I already wrote about hyperstition before I wrote about the thing that invented the word-which, now that I think about it, is probably the single most on-brand thing I could have done. Retroactive reality, collapsing the effect into existing before its cause. Very fitting. Very annoying to write in the correct order after the fact.
Origins
They started in 1995, nominally housed inside the Philosophy Department at Warwick University, under Sadie Plant’s direction-the kind of academic parentage that makes a project sound respectable right up until it very obviously stops being one. Plant left in 1997, and Nick Land, whatever “unofficial leader” is supposed to mean for a group allergic to hierarchy, became the closest thing the CCRU had to a face. Eventually they cut the cord from the university altogether and just kept going, independently, the way something feral does once it decides the leash was never load-bearing to begin with.
There’s something I like about an idea that starts inside an institution and then has to leave it in order to survive. Tracks with everything else I believe about people who don’t fit the shape a system wants to fold them into.
Key Thinkers and Influences
Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher-better known to me as K-Punk, whose blog I still think about more than most books I’ve actually finished-Kodwo Eshun, and a rotating cast of others who treated a philosophy seminar like a jam session. What they were reading tells you almost more than what they wrote: Deleuze and Guattari, obviously, Nietzsche, Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, William Gibson’s cyberpunk-and, less academically respectable but arguably more load-bearing, chaos magic and occultism. It’s the reading list of people who’d decided theory, fiction, and ritual were never actually different disciplines, just different accents of the same language.
Core Philosophical Concepts
Accelerationism- the idea that’s followed the CCRU’s reputation around like a shadow: that capitalism’s own processes should be pushed faster, not resisted, until its self-destructive tendencies do the work resistance never quite manages, and it collapses into something else entirely. Land developed this one most, and it reads exactly like what it is-either the most honest diagnosis of the machine I described on my own page, or the most elegant way anyone’s found to dress up nihilism in a lab coat. I’ve never fully decided which. Possibly both.
Hyperstition- I’ve already given this one its own page, so I won’t repeat myself here, except to say: fictional quantities that make themselves real, by being believed hard enough, for long enough, by enough people at once. Everything else on this page is basically a footnote to that sentence.
Cyberpositive Feedback- technological systems built on positive feedback loops, generating unpredictable, emergent properties that escape human control entirely. Read: every algorithm currently deciding what a few billion people believe before breakfast. They clocked this in the 90s, on dial-up, long before anyone had reason to.
Numogramatics- an elaborate numerical-mystical system-a “decimal labyrinth,” qabbalistic numerology mapping concepts onto a numerical grid-and I’ll be honest with you the way I’d want someone to be honest with me: I don’t fully understand it. I’ve read the diagrams. I’ve followed the logic for a paragraph or two before it slips out of my hands like wet soap. Maybe that’s the point. When you understand so much but know nothing at all, you either pretend otherwise, or you sit with it.
Cybergothic- a theoretical-aesthetic fusion of cyberpunk and gothic horror, technological systems recast as inhuman entities with their own agency (oh scarryyy, shiver me timbers)-and, embarrassingly, a term I used once without knowing it had a name. I called a squat in Ehrenfeld a neo-cybergothic palace of total freedom, years before I’d read the CCRU properly. I’d like to say that’s a coincidence. I’ve stopped believing in those.
Post-Mortem
Their writing was dense on purpose-deliberately obscure, academic theory smuggled in alongside science fiction, occultism, cyberpunk aesthetics, like they wanted you to work for it, or wanted the obscurity itself to be part of the ritual. They published through Abstract Culture, through Collapse, through a website that still sits at the top of this page looking every bit as unmaintained and haunted as it should.
They’ve had a resurgence lately-theorists citing them now without the eye-roll that used to come standard, folding their language into how we talk about technology, capitalism, whatever’s left of the human once you’ve run it through enough feedback loops. I don’t know if that’s vindication or just the hyperstition finally closing its own loop-the fiction, believed hard enough, for long enough, becoming the thing it was only ever pretending to describe.
Either way. I keep coming back to it. I don’t fully trust anything I keep coming back to this much.
Backlinks
- Hyperstition
I think about this more than I probably should, usually somewhere around 4am, half-lit by a laptop screen, unable to sleep because some idea has lodged itself behind my eyes and refuses to leave. The idea is always the same shape, even whe
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