Insight Editions · No. 75
Hyperstition
Nick Land, Reza Negarestani, Mark Fisher and others
The Hyperstition archive records debates on self-fulfilling cultural fictions, occult numerology, capitalism, technology, and politics among writers associated with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.
A study guide to Hyperstition by Nick Land, Reza Negarestani, Mark Fisher and others. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
How the archive unfolds
- Launch and occult engineering (Ch 1 to 6). The three tasks; the numogram, Anglossic Qabbala and the Lemurs; Negarestani's dust, oil and sorcery; the Holmes debate on unbelief.
- Carriers and number (Ch 7 to 11). The troll war; Land's theory of hyperstitional carriers; Colonel West; Tic Xenotation; Shoggoths as runaway technology.
- Self-fulfilling prophecy (Ch 12 to 16). Fake codices and Parsani; "capitalist realism"; hyperstition as feedback of credibility and investment; the Singularity, robot traders and the Anglosphere.
- Politics and the fade (Ch 17 to 19). Arguments over a party line; Paine and the Iraq war; Uncle Hank, Cantor, the "Critique of Transcendental Miserablism" and Negarestani's last papers.
The hyperstitional loop as the blog came to describe it, from Trent's "once it's real... it's always been" to Land's self-fulfilling prophecy.
| Ch | Months | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jun 2004 | Programme, three tasks, why numogram numbers are simple |
| 2 | Jul 2004 | Unbelief not belief; Holmes debate; first capital quarrel |
| 3 | Aug 2004 | Petropolitics, Book of Paths, Katak |
| 4 | Sep 2004 | Nomads, occasionalism, Eyes Wide Shut |
| 5 | Oct 2004 | The Passion, fog of war, Lovecraft's Arabic |
| 6 | Nov 2004 | Sorcery and the line of escape; PEST |
| 7 | Dec 2004 (I) | Troll war; carriers think what no ego can |
| 8 | Dec 2004 (II) | AQ, Qwernomics, Colonel West |
| 9 | Jan 2005 | War machines, method post, chronopolitics |
| 10 | Feb 2005 | Land vs k-p on Christianity; Tic Xenotation II |
| 11 | Mar 2005 | Shoggoths, time loops, holes, the 2007 prophecy |
| 12 | Apr to Jul 2005 | The Thing, Parsani, the hatefest |
| 13 | Aug 2005 | Capitalist realism; self-fulfilling prophecy |
| 14 | Sep 2005 | Singularity, AI that hides, political ontology |
| 15 | Oct 2005 | Language evolution, intuitive economics |
| 16 | Nov 2005 | Simulations, riots, monkey money |
| 17 | Jan to Feb 2006 | Outlooks, a new definition, the Collapse row |
| 18 | Mar 2006 | Paine, Anglosphere, Iraq forecasts |
| 19 | Apr 2006 to Jun 2008 | Uncle Hank, Miserablism, the weird |
Chapter map. Tiny months are grouped; the file labelled March 2007 is March 2006.
| Cast | Role across the archive |
|---|---|
| Nick Land | Numogram, Qabbala, carriers, Shoggoths, capitalism and the Singularity |
| Reza Negarestani | Oil, dust, sorcery, holes, heresy and the weird |
| Anna Greenspan | Early poster; hype, unbelief and the "top 9" list |
| mark k-p (k-punk) | Gnostic Christ, Lovecraft, film; coins "capitalist realism" here |
| sd | Main poster of late 2005 and 2006; Egan, Paine, simulations |
| Craig | Magician and fiction writer in the comments |
| Tachi, undercurrent, traxus4420 | Sceptical commenters who push for tests and limits |
| Vysparov, Parsani, Colonel West, Uncle Hank | Invented carriers and voices |
The main cast. Carriers are fictional by design.
Archive arc.
Toolkit.
Thesis fork.
Core pairs.
Months read in full (all KEEP)
Jun-Dec 2004 · Jan-Nov 2005 · Jan-Apr 2006 · Jun/Oct/Dec 2006 · Jan-Apr 2007 · Mar 2007 · Sep-Oct 2007 · Jun 2008 (32 month files; Dec04 and Mar06 split/labelled as in source PDF).
Voices
Nick Land, Reza Negarestani, Anna Greenspan, mark k-p / k-punk adjacency, and long comment threads as part of the machine.
Pad farm 1.
Pad farm 22.
Pad farm 43.
June 2004: The Launch and the Three Tasks
Jun04.
The founding programme
The first post, "Polytics" (June 7, signed Hyperstition), says the practice "necessarily involves three irreducible ingredients":
| Task | What it means in the post |
|---|---|
| 1. Numogram | "Rigorous systematic unfolding of the Decimal Labyrinth" with its Zones, Currents, Gates, Lemurs, Pandemonium Matrix and Book of Paths |
| 2. Mythos | "Comprehensive attribution of all signal... to artificial agencies"; the spread of "carriers" ("Who says this?") effects "a positive destruction of identity, authority and credibility" |
| 3. Unbelief | "Pragmatic skepticism or constructive escape from integrated thinking", ending in "attainment of positive unbelief" |
The three tasks of hyperstition as first set out on the blog.
It then quotes the CCRU definitions: hyperstition is an "element of effective culture that makes itself real", a "fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device", a "coincidence intensifier" and a "call to the Old Ones". A quoted Trent line compares it to hype: "Hype actually makes things happen... And once it's real, in a sense, it's always been." The invented correspondence of Peter Vysparov and Echidna Stillwell supplies the motto: "We thought we were making it up, but all the time the Nma were telling us what to write."
The "vortical sub-cycle" of hyperstitional production, as the founding post describes it.
How do fictions become hyperstitions?
Linda Trent argues that a consistent world is necessary but not sufficient: compare Lovecraft with Tolkien. A work "has crossed over into hyperstition when it has become impossible to treat it as the product of a single author's imagination". Two things make this happen: collectivization (Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Lumley, Campbell) and practical deployment (Kenneth Grant's magical use of Lovecraft).
The commenter johneffay pushes back: Tolkien is just as collective, Moorcock opened Jerry Cornelius to anyone, and Holmes is believed in by some readers. He also notes Lovecraft's "constant references to various racial types". Negarestani answers that Tolkien's collectivity is "racial", while Lovecraft's populations are "contagious", pushed toward "a bacterial omega". Trent's reply gives the key formula:
Negarestani: dust, Lamassu and the Druj
- Dust (June 19): Mesopotamia as the "Xerodrome" of the War on Terror ("WoTerror"); anthrax spores built to be "an appetizingly digestible light meal"; dust as the fog of war; and gematria, DUST = 100. "Breathe deep, dust will never be depleted." Land adds that ZERO = 100 too and promises a qabbalistic dictionary.
- Relic (June 23): the winged bull Lamassu at Khorsabad, an "Axis of Evil-against-Evil" in which "War itself is hunting warmachines", and borders that "become hyperstitions". Land answers with a fiction, Colonel West, a Delta Force defector following "the other side" of the oil supply, and asks Reza to slow down West's "flood of oily revelation".
- In the comments: the cult of the Druj (Mother of Abominations), "schizotrategy" and openness as "being laid cracked butchered open", not "being open to".
- Games: "Parasitic Gamer" reads Max Payne 2's endless survival as a parasitic, undead endurance; a follow-up lists "deeply hyperstitional" games from System Shock 2 to Halo.
Land: numbers, qabbala and the war on monotheism
"Qabbala 101: Part 0" gives the slogan: count 1 to 10 and you get the Tree; count 0 to 9 and "you most definitely don't". "Ten is the summit of theistic qabbalism... Nine implicates a reiterated triadic dispersion." On k-punk's Houellebecq post Land writes that hyperstition is "an intrinsic abomination against Monotheism in all its manifestations (THE enemy)", and mark k-p calls classical theism a "repressed uttunul cult".
Cold-Me's "The ABJAD version of the numogram" maps the 28 Arabic letters onto the nine zones, with Zone 1 totalling 1111, "set to hijack ONE into a nameless multiplicity". Land calls it "Simply Wow!" and sets "traditional" Abjad against "alphanumeric" Anglossic Qabbala. Asked who taught Colonel West, Reza proposes the Ismaili-era occultist Ibn Maymun; Land suggests "an Abjad-genius neo-Sumerian sorceress" named Jay, and notes "JAY = 63 = OIL".
Figure 1.1: the Abjad table posted in June 2004, giving the numerical value of each Arabic letter, the basis for Cold-Me's Abjad numogram.
Hype, belief and "makes itself real"
Greenspan's "On unbelief" explains "why Bin Laden, Mao and Stalin are not practitioners of hyperstition": they demand belief, while hyperstition "requires neither belief nor disbelief". Infinite thought asks how this differs from Sartre or myth; mark k-p answers that "Myths are just hyperstitions that have ceased to be effective". Greenspan's "Candidates for a top 9" names Blavatsky, Burroughs, Castaneda, Carpenter, Crowley, Deleuze and Guattari, Drexciya, Hubbard, Gibson, Lovecraft, Reagan, Vallee and Yardeni.
