an apocalyptic solution. We can simply dismantle the apocalypse,” the authors write.
Hyposubject politics may seem unserious. It resembles the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, whose weakness, according to Morton and Boyer, was its main achievement. It is like Reykjavik’s Mayor Jón Gnarr, who made vulnerability and acknowledgment of one’s ignorance part of politics, rather than portraying himself as an omnipotent leader.
A similar shift has already occurred within the crypto industry. In November 2023, Vitalik Buterin responded to Andreessen with his own essay on techno-optimism and proposed the formula d/acc. The letter “d” stands for defense, decentralization, and democracy. Instead of racing toward superintelligence, Buterin suggests developing technologies that protect, distribute power, and leave room for humanity. The co-founder of Ethereum is particularly repelled by the accelerationists’ fascination with military technologies and the idea that AI will become the “dominant species.”
Essentially, d/acc returns decentralization to its original “hyposubjective” meaning: not escaping the state into digital eternity, but distributing power so that everyone survives, not just the strongest.
Humans, Birds, and Snails
Morton and Boyer’s book features an experimental language and may seem overly complex. The authors acknowledge this themselves: they describe the text as “an exercise in superficial and chaotic thinking” and honestly warn that parts of it may seem nonsensical.
“Reader, have you noticed something amusing about this book? We decided not to present it in the form of a dialogue and to use the first-person plural, so the book is perceived as one of those wonderful paragraphs by my favorite modernist, Virginia Woolf, where about three or four people appear, and not only people but also a kind of assemblage consisting of, for example, humans, birds, and snails, united in a stream of consciousness,” write Morton and Boyer.
They do not construct a theory or present a program. Two “white guys” trying to save the world ironically reflect on their position as saviors.
But one thesis is worth adopting. In an industry that worships “more,” “faster,” and “higher,” the most radical gesture may be the opposite: less, slower, lower.
Quotes are taken from the publication: Timothy Morton, Dominic Boyer. Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human. Perm: HylePress, 2026. Translated from English by Oleg Myshkin.