Hyperstition HWYL 04 019

2024-01-04T00:00:00Z

Hyperstition "Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely. The (fictional) idea of Cyberspace contributed to the influx of investment that rapidly converted it into a technosocial reality. [...] John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness includes the (approximate) line: 'I thought I was making it up, but all the time they were telling me what to write.' 'They' are the Old Ones (explicitly), and this line operates at an extraordinary pitch of hyperstitional intensity. From the side of the human subject, 'beliefs' hyperstitionally condense into realities, but from the side of the hyperstitional object (the Old Ones), human intelligences are mere incubators through which intrusions are directed against the order of historical time. The archaic hint or suggestion is a germ or catalyst, retro-deposited out of the future along a path that historical consciousness perceives as technological progress." Land, Nick. "Hyperstition." Interview by Delphi Carstens. 2009. Xenopraxis, 2013. https://xenopraxis.net/readings/carstens_hyperstition.pdf