🧠 HYPERASSASSINATION

15 Jan, 2025

On December 4th 2024, Luigi Mangione staged the world's first Hyperassasination.

Hyperobjects

The anthropocene brought about the capacity for humans to first see glimpses of hyperobjects, fluidic facets briefly overlapping with the cross-section of reality abstraction (as defined by hegemonic convention). Humanity struggles to incorporate relational properties into intuitive abstraction as easily as discrete nodes of reality. The permutations of interacting forces reverberate in maddeningly complex ways beyond comprehension - we have humans with unbelievable knowledge of objects, but none who can faultlessly predict a few minutes of a ponds chaotic rippling following a scattering of flung pebbles.

Hyperobjects exist beyond a single point of spacetime, constituted from many other object relations into a horizonless structure. The quintessential example (posited by Tim Morton) is that of Climate Change. Impossible to grasp in totality, this degenerating ecosphere is formed of so many conflicting, contradicting, unpredictable flows as to be beyond understanding by an entire civilisation. Taken a step further, the ecosphere itself could be argued to be a hyperobject, through which then every discrete object within it is connected.

Those pebbles in the pond, though simple objects, become hyperpebbles through a lens that includes every flow of terrain, cataclysmic event and atom of erosion that led them to their present shape. Objects formed from a hyperobject, extruded through time and space from coalescing space sediment to incineration by a dying sun. We see but one slice of its nature in the moment we encounter it, at most a lifetime-thick slice, the equivalent of attempting to learn the English language by throwing a dictionary through a CT scanner.

Hyperobjects today define the structure of our civilisation. They have even invested themselves in mortal men.

Hypermen

Brian Thompson was not the world's first Hyperman. Men have sat atop structures of power for thousands of years, becoming vessels for it to flow through. Stained glass windows through which their idiosyncracies may bend and tint the light with no impact on its solar source of power. A billionaire is not a man with a billion dollars, but a billion dollars with a man. It bends abstracts around it like a mass in spacetime, drawing power into its bulk by default, by sheer density. No man can spend a billion dollars, the wealth spends the man, disposes of him and proceeds to the next owner, passed on through corporate or genetic descent. The man is a face, a meme, an aesthetic stretched thin over a discrete boundary of property ownership.

Yet that line is not so discrete as Forbes would have you believe, every dollar is not accounted for and the nation-sized web of relations cannot possibly be understood. It is impenetrable, ungovernable, and only understandable in part by an extruded facet. The meme makes this easier to understand, like a 2c climate target makes Climate Change easier to understand, but they are not understanding, they are an atom thin cross-section of an understanding.

For something sentient, though not sapient, like a billion dollars¹, this is an effective means of survival. A predator is capable of understanding how to maim mammalian prey, but the flows of power of an ant colony are beyond its understanding. Better - an ant colony can be stomped on and recover, so long as the Queen remains safe to regenerate it. Extend this to the human understanding of its unnatural predator², and you see the value in this obscurity. The Queen ant has other tools at its disposal sure, pheromones to disrupt and cajole enemy ants, mucosal fluids to bog down, loyal guards to defend them, but what if it was domesticated, protected by the terrarrium's owner?

This is where we run into the seemingly unsolveable catastrophe of the 21st century - The world is burning and we know who's holding the matches. We take a billion dollars worth of the world and invest it in a mortal man, who contains all the rights and privileges of a human (as he should), and thus becomes unassailable. The Hyperman cannot be overcome by any force, his mortal frame protected by the state, his material composition so large as to swallow any power structure daring to near its gravitational well. We are at an impasse without the collapse of conventional legitimating bodies like states, banks and property ownership.

HYPERASSASSINATION

On December 4th 2024, Luigi Mangione staged the world's first Hyperassasination. Brian Thompson briefly descended from his 464 billion dollar corporation, (a particularly eldritch hyperobject flowing with coercion, capital and tragedy) walked down a street and was shot dead from behind. The Hyperassasin fired upon an extruded facet of a hyperobject, pierced the membrane between reality and hyperreality, and bled a monster. This is what its blood looks like.

No mortal wound by any means, but a Hyperman was felled and moreover, the public cheered. No political pundit predicted what occured after the chaotic rippling following a scattering of flung shell casings, "Deny, Defend, Depose", except the Hyperassassin himself. He prepared the way to ascension, dousing his online presence in deliberate memetic spirit before disappearing into custody. The man was as good as dead, but the Hyperassassin was born, not atop a structure of capital, but social capital. He grew infinitely in all directions, until only a facet of his impact could ever be understood. St Luigi Mangione.

Hyperassassination is the first effective reaction to the Hyperman, the unassailable vessel for power girded in liberal conventions of non-violence and pseudo-negotiation. Violent vigilantism is immoral, ineffective and ill-advised. The jury is still out on Hyperviolent Hypervigilantism, and increasingly aware of the possibility of the first Hypernullification.³ Perhaps there will be new innovations in the field, a means by which to slice the man from the Hyperman, (Psychonuking, Hypercontagion, Sociogenic Chemotherapy) without killing him. Indeed, it is virtuous to aim for the Hypermonster with intent to kill, and it is deeply unfortunate that the man insist on diving in the way to save it.

Footnotes