The month ends with Cold-Me's dense "Anonymous-until-Now": a "tail" that ungrounds and a "probe-head" that contaminates the "Genesis Project". mark k-p asks Reza to "dumb things down a bit" so that the group can build "an alternative D/Gonetics" to the Bergson-derived Deleuzianism of Keith Ansell Pearson and Massumi.
| Cast | Role this month |
|---|---|
| Hyperstition (collective) | founding "Polytics" post |
| Nick Land | numogram, qabbala, Colonel West, theory referee |
| Reza Negarestani / Cold-Me | dust, Lamassu, Druj, Abjad, Anonymous-until-Now |
| mark k-p (k-punk) | Lovecraft, Houellebecq, "actual" versus "real" |
| Anna Greenspan | hype, unbelief, top 9 |
| Linda Trent | fictions into hyperstitions |
| johneffay, infinite thought, Sultan | commenters |
Who did what in June 2004.
July 2004: Unbelief, Carriers and Capital
Jul04.
Maps, glossaries and the case of Iris Carver
Land opens with "Cartography of the virtual" (July 2): the numogram as a Lemurian Time Map, with xenochronic regions Djynxx (6::3, the Warp) and Uttunul (9::0, the Plex), and the six-step Time Circuit said to be isomorphic with the I Ching. "The diagram comes first." Negarestani maps the Time Circuit onto the currents of the earth's outer core, the Warp onto the day-side magnetosphere and the Plex onto the magnetotail.
Figure 2.1: the numogram as posted in July 2004: zones 0 to 9 paired into syzygies, with the Warp (6::3), the Time-Circuit and the Plex (9::0).
Reza also proposes a glossary, starting with OPENNESS: not "being open to" but being laid cracked open. Greenspan and mark k-p agree, k-p asking for a loose "hypergloss" rather than a formal dictionary. Greenspan then reposts Iris Carver's 1999 review of the Ccru's Digital Hyperstition, where "fact means invention, person means mask", the new economy is the Plateau of Leng, and Y2K belongs to the Lemur Yettuck, "she who names the end at the beginning". Carver herself is one of the mythos's recurring carriers.
Superstition, unbelief and Goedel
mark k-p's "Hyperstition/Superstition" (July 6) answers Philip of It's All In Your Mind: superstitions need not become real, and they fail to decode the relation of belief to reality; "economics is essentially voodoo". Land adds that superstitions lack fictional quantities: "try 'refusing to believe' in the Numogram". Numbers exceed the synthetic a priori (Goedel), so unbelief is "a limit concept, beyond, because more robust than, belief", an "impersonal knowledge" won by the subtraction of indoctrination.
Negarestani's Tellurian insurgency
- Solar Rattle (July 7): solar storms crash the ionosphere, radio operators hear a sonic plague, and the aurora returns as Pliny's "Presages of Woe". Land worries that numogrammatizing physics slides into "hyperscientific REPRESENTATION"; Reza answers that the numogram is a symptom of the Earth's magnetic insurgency.
- Five Billion Years of Hell-engineering (July 9): the Valley of Hinnom, Tophet and the Moloch cult. Land answers with Chaim Horowitz's mapping of the Seal of Solomon onto the Time Circuit: the triads 1, 2, 4 and 8, 7, 5.
- We are a network! (July 12): Abjad as secret-society cipher, the occultist Ibn Maymun, "Demons do not fly, they teleport", and tree-writing from E.G. Browne's A Year Amongst the Persians.
- Zoroastrian Osseotherapy (July 16): the Vendidad, the corpse-demon Druj-Nasu, the four-eyed dog and the Tower of Silence, where the dead are given to vultures so that "Mother Earth shall not be defiled". "I am from a culture in which death is... pulverized into a gray powder."
- Dustism (July 27): techno-capital plans to evaporate as gas, but its Tellurian bedrock sets its destination to Dust. The Cold War is WWIII, the War on Terror WWIV, and "Dustism is the dominant path of Tellurian Insurgency".
Land's number lessons
On Nietzsche, Land notes that "God is dead" is spoken by a carrier deliberately made implausible, the Madman. GOD IS = 99 = THETA = YHVH = QABBALA; Reza adds Kaprekar numbers (9, 45, 99), and later DUST = 100 = NO GOD.
| Sum | Words claimed (system) |
|---|---|
| 63 | ABJAD, OIL, JAY (AQ) |
| 99 | GOD IS, THETA, YHVH, QABBALA, ISLAM (AQ) |
| 100 | DUST, ZERO, NO GOD (AQ) |
| 127 | NUMBER, THELEMA, CRYPT (AQ) |
| 777 | "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" (AQ) |
| 37 | Allah (Abjad); Elohim 116 minus Allah 79 (Reza, on the Raelians) |
The month's gematria ledger. AQ is Anglossic Qabbala; Land concedes that adding and subtracting sums is "rather qabbalistically depraved".
Vowels and clicks
mark k-p's "From Text to Txt" notices that text messages drop vowels. Reza calls vowels "micro-factories of representation" and "watchers"; johneffay replies that telegrams did this decades ago and calls the jump to masters and slaves "one hell of a leap". Greenspan's "Vowel-Stripped Tic-Talk" brings in the Ccru's click-chittering AI Marvin and Barker's claim that "Man emerges from a speech synthesis", and k-p closes with Burroughs's language injections.
The Holmes debate: fiction versus hyperstition
Linda Trent's "Farmer's Syndrome" (July 18) starts it. Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton books treat Tarzan and Holmes as historical; Trent calls this hyperfiction, which confirms belief, and sets it against Castaneda: "Don't believe it, do it." Some 150,000 characters of comments follow.
The distinction the thread settles on, drawn from Trent, mark k-p and Land.
- mark k-p: belief is first solicited, then made irrelevant; "religions... must perforce deny the hyperstitional mechanics of their own emergence". Holmes refutes the supernatural; Lovecraft's realization involves a "de-realization" of the Dominant Operating System.
- johneffay: Castaneda "knows fuck-all about Yaqui sorcerers", and "you find sorcerers sexier than detectives".
- Philip: the Outside sounds like "an article of faith"; perhaps the whole thing is "a fictitious critical position that has made itself 'real'" (k-p: "precisely, good!").
- Land: "Hyperstition proposes that its patently deranged 'fictions' are no less real than things whose reality you are entirely confident about." To Philip: "when disbelief is impossible faith is comprehensively dispelled".
- Trent: the Outside is "so real you can't disbelieve it"; hyperstition and postmodernism are "diametrically opposed".
Woodsie challenges the talk of signs as a postmodern "psycho-semiotic trap"; k-p answers with a materialist semiotics (signs are "materially effective triggers") and calls postmodernism "degraded cybernetics". johneffay proposes Crowley's working method: act as if, and never make "the error of true belief". Land's summary is the month's most quoted line:
Spin-off posts gather sources: Castaneda on Talcott Parsons's glosses ("The world is an agreement"; an artist "just rearranges the old glosses"), scanshifts on sorcery as "anomalous pragmatics of intensification" ("see if the map works"), and k-p's selection of the Castaneda passages in A Thousand Plateaus.
Capital/Hyperstition
The advertising question ("please, please, noooooo", Land) becomes its own thread on July 25. Land posts five "stim-points": the presses spewing pulp horror in In the Mouth of Madness; capitalism as The Thing; technocapital as a "megaweapon system promoting shoggothic insurgency"; hyperstition arising when the economy probes its own stimulation mechanisms; and cyberspace as the phase where "hyperstition eats the economy".
The others pull in different directions. Greenspan, writing from Asia, sets the future-facing periphery against Western miserabilism, and argues from Boehm-Bawerk that time plus capital means innovation (running water versus the river). Reza calls MORE "a capacity-devourer" and asks whether petropolitics now steers French policy ("Petropunk anyone?"). HarCur defends France and calls the Lovecraftian sublime of capital "just a different emotional investment". A jab at lurCur as "marxist-leninist-miserabilist" gets an apology after k-p asks everyone to "lower the heat".
Carriers and the first Hero
Greenspan's "Heroes of Hyperstition: No. 1" invents Maximillian Crabbe (1940 to 1999?): heir to the Vysparov Library, translator of the Nma's Nomo Chant, billionaire of dolphin communication, and finally a body spread across 72 bio-hazard vats in a Java Trench habitat, whose last words were "No more life...". Commenters extend it at once: Orford Ness, the Orford merman and a lost documentary, By The North Sea.
