Hyperstition I

Objective

By the end of this volume you command the CCRU's core concept. You can break the mechanism of hyperstition into its parts, distinguish it from three neighbouring concepts it regularly gets confused with, and pin down its time figure exactly. You also know the strongest objection to it. With that you hold the tool the next volume uses to open up the decisive case.

Exposition

The word is a portmanteau of hyper and superstition. Superstition is a notion that is false and gets believed anyway. Hyperstition is a notion that is false and becomes true through being believed. The prefix marks that jump. Superstition stays snagged on reality, hyperstition reaches through it.

The CCRU sketched the concept through four features that only together give it its profile. First, a hyperstition is an element of effective culture that makes itself real. Second, it works as a fiction functioning like a time-travel vehicle. Third, it is a condenser of coincidences, a mechanism that congeals coincidences into patterns. Fourth, it is a call, a summoning of what is not yet there. The first feature is the thesis, the second the time structure, the third the symptom, the fourth the stance. Most accounts stop at the first and thereby lose the concept.

The distinction matters more than the definition, because the concept loses its edge the moment you confuse it with the familiar.

The nearest neighbour is the self-fulfilling prophecy. The sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the phrase in 1948 with the example of a bank run. A rumour claims a bank is insolvent. The rumour is false. Customers believe it, pull their money, and the bank becomes insolvent. The false statement has made itself true. The mechanism is identical with that of hyperstition, the valuation is not. Merton describes a pathology, a sociological failure case, something you diagnose in order to prevent it. For the CCRU the same process is the basic constitution of culture as such and a procedure you can operate. You already know that shift. It is exactly the same movement as in Volume 3, where positive feedback went from operational fault to actual object. Merton stands to the CCRU as Wiener stands to Land. The mechanism stays, the sign flips.

The second neighbour is performativity. The philosopher of language John L. Austin showed that some sentences describe nothing but do something. Say, under the right conditions, that you hereby pronounce two people married, and you produce a fact rather than report one. The difference from hyperstition lies in two points. The performative utterance works immediately and it needs an institution that authorises the speaker. The registrar can marry, the passer-by cannot. Hyperstition works over time, through the mediation of belief and action, and it needs no authorisation. It operates from below, anonymously, through contagion. That's why it's interesting for the CCRU and performativity isn't. A procedure that presupposes authority is no use to a group that has none.

The third neighbour is the simulacrum. Jean Baudrillard described a culture in which signs have detached from the signified and refer only to each other, copies without originals. The surface looks related, the direction is opposed. In Baudrillard the real vanishes behind the signs, his tone is one of loss, the diagnosis reads derealisation. In the CCRU the signs produce the real, the tone is one of arrival, the diagnosis reads production. Baudrillard mourns, the CCRU builds. Read hyperstition as postmodern arbitrariness and you have put the concept in the wrong family.

The mechanism itself has four links and runs as a closed circle. A fiction enters circulation. It produces belief, where belief has little to do with conviction and much to do with expectation, with counting on something. The belief changes actions, because whoever reckons with a future arranges themselves for it, invests, builds, votes. The changed actions produce states resembling the fiction. Those states confirm the fiction and feed the belief. You recognise the structure from Volumes 2 and 3, it's a feedback loop, and because the result amplifies the output instead of damping it, it's a positive one. Hyperstition is positive feedback in the medium of belief. At this point the foundation of this course joins onto its core.

The most solid case is cyberspace. William Gibson invented the word around 1982 and filled it with images in Neuromancer in 1984. He had, as he later recounted, barely any grasp of computers and wrote on a mechanical typewriter. The word denoted nothing. There was no cyberspace, there was a description of something absent. Then engineers, programmers, and founders read that novel, and some of them set about producing what had been described. The word migrated into conferences, funding applications, company formations, legal texts. Today a thing exists that the word fits. The description preceded the thing and contributed to its coming into being. Gibson didn't describe the future, he supplied it with a template.

That settles the time figure, and it demands precision, because this is where most misunderstandings arise. From outside, the matter looks like backwards causation. Something that only exists later appears to act on what happens earlier. Mechanically considered, nothing of the sort happens. It isn't the future that acts, it's a present narrative about the future. Causality runs dutifully forwards. And this is exactly where the CCRU applies its lever and poses the uncomfortable question. If the expectation of a future reliably produces that future, then what remains of the difference between a future that acts and a future whose image acts? The group doesn't decide that question, it holds it open and uses the undecidedness as a drive. That's why its texts can never be pinned down as to whether they present a causal analysis or an incantation. Being both at once belongs to the procedure.

The third feature, the condenser of coincidences, usually gets passed over and is the most revealing point. Whoever carries a hyperstition sees evidence everywhere. Coincidences order themselves into patterns, finds fall into place, everything starts to fit. The sober explanation is called confirmation bias, a known weakness of perception. The CCRU knows that explanation and refuses to stop at it, because the pattern-formation for its part produces actions and thereby leaves real traces. Confirmation bias is then no error about the world but a means of production. Here lies the concept's actual imposition, and here at once lies its danger, because the same structure carries conspiratorial thinking. The CCRU sought that proximity rather than avoiding it.

The strongest objection follows from that directly and can't be defused. Hyperstition is not refutable. If a fiction realises itself, the concept counts as confirmed. If it doesn't, it simply wasn't effective culture but mere superstition. The criterion gets awarded retrospectively, by the outcome. On top of that comes a selection effect. What's visible are the fictions that became real, while the countless ones that fizzled leave no trace. From Gibson you cannot derive that fictions realise themselves, only that some do, and about the conditions under which it happens the concept is silent. Look here for an explanatory theory and you'll be disappointed. The CCRU offers a procedure, not an explanation, and it measures that procedure by effect rather than correctness. Whether that trade pays off is the open account of the entire project.

The consequence for reading the group is harsh. If hyperstition holds, then the Lemurian myth of Volume 20 is no ornament on the theory but its experiment. The CCRU built a fiction and watched to see whether it would realise itself. And since you are reading this text because a small, dissolved group from Warwick managed to have people talking about it thirty years later, the experiment has already delivered part of its answer.

Core Claim

Hyperstition denotes a fiction that produces its own truth through the belief in it and the actions that follow. It is positive feedback in the medium of belief and differs from Merton's prophecy by the inverted sign, from Austin's performativity by the absence of authority, from Baudrillard's simulacrum by the direction of movement. Its price is unfalsifiability, since it is measured by effect rather than by correctness.

Bridge to the Next Volume

The mechanism is in place, the evidence is missing. The CCRU claims not that hyperstition is a marginal phenomenon of culture but its strongest force, and it stakes everything on a single case. Volume 14 tests it. Money, credit, and capital are fictions that produce real futures, and if that demonstration succeeds, the concept turns from a literary game into a statement about the constitution of the present. There the third module joins what Land drew out of Deleuze and Guattari.