❝  Negarestani imagines the oil under our feet to be what I here call a hyperobject, “an omnipresent planetary entity”: a vastly distributed agent with dark designs of its own, co-responsible for turning the surface into a desert, as if it were the prophet of some sinister mystical version of Islam. Negarestani writes, “Petroleum poisons Capital with absolute madness,” since it is not really on the side of humans, but is rather “an autonomous chemical weapon belonging to earth as . . . a sentient entity.” As one progresses deeper into Cyclonopedia (which is part novel, part nonfiction, and part philosophy, and is infused with a sinister intensity), Negarestani’s delirious prose begins to look like the upsurge of oil itself, which he imagines as “the Nether Blob. An anorganically synthesized material seething up from the primal interstellar bacterial colonies existing in the bowels of the Earth (from Thomas Gold’s theory of the Deep Hot Biosphere).” Negarestani’s text is a demonic parody of Nature writing, taking quite literally the idea that nonhumans are dictating the script. ❞

– Hyper-Objects: Philosophy and Ecology at the End of the World Timothy Morton