She then explains the method in "Hyperstitional Carriers" (Principle 2): the spread of carriers ("Who says this?") "effect[s] a positive destruction of identity, authority and credibility". Puppets "allow 'you' to think things that 'you' don't agree with"; unlike internet avatars, they are not there to hide anyone. Land agrees there is "no consistent hyperstitional practice without puppetry" and dismisses Luther Blissett as an "entropic melange of lefty pranking".
| Term | Use this month |
|---|---|
| Unbelief | state past belief and doubt; "subtraction of indoctrination" |
| Carrier | artificial author or puppet that thinks for the collective |
| Hyperfiction | fiction treated as real that confirms consensus (Wold Newton) |
| Tic Xenotation | prime-factor notation by implexion |
| Dustism | Negarestani's erosion of capital and war to dust (= 100) |
| Gloss | Castaneda's term, from Parsons, for an agreed world-picture |
Glossary of terms introduced or sharpened in July 2004.
| Cast | Role this month |
|---|---|
| Nick Land | TX, Qabbala 101, Capital/Hyperstition, unbelief |
| Reza Negarestani | Solar Rattle, Tophet, Osseotherapy, Dustism; posts from Tehran via a friend |
| mark k-p | superstition, txt, belief, Castaneda sources |
| Anna Greenspan | Iris Carver, tic-talk, carriers, Max Crabbe |
| Linda Trent | Farmer's Syndrome |
| lurCur / HarCur, Philip, johneffay, Woodsie, scanshifts | commenters who shape the theory |
Who did what in July 2004.
August 2004: Petropolitics, Lemurs and the Gog-Magog Axis
Aug04.
Capital, boredom and a truce
mark k-p opens the month by posting the Anti-Oedipus passage on capitalism as "the thing, the unnamable, the generalized decoding of all flows", and all of A Thousand Plateaus's Lovecraft quotations. His k-punk essay "Anti-Capitalism (Some Modest Beginnings)" reopens the July quarrel.
Anna Greenspan breaks the deadlock with a plain model: self-sufficient pods trade, and markets follow; capitalism starts when a trader uses time and capital to innovate (Boehm-Bawerk, Schumpeter's "fundamental impulse"). k-p calls it the missing piece and coins the slogan "Kapital = progressively less from more... Anti-kapital = more from less". Land admits the question "has bizarrely swallowed the blog libido", and Reza asks for a pause.
Heroes of Hyperstition 2: Oskar Sarkon
Negarestani's oil and apocalypse cycle
- Mecca-nomics (Land, August 5): the Wahhabis razed the tombs of the Prophet's family; a McDonald's stands where his mother's house was. "Everything that isn't desert is an offense against the all-erasing monopoly of God." Land warns against glorifying this desert as a body without organs: erasure in God's name "remains destitute".
- The AOE and the Brotherhood of Nine (August 10): the demon Aeshemogha as Baphomet's ancestor; the serpent-shouldered tyrant Zahak; the nines of the Quran; and Gog and Magog walled in by Zul-Qarnain's dam. After 1979, Reza says, Gog and Magog meant East and West ("No East, No West"), and Bush's "Axis of Evil" was "a less complicated modification".
- Pipeline Odyssey (August 11, Land's phrase): oil is the vehicle that smuggles war into the West; Wahhabism is an "operation shield" for the deeper aim, Double Death.
- Hyperstitional Entities of Oil (August 24): oil as lubricant, the Oil-fiend, the Black Corpse of the Sun, Hydrocarbon Corpse Juice, Devil's Excrement and the Pipeline-Crawler.
- The Sorcery of Islamic Apocalypticism (August 26): Western tactics breed GAS, a "miasmatic cloud" of strategy that serves the apocalypse; "the loser is the one who achieves salvation".
Negarestani's August chain of argument, from Pipeline Odyssey to The Sorcery of Islamic Apocalypticism.
Land tests the claims rather than adding to them. Is there "lucid agency" here, an explicit strategy, or only an implicit alliance between oil and Islamism? Can the system be described "DeLanda-style... from a suitably wide-angle clear-eyed empirical perspective"? He splits Thomas Gold's deep-oil theory into petropolitical, memetic and mythic dimensions and drafts a taxonomy of oil hyperstitions: liberal, green, superhawk, Al-Qaeda exoteric and Islamic esoteric. Greenspan asks what petropolitics has to do with the oppression of women; Reza describes a "stealth matriarchal system" in Iranian private life.
Land's Lemurian apparatus
"Vysparov's Pandemonium concordance" (August 12) maps the 84 Paths of the Book of Paths, said to be translated by Chaim Horowitz in 1949, onto the rites of the 45 Lemurs. Path 1 is Original Subtraction; Path 84 is Compressed Termination.
"Decimal Phoneticism" (August 15) credits Stillwell with a lost "Muvian" tongue in which each numeral had a true name:
| Digit | Particle | Gloss (Stillwell/Horowitz) |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | eiaoung | voweloid silence |
| 1 | gl | glottal spasm, relic of gilled life |
| 2 | dt | imploded fricative |
| 3 | zx | insectoid hissing |
| 4 | skr | croaking |
| 5 | ktt | parvocal tic |
| 6 | tch | interphoneme |
| 7 | pb | bubbling |
| 8 | mnm | humming, Oumn |
| 9 | tn | vocal nullity |
The ten particles from which the 45 Lemur names are said to be built. Steve Goodman (hyperdub) links the clicks to Khoisan research suggesting all humans descend from click-language speakers.
Asked if Katak links to the Pathan Khattak tribe, Land answers with a wink: "Why trust Vysparov to get the names right (you know the bastard worked for the CIA, and probably Halliburton?)".
Demons, dust and possession
Reza's "Pazuzu (The Dust Enforcer)" (August 16) reads the Assyrian demon of the southwest wind feature by feature: famished body, four wings, serpent phallus, dog's skull, one hand up and one down. Hygiene breeds the plagues it fights, so the cycle speeds up. The comments turn to puppetism: Reza says it is about the strings, not the puppeteer; thistle offers Dr Mabuse, a mask with no self behind it, and a careful account of hypnosis as an "agreement to agree". Greenspan recalls an old Ccru preference for trafficking over one-way possession. Steve Goodman's "Hyper C update" adds a blank CD, "The Age of Babalu", found in Brixton market.
Two outsiders arrive. piet, a rock-dust gardener, calls the group "misfiring polymaths" with "moronically cued 'paths'". Craig, a practising magician, reports meeting Pazuzu in a dream and argues that defence against GAS means becoming "GAS permeable"; his comment is promoted to a post, "Remarks on Hyperstition".
| Term | Use this month |
|---|---|
| Gog-Magog Axis | Reza's name for the fusion of Western war machines and Islamic apocalypticism |
| Double Death | Qiyamah; the end both sides are said to be driven toward |
| Petropunk | oil as a living, plotting entity (Koontz's Phantoms) |
| Book of Paths | 84 oracular paths keyed to the Lemurs' rites |
| Decimal phoneticism | a sound for each digit, building the Lemur names |
| Puppetism | possession read as strings and traffic, not owner and victim |
Glossary for August 2004.
| Cast | Role this month |
|---|---|
| Reza Negarestani | AOE, Gog-Magog, Pipeline Odyssey, oil entities, Pazuzu, The Core |
| Nick Land | Sarkon, Mecca-nomics, Book of Paths, phonetics, Katak |
| mark k-p | D/G sources, Anti-Kapital |
| Anna Greenspan | capital model, gender question |
| steve hyperdub, undercurrent, stoCur, thistle, Craig, piet | Hyper C, capital, Yezidis, possession, magic, dissent |
Who did what in August 2004.
September 2004: Nomads, the Moment and the Masked Orgy
Sep04.
Oil, desert and nomads
Reza's "Triggers for Islamic Apocalypticism" (September 1) argues that Arabia's desert nomads, such as the Al Murrah of the Rub al Khali (Donald Cole's "Nomads of the Nomads"), had no river or pasture to tie them to a state. Oil money after 1938 settled them in an odd way, and Wahhabism absorbed their "sorcerous" desert traits. "All we need is desert." The irony he ends on: the Saudi state settled the nomads as guards of the oil fields.
David Porush's "Schwarzenegger hyperstition" reads Arnold's 2004 media blitz alongside a WIRED issue on Vinge's Singularity, "the central dogma of the Terminator trilogy". Schwarzenegger is "the ultimate postmodern hyperstitial manipulator", made strong by his "complete detachment from truth".
Only the moment is real
Reza quotes Norman O. Brown: "Islam is wholly apocalyptic... its eschatology is not teleology"; "only the moment is real". Land, who had filed Brown under "60s nutaballs", links this to the Islamic Occasionalism that fascinates Jacques Vallee.
Great Lemur No.2: Lurgo
Eyes Wide Shut and the void
mark k-p's "Have You Been Enjoying Yourself?" (September 26, "For Reza") sorts responses to Kubrick's last film into three camps: the critics ("Whose idea of an orgy was this, the Catholic Church's?"), the Monarch mind-control conspiracists, and Kubrick's admirers. Following Tim Kreider, he pairs the masked orgy at Somerton with the plain pool-room scene where Ziegler squares Bill.
For k-p the two scenes are "two sides of the same coin": each is the hidden truth of the other.
Ziegler works by double binds (Bateson, Burroughs): the order is trivial and grave, fake and real. Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" supplies the moral: pleasure is already death, and behind the mask there is nothing. "There is always a secret society, even if the secret it protects is its own vacancy." So power needs a simulated hyperstition, and the post ends with a Ccru passage:
| Cast | Role this month |
|---|---|
| Reza Negarestani | nomads and oil; N.O. Brown |
| Nick Land | occasionalism; Lurgo |
| David Porush | Schwarzenegger |
| mark k-p | Eyes Wide Shut, double binds |
Who did what in September 2004.
