Hyperstition

Hyperstition is a term used to describe self-fulfilling prophecies that come true through their existence and spread.

Etymology

Hyperstition is a neologism that combines the words 'hyper' and 'superstition' to describe the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture.

Concept

Hyperstitions work at the deeper evolutionary level of social organization in that they influence the course taken by cultural evolution. It is associated with science fiction, speculative fiction, futurism, occultism, and conspiracy theories. The term was coined by the British cultural theorists Nick Land and Mark Fisher to describe the way in which certain cultural ideas or narratives can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Hyperstition describes ideas that bring themselves into actuality in the future through the forces unleashed via their expression in the past or present.

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.

Abrahamic Monotheism is also highly potent as a hyperstitional engine. By treating Jerusalem as a holy city with a special world-historic destiny, for example, it has ensured the cultural and political investment that makes this assertion into a truth. Hyperstition is thus able, under ‘favorable’ circumstances whose exact nature requires further investigation, to transmute lies into truths.

Hyperstition can thus be understood, on the side of the subject, as a nonlinear complication of epistemology, based upon the sensitivity of the object to its postulation (although this is quite distinct from the subjectivistic or postmodern stance that dissolves the independent reality of the object into cognitive or semiotic structures). The hyperstitional object is no mere figment of ‘social constuction’, but it is in a very real way ‘conjured’ into being by the approach taken to it. — Nick Land

Examples

The "Snyder Cut" of the film Justice League is an example of hyperstition, where social media activists effectively willed a non-existent product into being.