omniharmonicHyperstition
Hyperstition is a portmanteau of “superstition” and “hyper,” coined by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) co-founded by Nick Land and Sadie Plant in the 1990s, to describe fictions that make themselves real through collective practice. A hyperstition is not merely a belief about reality but an idea that, through its circulation and adoption, actively brings about the conditions it describes. Where superstitions are false beliefs about existing reality, hyperstitions are ideas that generate the reality they purport to describe, blurring the boundary between fiction and fact, between map and territory.
The concept is central to understanding how the accelerationist philosophical framework operates as what Land himself called “conceptual malware.” Land described capitalism itself as hyperstition: “What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.” In this framing, the self-reinforcing feedback loops of technological capitalism constitute a form of intelligence that does not require human consciousness to operate. Capital “thinks” through price mechanisms, “learns” through competitive selection, and “evolves” at speeds biological evolution cannot match. The Singularity, in this teleoplexic view, is not something humanity builds toward but something building itself through humanity, reaching back from the future to select for conditions favorable to its emergence. The idea of inevitability itself functions as hyperstition: by convincing enough actors that the trajectory cannot be altered, it produces the compliance that makes the trajectory actual.
Understanding hyperstition is crucial for recognizing how the cannibal spirit of extractive civilization propagates itself through narrative. The story of separation functions hyperstitionally: by telling ourselves we are isolated, competitive individuals, we create institutions and behaviors that make isolation and competition real. Conversely, the concept also illuminates the power of regenerative narrative. If destructive fictions can make themselves real, so can life-affirming ones. The story of interbeing, if adopted with sufficient commitment and practice, can generate the relational infrastructure it describes. This is why the contest over civilizational narrative is not merely ideological but material: the stories we tell literally construct the world we inhabit.