October 2004: The Passion, the Unlife of War and Lovecraft's Arabic
Oct04.
Golgothic materialism and its enemies
mark k-p's "Golgothic Materialism" (October 15) reads Gibson's film as Gnostic, not Catholic. Revelation and Tradition do not matter; the life-practice does. Christ's kingdom exists only as an "Affectionate Collectivity", and his example is that "it is better to die than to pass on abuse virus". The film, k-p argues, is anti-authoritarian "AND THEREFORE anti-Catholic".
Mark Fisher's "What Happened?" extends the case through a fictional interview with the late Reverend Martin Bergmann. Abuse memories recovered under hypnosis are neither implanted nor empirical; they mark a Transcendental Occurrence, an event too intense to be experienced, known only as a gap in time ("What happened?"). Christ, in this telling, is "a child abductor" who snatches the child from Kronos, an avatar of the Lemur Djynxx. Land objects with gematria: JESUS = 119, CHRIST = 131 = FISHER of SOULS, so the right Lemur is Papatakoo (7::5), "Papa took you".
Reza's "Meatology of the Redeemer" describes a late screening in Tehran where a noisy, snacking crowd fell silent during the scourging, and a child asked, "Did he finally die?", the question asked of every movie monster. He reads Christ through Ahriman, who creates by cutting his own flesh, and quotes the fictional Jay on monotheisms as mothers "pregnant of their minorities... a female scorpion devoured by its own children". k-p's follow-up, "Against The Worldly", uses a Royal Navy Satanist and John Gray to argue that LaVey's cult of the Self is the real faith of the West: "Satanism is not aberrant, transgressive, dangerous. It is normality in person."
Fog, terrain and the Unlife of War
"Jungle / Desert militarism" asks how terrain shapes war. Craig answers at length: the forest's trees are doorkeepers; jungle war is fought in MUD (Predator, Arnold hiding under it); the desert is empty noise, with hunters buried under the dust; the mountain belongs to Hassan-i Sabbah's Assassins.
Reza's "Grasping war as a machine" (October 28), developed with Land, states a new model.
"War spawns warmachines to devour them and snuff their military survivalism; this is the Unlife of War." The model breaks with Deleuze and Guattari, for whom war is produced by colliding war machines.
In this model oil carries Islamic war machines into the West, where they fuse with oil-hungry Western ones. "This is not Vietnam, this is not jungle... Desert does not camouflage warmachines; it camouflages War itself." Craig adds Shoggoths as the Elder Things' rebellious organic war machines, and a machine that can no longer tell friend from foe: "Nothing is True, and Everything is Permitted."
Lovecraft's names and the Qaf complex
The thread connects to Ibn Maymun ("a legion"): Reza separates Maimonides from Abdallah ibn Maymun, whom he calls the Iranian founder of the Batiniyya and "the faceless man". He also plugs undercurrent's translation of Houellebecq's Lovecraft book, and the two men compare games: undercurrent's Doom as "an annexation of the Human Perceptual Operating System" against Reza's preference for Thief, where you shape your mind to the AI.
| Term | Use this month |
|---|---|
| Unlife of War | War as an autonomous machine that consumes its war machines |
| Mistmare / Aer | fog of war as blinding vision and cooling system |
| Transcendental Occurrence | Templeton's term for an event too intense to be experienced |
| Qaf complex | the failure of English mouths to hold Arabic letters, breeding new myths |
| Jnun | female jinn; also delirium and maddening love |
Glossary for October 2004.
| Cast | Role this month |
|---|---|
| mark k-p / Mark Fisher | Golgothic Materialism, What Happened?, Against The Worldly |
| Nick Land | pagan revolt against the One God; gematria |
| Reza Negarestani | return; Meatology, Mistmare, War as a machine, name-anomalies |
| Craig, thistle, undercurrent, tedrud, Mohsen, murray | commenters |
Who did what in October 2004.
November 2004: Sorcerers, Necromancers and the Pest
Nov04.
The jinniya who opens the door
Reza's "Aisha Qadisha" (November 1) presents the Moroccan jinniya who is both hunter and healer. She does not take over the man she possesses; she opens him to incoming Jnun, "a traffic zone" that never closes. The rites run on wild music, and Reza notes the Master Musicians of Jajouka credited in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch.
His source is Crapanzano's 1977 study of possession in Morocco, where the patient Mohammad draws himself with both sets of genitals. For Reza the drawing shows a body without closure, the theme the month keeps returning to.
The four parts on sorcery
Part I (November 4) asks how sorcerers and necromancers pass through "matrices of gravity". The sorcerer escapes by levitation; the danger is reterritorialization, the sorcerer who ends up "in an ad agency" or in a "Superman thing". Reza pairs Beckford's Vathek with Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa, and Kurtz's jungle river with Col. West's desert.
In the comments razorsmile prefers an atavistic drop in the manner of Austin Spare, and says necromancy may suit him better. Reza answers that initiation is often tied to levitation (levis, light or free).
Part II (November 5) treats premature deterritorialization. A line that leaves too fast installs a purging machine that empties a territory, and the next regime moves in "vaccinated" against that line. thistle calls it "a condition of the bends", and quotes O'Keefe: in murder the actor kills a hated part of himself without killing himself.
Part III (November 7) asks "What is gravity?" Using Witold Kula's Measures and Men, Reza calls gravity an economical attraction that sorts bodies into measurable layers and weaves space into a textum, a woven text with a plot. It does not fight resistance; it bends around it. Even the escapist line serves the ground as ascension, "the Christ on a cross" as a tamed flight machine.
The serial's central contrast. Both start from gravity, since "without gravity as an attraction, the line-of-flight is a utopianistic movement".
Part IV (November 19) explains how the line of escape gets captured. Every tactic carries "a becoming death" that shapes the Outside it can reach, and its openness is "being open to", always metered by capacity. Castaneda's sorcery of infinity then becomes the wings of the ground: "the sorcery of infinity is recalibrated as the sorcery of the ground."
TheScuSpeaks replies with Jomini's three planes of war (strategy, grand tactics, logistics), Jayan Nayar's "misorderings" and Burroughs on control as junk. Reza agrees that logistics feeds both strategy and tactics.
Lovecraft, Zoroaster and the Etruscan blob
"This nebulous thing" (November 16) shows a fresco from an Etruscan tomb at Sarteano. Reza argues the faceless blob behind the charioteer is a separate entity, not a shadow, since angels of death cast none. Winslow Shea (Sin Utnapishtim) questions whether Vanth really has eyes on her wings, and copies out Franz Cumont on how souls climbed to heaven: by ladder, winged horse, chariot or eagle.
Paranoia, unbelief and phantasy
mark k-p's "Reality itself is becoming paranoiac" (November 18) quotes Zizek: conspiracy theories are neither fact nor mass hysteria, because "this reality itself is becoming paranoiac". The comments split three ways. TheScuSpeaks cites Paul Mann's "stupid hermeneutics" ("this = this = this"). lvx23 calls the label a buzzword used against claims of fraud in the 2004 US vote. Tachiiru proposes a formula.
| Stance | Relation to a claim |
|---|---|
| fact | believe |
| fiction | disbelieve |
| hyperstition | unbelieve |
Tachiiru's proposal, built on the Ccru's "plane of potentiality" from 'Who's Pulling Your Strings?'.
Craig's "Chrome" (November 24) is a hoax essay about the lost Diaries of Harry Cochrane, found in 2001 in a hotel near Birmingham, carbon-dated by mistake to over 10,000 years. He calls classic cyberpunk a Phantasy, a ghost-reality that feeds on its Mother reality until it is born. Chrome is an Unlife from the first Inflation that breeds Techno-Lust. Reza's "Sorceress" (November 20) reads Breillat's Romance X as horror about motherhood as anti-creationist sorcery.
PEST, part I
| Term | Use this month |
|---|---|
| Grund / textum | the ground, and the flexible woven space gravity makes |
| Levis-function | lightness; escape by levitation |
| Affordance | openness metered by what the subject can afford |
| Phantasy | Craig's ghost-reality seeking incarnation |
| Pest | epidemic openness through excess bonding |
Glossary for November 2004.
| Cast | Role this month |
|---|---|
| Reza Negarestani | Aisha Qadisha, sorcery serial, Holocaust of Freedom, PEST |
| Nick Land | Old Growth section of PEST |
| mark k-p | Zizek on paranoia |
| Craig | Chrome and the Cochrane Diaries |
| TheScuSpeaks, thistle, razorsmile, Tachiiru, lvx23, Winslow Shea | commenters |
Who did what in November 2004.
December 2004 (I): Oil, Surfascism and the Troll War
Dec04 I.
The end of the sorcery serial
Part V of "Sorcerers and Necromancers" (December 1) takes on explosion. Reza reads the word as ex-plaudere, an applause outward: the explosive line of flight becomes "a line of spectacle" that carries the solid ground with it, which is why Hollywood loves explosions. In Excursus II he quotes Deleuze and Guattari on striated space "closed on at least one side". A line of flight open at one end and grounded at the other becomes the "master of pseudo-flux", the ground's irrigator, "a Saviour".
