HYPERSTITION

"The extent of the interconnectedness of such systems also means that subtle shifts in activity in one area can have great implications for others, again without reference to some central site. In effect, such systems are continually engineering themselves, growing, emerging and taking shape as a consequence of their own distributed activities. They are self-organizing."

"We are interested in fiction only insofar as it is simultaneously hyperstition - a term we have coined for semiotic productions that make themselves real - cryptic communications from the Old Ones, signalling return: shleth hud dopesh. This is the ambivalence - or loop - of Cthulhu-fiction: who writes, and who is written?"

"Hyperstition. Element of effective culture that makes itself real, through fictional quantities functioning as time-travelling potentials. Hyperstition operates as a coincidence intensifier, effecting a call to the Old Ones."

"The Digital Hyperstition volume is an unexploded bomb: a text that, in decoding the esoteric traditions of the past, awaits its deployment in the near-future by populations it will itself machine. Ccru is pleased to announce a deal in which key concepts from Digital Hyperstition have been sold to the games design company, Abstract Machines, who will be weaving them into the architecture of a digital game. From the point of view of the game and its consumers, Ccru is only important as the producer of Digital Hyperstition, and Digital Hyperstition is significant only as a handbook to the game."

"Whatever or however it is called, Cyber-hype libidinally invests its own semiotic, propagating fictional quantities, tagging artificial agencies, and making itself up as it goes along, whilst dissolving production into cultural synthesis."

"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."

"Whereas hope and fear are superstitious (although they may have some hyperstitional effects), confidence is essentially hyperstitional: it immediately increases the capacity to act, the capacity to act increases confidence, and so on — a self-fulfilling prophecy, a virtuousspiral."

"And hyperstition, which Amy and Tony will talk about more, is partly in the claim that it doesn't stop there, that it actually feeds back into the world in a way that's more destructive or creative than we tend to admit."

"Hyperstition, at its core, is about worldbuilding. The reason that Lovecraftian mythos is such a potent hyperstitional example is because it’s so close to our world that we can almost reach out and touch it. Once several different perspectives weigh in on a world, it starts to come together as a multi-layered possible thing over and above a mere tale of horror."

"A nascent hyperstition (provisionally –––⦅ ) becomes a successful hyperstition ( –––< ) under certain specific conditions—carrier proliferation, cybernetic uptake, memetic vigour, insertion into functional circuits of long range positive feedback, mutant suppleness (or - ‘making itself up as it goes along’ [Carver])—all, significantly, beyond the control of the hyperstitional cyberneticist."

"And the same is true here for Mark Fisher especially, but also the broader CCRU and the other members of the hyperstition block. It's often the case that some of the most profound insights into our cultural moments or our contemporary structures of feeling can be drawn out from our cultural trash."