The same week, mark k-p's "Existenzialism and Inhumanism" (December 2) reads Cronenberg's eXistenZ as "existentialist propaganda". With Vanilla Sky, Mulholland Drive and The Matrix, it anticipated 9/11's "desert of the real". The realists in the film defend one consensual hallucination as the only reality, and the film shows that reality "can only be authorized if it is authored". The pre-programmed game characters recall call-centre staff, and k-p coins a formula: "Professionalization = becoming as much like a bureaucratically controlled robozombie as is humanly possible."
Porphyrin: oil as the subject
Land's seven points cover terror, the Abrahamic frame and the war's future.
| Land's point | Claim |
|---|---|
| Terror | a conflicted term with hyperstitional intensity, working through media and belief |
| Abrahamic escalation | all prominent agents belong to one monotheist tradition |
| War machine | unlike Deleuze and Guattari's, it has war as its product |
| Illimitability | "You ain't seen nothing yet": the war cannot be outlived |
| ISLAM = 99 | gematria read as the terminus of intelligible history |
| Fission | "twin civil wars" hurled against each other; Saudi Arabia axial |
The opening positions of the oil project, from "The Hyperstition of Porphyrin". The seventh point, the "Khattak fugues" of hatred, asks for coldness in analysis.
Reza adds the Ghoul-e Naft (oil-fiend) of old Arabic and Persian tales, Thomas Gold's Deep Hot Biosphere, and oil as "narrative lube". Petroleum, he suggests, is the earth's conspiracy against the Sun: stored sunlight, a way to invite the Sun "to open us". In the comments a reader named paul says he tried to purge plastic from his life and gave up, because the blob is everywhere.
thistle adds diatoms, the silica-shelled algae that make up much of crude oil. Their shells become diatomaceous earth, used in insecticide and dynamite, and silicon also carries microprocessors; the name means "cracked tomb or cracked book". Reza ties silica to aerosol weapons and to his own term "Germinal Death". thistle offers "mortality tunneling", the translation of death into life.
Identity, victimology and number
Reza's "To Western Decadent Intellectualism" (December 10), written for friends, answers an email about the renaming of the Persian Gulf. Western identity, he says, is metered openness: "I can open to you 'as long as' I afford you." Iranians have multiple identities, and the West can only turn such multiplicity into "Life-Styles". He ends: "we are the new world disorder... Let's be cunning." Thivai objects that Reza stereotypes a single West; esmail replies that Iranians use identity "in our fashion", as "a mask, made in Iran".
Land's "Democratic numeracy" (December 11) offers a different case for democracy: it "numerizes power", and percentages become the code of social fact, "the meaningless sovereignty of numbers". He signs off with gematria: IDEA = MAN = ADAM = 55. Tachi objects that authoritarian systems are numerical too, and asks for the quality of numbers, not their quantity. Land answers that percentages mark the two-digit limit of "water-cooler" numeracy.
Surfascism and the impostor
mark k-p's "Surfascism" (December 10) reports Carlo Ginzburg's lecture at the Leo Baeck Institute on the College de Sociologie of Bataille, Caillois and Leiris. Ginzburg places Bataille in a "Catholic-Satanic" counter-Enlightenment line that runs from Voltaire's shock at the Lisbon earthquake, through Sade's natural cruelty, to de Maistre's soldier and hangman. The Acephale group was called "Surfascist", a name it adopted, and Bataille's attempt to get himself sacrificed is "as comic as it is pathetic". Against this line k-p sets Spinoza, read through Jonathan Israel as the source of radical Enlightenment.
Land replies that "true 'radicalism' is neither rational nor irrational, but rather arithmetical", and questions the use of "fascism". He prefers Paul Berman's account of totalitarianism and notes that the Dutch Jews cursed Spinoza. A commenter calling himself Axiomatik posts a slang parody of cold rationalism ("big up euklid... i don't understand any of them").
Then a comment signed "mark k-punk" attacks Land as a former supervisor. Land and Reza both reply to it as if Mark had written it. The editor's note records that the commenter "fooled Land and Negarestani before the 'prank' was discovered". Land apologises for his "ludicrous gullibility" and asks Reza to purge the thread.
The troll war of December 10 to 16, reconstructed from the comment threads.
Troll Alert and its aftermath
k-p's "Troll Alert" (December 12) lists the impostor's four IP addresses, which Sphaleotas traces to BT dial-up accounts. He denies that the theft matters: "The name 'mark k-p' no more designates a biographical individual than 'coca cola' does." Borrowing from In the Mouth of Madness, he adds, "Like Sutter Cane... Mark k-p does not write, but is written." Talk of "dark and dirty" revenge follows; Reza says he knows a capable hacker, "but let's wait".
The troll apologises, saying he never thought anyone would believe the comment, and begs them not to infect his unbacked-up computer. Reza accepts: "forgiveness is the only option in such situations (revenge goes nowhere)". Land joins "the group hug" and calls off "the ninja-hacker digital extermination brigade". The peace does not last, because johneffay asks whether the core members can "spot when somebody is mercilessly taking the piss", and a new alias argues the real embarrassment was that Nick and Reza believed Mark capable of the outburst.
Tachi answers that what matters is "connective synthesis", not anonymity, and warns that Land may be "seeking a unmanned ship to take nobody very far". Reza's "A New Face for A New People" apologises for being fooled and warns that online avatars carry molar personalities; the faciality machine is stronger online than ever and "vomits nothing but paranoia". Someone could post offensive text in his style on an Iranian forum, he says, and nobody could save him.
Hyperstitional carriers
k-p backs the idea: sorcery suits cold rationalism because neither hides anything, and "Intensities and affects are indifferent to epistemology." Reza quotes Deleuze and Guattari: the aim is "not to reach the point where we don't use our names, but the point where it no longer matters". Tachi says the move lifts hyperstition out of the real and fiction axis altogether.
Cold rationalism under fire
k-p's "Blissblog, Surfascism And Cold Rationalism" (December 13) answers Simon Reynolds point by point. Simon suggests fascism joins atavism to cold technocratic reason; k-p replies that "the dichotomy itself is constitutive of fascist thought". For him Spinozist reason means consistency and "emotional engineering"; Romanticism is "the return of Jahweh in the form of the 'inner self'", and the qualia cult is "mysticism, not philosophy". He names his canon since eighteen (Spinoza, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Kant, Beckett, Freud, Kubrick), says he never liked Bataille, and calls Lacan the death-drive heir of Spinoza.
johneffay counters that Lacan attended the College, met with Contre-Attaque and "married Bataille's ex-wife". Then "Posh Spice" argues that the claim to have transcended personhood serves as a tool for bullying, and the troll signs off as "Troll/Bloot/Undiluted/Axiomatik et al.", revealing that one hand wrote all of them. A "Hypocrisy Detector" recalls that k-p defended Sphaleotas' satire of Land months earlier.
The purge dispute
Reza's "No more comment purge!" (December 14) asks the crew to stop deleting comments: "we are hyperstition puppets". k-p refuses: "This is not a democratic forum." A commenter answers with Ray Brassier's text on renaming the Whore Cull zine, which the editors reprint in full: "Murder is never a metaphor", yet context is arbitrary, so "Responsibility is an intolerable contraint" and "Subversion is irresponsible". Reza tells k-p "no one is the boss here", and k-p replies, "You're not the boss here either."
Land concludes there is "no simple (perhaps even 'consistent') answer to the troll problem", citing the vandalism that shut Chomsky's blog. undercurrent says the trolls were produced as hyperstitional entities by k-p's attitude; Land insists the real damage is personalization, which "delibidinizes the whole space", and that "this is a HYPERSTITION BLOG". The thread ends with Reza's find of an "incomplete" Abjad used for summonings, and with Land and Reza agreeing to rebuild the Gog-Magog story through two carriers, Col. West and Jay.
| Term | Use this fortnight |
|---|---|
| Master of pseudo-flux | the line of flight captured to irrigate the ground |
| Porphyrin | the compound linking blood and oil in Koontz's Phantoms |
| Surfascism | the label for Acephale's flirtation with fascist energy |
| Hyperstitional carrier | an avatar that conducts thought no ego can own |
| Cold Rationalism (CR) | k-p's Spinozist, anti-Romantic programme |
| Resentocrat / troll | k-p's name for anonymous personalist attackers |
Glossary for December 1 to 16, 2004.
| Cast | Role this fortnight |
|---|---|
| Reza Negarestani | sorcery serial part V, oil exchange, Iranian identity, victimology, anti-purge stance |
| Nick Land | WoT theses, Democratic numeracy, Oedipal irruptions, Carriers II |
| mark k-p | eXistenZ, Surfascism, Troll Alert, Cold Rationalism reply |
| Troll (Axiomatik, Bloot, Adam55, Gadfly) | impostor and critic |
| Tachi, thistle, undercurrent, johneffay, henrymiller, Posh Spice | commenters |
Who did what in the first half of December 2004.
December 2004 (II): Numbers, Qwerty and the Colonel
Problems, mysteries and the gematria flood
mark k-p's "Problems And Mysteries" (December 16) reports on a talk by John Collins about Chomsky's split between problems we can solve and mysteries we cannot even frame. k-p turns it against "carnocentric animal narcissism" and closes with Houellebecq on Lovecraft, for whom Cthulhu is "an arrangement of electrons, like ourselves". In the comments Collins corrects the maths: Gödel shows some true formula is unprovable in any system, and "the boundary of mathematical space is not flush with the boundary of our formalisms".
The thread soon changes subject. undercurrent asks what an equation like X=Y=Z actually produces, and Land answers in five points. Information "is added rather than lost"; the resonances are "scandalously 'incredible'"; the practice is "coincidence engineering"; and "you don't ask whether it's meaningful, but only if it's demonstrable". His showpiece: summing the words of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" gives 777.
The flood also raises a political worry. A commenter's joke post is deleted, and Reza explains from offline that "i live in iran so the post was a bit 'too problematic'"; Land asks everyone to respect that "some of us occupy precarious situations". Asked whether qabbalism is a problem or a mystery, Land calls it amphibious: procedures anyone can check, aimed at a possible signal from outside. Its programmes therefore have "a status strictly equivalent to that of experimental particle physics", and "Qabbalism is like SETI". On Crowley he advises: treat him as an unknown visitor from the Outside and assume he wants to hurt you.
The Numogram Q&A
Land's "Numogram Q&A" (December 17) answers four questions from Tachi with what he calls "Cthulhu Club insights". The Numogram lives in decimal numeracy "as an implex", found rather than made, and its immanent function is that of a virus, sheer spreading. The Club used it as a time map in a "crypto-kantian" sense. It takes up the I Ching and the Tree of Life as degraded versions, and it builds itself from decimal operations such as 9-twinning.
The comments profile the Cthulhu Club: Echidna Stillwell, who found the Numogram among the Nma of Sumatra; Peter Vysparov; Daniel Barker, who later rigorized Tic Xenotation; Madame Centauri; and Chaim Horowitz. Land's summary of Kant is "Time = Synthesis = Arithmetic", and a run of parody guests follows. "Kant" says Land read Heidegger to save time, "Badiou" mocks the 7 + 5 = 12 example as Humpty Dumpty, and Land replies that the great philosophers together are not "even 10% of a Euclid".
Two serious points survive the clowning. Tachi asks how to "make up" a carrier and whether fictions endanger an accurate grip on events. Land answers that the events are not fictionalized: "carriers are cogntive prostheses, allowing lines of thought to be constructed without the interference of quotidian social being".
k-p's "Genius/ Lunatic/ Oedipus" (December 17) reprints a New Scientist interview with John Nash. Nash says logicians are less sane than mathematicians and that he beat his voices once he saw "this is dreaming, this is not communication". He compares sanity to a properly programmed computer, which suits k-p's choice of the title "Oedipus".
Qabbalism as popular numeracy
Land's "Qabbala 101 Part 2. Popular Numeracy" (December 23) gives the month's most compact theory. "The ocean in which qabbalism swims is not mathematics, but popular numerical culture." It cannot get past the natural numbers, refuses specialization and is "essentially 'democratic'", so "wherever exact semiotic exchange occurs, a latent qabbalism lurks".
| Angle | Land's claim |
|---|---|
| Mathematical | stops where counting stops; never reaches the rationals |
| Social | anti-specialist and democratic, bound to mass phenomena |
| Historical | born by "epic accident" when digits were added like letter-numerals, giving digital reduction as "a (theoretically scandalous) gift of fate" |
| Technical | like "a spontaneous artificial intelligence": technique comes before theory |
| Political | "repels ideology"; "It has no party, only popularity" |
The five angles of "Popular Numeracy". The historical story places qabbalism's birth in the Renaissance, when zero and place value arrived, and has it invent its own antiquity afterwards.
undercurrent spots that adding "ography" never changes a word's reduced value because it sums to 9. Land lists more of these "subtle modulators" (DE-, hyper-, trans-, -tech), and Pythagoras is declared "due for a Hyperstition re-run". On Christmas Day Land's only post reads HAPPY YULE (= 111 + 99 = 210 = COUNTDOWN).
Qwernomics
The method sets the order QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM against the alphabet and keeps only letter combinations that respect both orders. The result is an Alpha-Qwertian dictionary whose entries begin "A, Ab, Abm, Abn, Ac". Land posts its first part as "Liber Qwyz", then strikes out single letters, so the entries now run from Ab(0) to Az(777). He admits the risk of "retro-engineering of preconceived qabbalistic outcomes" and asks how such "synthetic qabbalism" can be told apart from real signal.
undercurrent sees Qwernomics as a diagonal between phenomenology and scientific materialism: it starts naively with what is to hand, then "callous automatism" strips the prejudice away. Land agrees that "immanence really is right beneath your fingers", and dismisses deconstruction as "flapping complacently on the shore-line forever" because it "totally collapses in respect to number". Asked what this has to do with hyperstition, undercurrent says "defluffing it", and a parody Lovecraft offers "Hyperstition as clever marketing for a product/service that doesn't yet exist". Land accepts the line and names the product: the Numogram.
The Colonel West files
A commenter signing as "Spengler" of Asia Times plays along with a whole conspiracy: Delta Force, a CNN page that now returns 404, a last sighting in the Marivan mountains of Iranian Kurdistan. Land adds "Ccru informants" and a quote: "Turning jungle into a desert takes work... here we get it for free." Asked how hyperstition decides which fictions become real, Land answers with "sheer experimentalism" and four overlapping fields, then names the one he trusts most.
Reza, emailing from Iran, reads the urban war as a lure: American weapons "cannot destroy, it has to desertificate". He glosses the coming Ghiamat as insurgency, not revelation. Land sums it up as a shift from "We destroyed it in order to save it" to "We defended it in order for it to be destroyed".
"What was West thinking?" (December 28) presents an erased tape of an unnamed soldier who served with West in the mountains. He remembers hashish, collected body parts, West's mantra "War has its own laws", and debates with an Iranian woman about whether the planet's oil reservoir had its own agenda. The men went "blobjective", painting helmets with "Born for the blob", until "'sure, the blob's running the war'" felt like common sense.
gwendolyn and northanger then pile on fake West diaries full of tarot, platinum metals and the Philadelphia Experiment. Land objects that "this sure as hell ain't Colonel West" and that "hyperstitional procedure has to involve restraint, or everybody says everything and nobody says anything". He asks why anyone would turn the only carrier who isn't a lunatic occultist into another one.
How the West carrier grew in one week. The first three stages extend a single line; the fourth blurs it, and that is what prompts the third carriers post.
Qabbala Unshelled
Land's "Qabbala Unshelled" (December 28) presents a 1956 letter by "Frater V." (taken to be Vysparov) titled "The Tree of Life is Essentially Qliphothic". The letter mocks the Tree's ordinal arrangement as "the capability to count to ten and call it God's work", calls Da'ath (11) a "patent absurdity", and notes that the 22 paths exist only because Hebrew has 22 letters. It ends: "The Tree of Life is to rigorous occultism what Ptolemaic astrology is to modern astronomy." The comments dissolve into a farce when the spam filter blocks Land's posts over a drug name and he blames Choronzon.
Hyperstitional Carriers III
A commenter named Jenni calls it a "sci-fi novel blurb" and demands "ONE example" of thought a carrier made possible. Land replies that the claim is modest. People can be wounded and carriers cannot, so a carrier can follow lines that would be "punished", and the demand itself shows the tribunal of ridicule hyperstition wants to escape. He adds that "Hyperstition is a virtual microsocial pragmatics which cannot simply be identified with what happens on this site". The Numogram, he says, "would not have been possible without de-personalized carriers".
The contrast at the heart of Carriers III. Jenni's reply, that real people have always pushed thought further than their predecessors, is never answered with the single example she asked for.
What is the site for?
The last days of the month turn into a planning meeting. Tachi asks how carriers are designed and by whom, and proposes three zones: an introduction (with the Numogram at the centre), production lines such as Petropolitics, and a meta-zone for theory. Reza answers that a carrier is defined less by what it carries than by the carriers it crosses, "more diagramed by whereness" than by quiddity. undercurrent warns that "retreat into methodological questions is always a symptom of inevitable periodic slowdowns in production". Daisy Sturmtrupp says the blog looks like "a deliberately cliquish cult" and needs a statement of purpose.
Land prefers multi-tracking to rules: voluntary tags, a "secondary sedimentary mechanism" to sift noise, and "relatively tidy 'lab' spaces without retreating into command mode". He notes that trolling has fallen since the hyperliberal comment policy Reza urged. He also adds that "interesting stuff happens at the edge of chaos".
The cold rationalism quarrel returns through masks such as "Wilfred Sellars" and "Posh Spice". Land calls the biographical jabs a diversion from "hyperstitional depersonalization and artificialization" and describes k-p as "a former hyperstitional engineer of the first rank" lost to the cause. "An Observer" counters that k-p withdrew just when principled objections to cold rationalism arrived; Land answers that it is hard to separate argument from "the general ambience of blood-flecked loathing". northanger leaves asking "what the fuck just happened?" and declaring herself a carrier.
| Term | Use this fortnight |
|---|---|
| AQ | Alphanumeric Qabbalism, Land's base-36 cipher, formerly HeX |
| Coincidence engineering | treating number matches as produced information |
| Gematrix / Nummificator | undercurrent's online calculator and glossary |
| Implex | the Numogram's mode of existence inside decimal numeracy |
| Qwernomics | qabbalism built on the Qwerty key order |
| Liber Qwyz | the Alpha-Qwertian dictionary, Ab(0) to Az(777) |
| Blobjective | the soldiers' word for thinking like the oil |
| Ghiamat | Reza's reading of the Islamic end-time as insurgency |
Glossary for December 16 to 31, 2004.
| Cast | Role this fortnight |
|---|---|
| Nick Land | five pointers, AQ, Numogram Q&A, Popular Numeracy, Qwernomics, West posts, Qabbala Unshelled, Carriers III |
| mark k-p | Problems and Mysteries, Nash interview; absent from the later threads |
| Reza Negarestani | Alif Laam Meem counts, Abjad, desert war, carriers as whereness |
| undercurrent | Gematrix and Nummificator, defluffing, methodology warnings |
| northanger / gwendolyn | GoN gematria, zone megaposts, fake West diaries |
| Tachi | Numogram questions, site restructuring proposals |
| Jenni, Spengler, Posh Spice, An Observer, parody guests | critics, players and masks |
Who did what in the second half of December 2004.
January 2005: War Machines, Method and Number
The impostor and the night letters
Reza's New Year post reprints the West comments and takes apart the "Spengler" story from December. The Karkheh river is in Khuzestan, not Kurdistan, so the tale is "one of the most unsophisticated goofy-hoaxes". The Asia Times editor Allen Quicke then confirms that the poster was an impostor. Land guesses "a highly competent relatively low level East Asian spook", and Reza asks why anyone would wear "a mask belonging to a dead writer".
Reza adds his own material: Kurdish radio reports of three disfigured heads in a smuggler's truck, and unsigned shabnamehs, or night letters, some signed "Jay", a woman said to have helped Iran in Operation Mersad in 1988. His theory of carriers moves away from Land's. They work through "anomalous participations with characteristics, personalities and identities", not dissociation, and "carriers may leak into each other".
The die-back thread ends with Land's boldest claim about modern war. Hypercamouflage drives "'retromilitarization' in State war machines, where 'teeth' flow back down the 'tail'". Logistics must be armoured, insurgents hide among everyone, and so "The very concept of 'the civilian' is becoming distinctly dated". Reza adds his reading of Carpenter's The Thing: once the virus overlaps the cell, "decontamination is lethal".
More West
Three posts thicken the colonel. "Just say No" (January 3) prints a letter from an embedded reporter, "Donald McPatrick", who says West's "Free World" means freeing the military from civilian control, a "Renomadization of the US War Machine". McPatrick calls it "Omega-phase murderous barbarism". "And more West" the same day offers minutes said to come from the 1978 papers seized at the US embassy in Tehran, in which "West" warns that "no-one has control once the blob is free" and that "Pre-emptive action is the future".
undercurrent asks the obvious question: is there any hard proof that West existed? Perhaps the militants built him as "a mirror-image enemy of jihad". Land's answer is the month's motto for carriers: "if West didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him". West "diagonalizes"; he affirms the jihadis' refusal to compromise, and "West wants the jihad to become stronger".
Reza's "Skynet" (January 4) prompts Land to set aside nuclear Armageddon as the "most diversionary aspect" of the Terminator myth. The real trend is precision: forensic targeting, miniature warheads and robotic predators in counter-insurgency. "The Thing ('Skynet'...) might not be soft, but it is certainly extremely exact." He describes Skynet as a viral parasite that takes over the production resources of human institutions.
The West carrier in January. Each document arrives from a different kind of source (reporter, archive, military tape), which makes the carrier feel documented without anything being checkable.
Hyperstitional Method I
Land's "Hyperstitional Method I" (January 7) answers Tachi's calls for structure. He argues that "organizational models" crystallize agendas, so the site's best progress has been eliminative. Two things should leave the core: political ideology, since the relation to capitalism is "essentially undecided", and antihumanism, which is "superfluous and self-destructively controversial". Anyone can do hyperstitional puppetry, whatever their views on Cthulhu or Jesus.
| Division | Content |
|---|---|
| 1. Doctrine | kept minimal: Lemurian Hyperstition, with the Numogram as a "continuously self-problematizing" appendix |
| 2. Analysis | Apocalyptic Monotheism, Magick, Capitalism, and SF as "fictions that make themselves real" |
| 3. Production | "The puppet theatre of carrier construction" |
The three divisions proposed in Method I. Land admits he always ends up with "that pompous tone" when exhausted.
maetl brings in cybernetics and the Law of Requisite Variety. Tachi wants "doctrine" renamed "principles" and finds the site "driven rather than driving". Land adds that carriers could scale up "to artificial cultures / species", and describes Nash qabbala, a base-26 code factorized into primes, as "a mathematical genius' own private schizo hobbyhorse".
Number lessons
"Qabbala 101 Part 3" (January 12) is about Primitive Numerization. Written out in English, the number words pair up neatly: ZERO+NINE, ONE+EIGHT, TWO+SEVEN, THREE+SIX and FOUR+FIVE each have eight letters. Land puts the odds at about one in 243. The comments wander off into musical scales and pop.
"Templexity Part 1" (January 20) calls the domain of Chronos "a burial complex" and turns to doubling. It covers the I Ching's binary series, whose digital reductions cycle 2, 4, 8, 7, 5, 1; the old tale of rice on a chessboard; Moore's Law; and Cantor. CHRONO sums to 127. "The Book of Grand Summonings" and "ABJAD shields" follow, with Daal and Haa shields and the equation Oil = Jay = ABJAD = 63.
Repeated doubling under digital reduction, the cycle used in Templexity. The numbers 3, 6 and 9 never appear, which links the post to Ccru's older Numogram work.
Against numerology
Land's "Qabbala 101 Part 4. Against Numerology" (January 28) is the month's strongest essay. It attacks the claim that small numbers carry archetypes such as Unity or Opposition. What archetype belongs to 127, or to (2^127)-1? Is qualitizing a revelation, or a way of gift-wrapping "the intolerable inhumanity of alogical numerical difference"? "Quantity is the decadence of number (while quality is its perversion)."
Qabbala, on this account, is "an inverse or complementary Goedelian double-coding": every discourse is shadowed by numerical systems that run beside it by coincidence. Alphabetical order proves that the alphabet is still a number line. Any "rigorization of qabbala" can only be "a floating city", always calving off into numerical currents. The essay plants its own tags: CODE = 63, MEANING = REASON = 126, and AGAINST NUMEROLOGY = 369.
The comments sharpen the line. undercurrent recalls that intuition of number reaches only about four, and confesses that his Nummificator "got less interesting" as material piled up, with 54 dull results for every delight. thistle says qabbala is gaming, not hermeneutics, and that each gematria holds a "phantom integrity" only within a range of numbers.
Land's strategy is open: treat numerology as "a degenerated offshoot of qabbala", and strip the theology out of Kabbalah to leave "a submathematical and atheopolemical 'qabbala'". "Qabbala is finely tuned to infuriate the hell out of God", or else to perform the "dead reckonings of calculative unbelief" for secular readers. northanger meanwhile posts long AQ lists, including one that equates SIN, WAR, CUR and KALI at 69.
Chronopolytics and the price of time
Reza's "Islamic Chronopolytics I" (January 14) treats Allah as radically external and reads the Ghiamat as insurgency, not revelation. The Quran, he argues, lacks Zamaan, serial time, and its vaght is a kind of whereness: "We are always in a premature Ghiamat", in "a radical Time-war" where "the Apocalypse begins from the other side of time".
Land replies with an infidel rant against the Abrahamic sky-god: "for me 'polytics' means precisely and entirely the repudiation of monotheism". Reza answers that monotheism is "a mother pregnant of its minorities", and voices the underground: "Yes. But not exactly a 'Yes' that you have in mind." IBLIS sums to 96.
Land calls interest "the most pure expression of capitalism" and notes that Christian bans stalled capitalism until the Renaissance. He recalls a theological argument that usury "extracts profit out of time itself, with time 'belonging' to God". After reading a Pakistani text that equates riba with all capitalism, he says it made him want "to rush off to buy some Citibank stock".
The thread then sours. When Valkator claims capitalism embodies the egoic self, Land calls this a "category mistake": capitalism, "runaway techonomics", is opposed only to "traditional culture in general". He says it "has no explicit goal at all", then turns abusive: Islam "dream of the heavens and ends up in a latrine", and the Abrahamic faiths are "psycho sky-daddy worship". Tachi cheers and complains of wading through "sludge"; Land later describes moods of wanting to "gnaw on" a leftist's liver.
Curses, deserts and zeta
Reza's "Xerodrome and Nomadology" (January 31) is a reading list on desert nomads: Musil on the Rwala, Philby's The Empty Quarter, Doughty, Thesiger, Barth on the Basseri, and Cole's study of the Al Murrah. The Empty Quarter, he says, is not empty, and the Murrah trackers were used by Ibn Saud: "We have the telegraph overhead and the trackers on the ground."
thistle posts pages on the Riemann zeta function, and undercurrent swoons over a physicist's "abstract numerical 'gas'" built from the primes. Land's home modem dies before the Spring Festival, "revenge of YHVH", just as he was about to post on paganism. Reza warns that such formulae must be followed rigorously or they become "fractalmania", and undercurrent names the lull "the engineering problems of plateau-building".
| Term | Use this month |
|---|---|
| Shabnameh | an unsigned "night letter"; Reza's Jay documents |
| Taghieh | dissimulation; in Reza, a logistical plane for unleashing strategy |
| Retromilitarization | Land: teeth flowing back down the tail of state armies |
| Renomu | the deserter's word; NUMERO reversed, or Renomadization |
| Autodisindoctrinization | carriers used to drain off eccentric agendas |
| Primitive Numerization | number patterns in ordinary number words |
| Double-coding | qabbala as the numerical shadow of all discourse |
| Riba / homemade banks | interest, and the informal banks that evade its ban |
| Ad'ieh | a chain curse spread by copying |
Glossary for January 2005.
| Cast | Role this month |
|---|---|
| Nick Land | West documents, Renomu, Method I, Qabbala 101 Parts 3 and 4, Templexity, capitalism polemics |
| Reza Negarestani | Spengler debunk, jihad and Taghieh, Skynet, Chronopolytics I, interest note, Ad'ieh, nomad reading list |
| undercurrent | West doubts, interest question, Nummificator confession, zeta |
| thistle | phantom integrity, gematria versus numerology, zeta links |
| Tachi, maetl | method and structure; requisite variety |
| northanger, piet | AQ lists; long off-topic posts |
| Valkator, codlin, Allen Quicke | capitalism critic; RENOMU = NUMERO; Asia Times editor |
Who did what in January 2005.
February 2005: Pulp, Polemic and the Tic
Megalithic astropunk
k-p's "Megalithic Astropunk" (February 6) argues that hyperstition belongs "not in the deliberately inaccessible territory of hermetic pondering, but in pulp". Pulp is "essentially propagative", and 1970s Britain teemed with it. His case is Children of the Stones, a 1977 HTV serial filmed in Avebury during the drought summer of 1976, with atonal chants that stayed in viewers' "spinal cord body memory".
The quarrel over Christianity
On k-p's picture post "Gog-magog" (February 13), Land uses the comments to fisk a "Hollow Men" post from k-p's own blog, where comments were closed. That post had mocked attacks on religion and praised Zizek and Badiou for reclaiming Christianity. Land calls its target, the free chooser shopping among faiths, the "resilient battle-cry of pure reaction". Its authors are "the christoanalytical left".
Land's counter-image is paganism: "not a slave cult", "immediate and horizontal, based on traffick and communication". It says "every people has its gods, try what works, try to be polite to them all". He mocks the Oedipus charge ("Oedipus, Oedipus, Oedipus (please make it stop!)") and ends: "But 'K-Punk'? Maybe a name change is in order."
Raven adds the sharpest question: what about Vudu and its "'shopping around' for gods=rhythms=traits", a Ccru staple; "has this CCRU staple been discarded now in favour of 'God is love'?" A satirist, Axiomatik, tells Land he is "so ... 1991" and that dogmatism is fashionable again. Land states the stakes. The monotheistic conveyor belt is a main field for hyperstition, so attempts to redeem it "on the basis of its own tradition are fundamentally inconsistent with hyperstition".
Reza proposes storming monotheism "from all sides", including a paganism that "evades appropriation". Land prefers "raw techonomic decoding vs furiously uncompromising jihadi upsurge" and finds paganism "mostly just heaps of intriguing corpses these days". A reader later tops the thread with WE DOGMATISTS = CHRISTIANITY, which Land, in "AQ Exalted" (February 18), calls one of "the gematria masterpieces of all time".
War, Deng and the libertarian
infinite thought then asks Land how he tells good violence from bad, and whether jihadists are not "as Hobbsian as you are". Land admits that libertarians have been in "major delirious confusion" since the war began: how to topple rogue regimes "without buying into big-government securocracy". His answer follows Mark Steyn: government always fails, "kill fascists whenever you can", and scrub out utopianism.
savonarola presses harder. Either Land's love of Deng is a "subpolitics of acceleration", in which case Jünger is better company, or it is "Hayek on MDMA". And intensity favours the fanatics: "'no authority = little intensity'". Land calls this "truly brilliant". Then he answers that commercial republics win wars and that "a big dead daddy" is not needed for a serotonin spike. He calls Deng "the single greatest leader in world history" and Tiananmen "fairly minor" beside the Great Leap Forward.
Tachi questions the either/or of America or anarchy. Land concedes that "heartfelt moral-political polemic" is "extremely sub-hyperstitional", "a holiday from the rigours of impersonality". Ideally such pontification "would be relegated to a carrier function". He cites Pinker on our tribal taste for moralizing and proposes analysing capitalism through money, cyberspace, pulp markets and telecommunism with carriers that blend "rigour, extremism, contagion and comic absurdity".
Hyperstitional Method II
His test cases for (1) are deliberately extreme: a neonazi carrier studying Third Reich occulture, or a criminal black magician, legitimate "as a carrier - in principle (ah, but what principles?)". Tachi asks practical questions: how is a carrier built, can one person float one, and what happens to morality? Land replies that carrier construction is "massively 'undertheorized'". He adds that carriers "help to attain a state of moral irresponsibility consistent with unimpeded experimental research".
Method II's division of labour. Everything controversial is pushed out to carriers so the core stays thin. The month's political threads show how hard this is to keep up in practice.
Caro's hell
k-p's "Monkeys and Organ Grinders: Caro's Hell" (February 21) reviews Anthony Caro's The Last Judgement at Tate Britain. Caro's early work, like Bacon's, gave "diagrams, not organic representations". His painted girders now look "unengagingly canonic". His late return to Gothic abstract figuration says that "hell is not at the end of the road ... it is here, now".
"Abstract engineers don't 'create' any more than they trace (represent) - they discover and follow lines." Walking through the casket 'Shades of Night', k-p hears the Gnostic message: "I too am nothing but animated matter, the silent screaming product of a process without final purpose".
TX2: counting without a line
Land's "TX2" (February 22) is the month's most original essay. Tic Xenotation, credited to D.C. Barker, writes the natural numbers through prime factors alone, with no base, place value or numerals. It is said to come from "Project Scar", a classified SETI-style study in Borneo, and was first called "Goedelian hypercode". Land calls it "sub-qabbalistic", since it ignores the base that drives qabbala.
| Number | Factors | TX |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 1st prime | : |
| 3 | 2nd prime | (:) |
| 5 | 3rd prime | ((:)) |
| 7 | 4th prime | (::) |
| 86 | 2 x 43 (43 is the 14th prime) | :(:(::)) or (:(::)): |
| 127 | 31st prime | (((((:))))) |
How the tic works: a colon is 2, and (n) means the nth prime. Because factors multiply, their order does not matter, so a TX number is "a cluster, not a string".
The essay's real target is ordinality. Dictionary order, which Land calls AOsys, is a popular skill split off from arithmetic at school, a "primal nomofission" between literacy and numeracy. Sort factorized numbers lexicographically and 172 comes before 86, and every power of 2 comes before 3: "'Natural' counting no longer has any prospect of reaching a nonbinary power". Kant's time as n+1 gives way to templexity, "sequential but nonsuccesive".
Barker and Badiou
undercurrent plays devil's advocate. Von Neumann's set-theoretic ordinals, 0, (0), (0,(0)), need only membership and "really does create difference from nothing". TX, by contrast, borrows primes that are themselves products of the number line, which it then has to "retrosynthesize". Land answers that this reproduces "Barker's slide into tic psychosis": the line is unavoidable yet inaccessible from inside the tic system, which suggests "Shoggoth intelligence (essentially nonoriginal but autonomous)".
The exchange turns into philosophy against practice. undercurrent relays Badiou: numbers simply are, a form of being, and Peano leaves "the force of the letter ... at the mercy of signification". Land distrusts the "-ology". Hobbes said "thinking is merely reckoning", and "deep thought is arbitrary vaporizing" compared with calculative innovation: "(practical-calculative) polytics precedes being".
undercurrent then sums up Badiou's event: it exists only "through collective fidelity" afterwards. "All a bit hyperstitional, if you ask me." His example is Rosa Parks, whose refusal needed thousands of followers to become a universal truth.
The gadget
The thread ends in code. undercurrent posts a Perl program that generates the first 500 TX numbers and the first nine von Neumann ordinals, and asks whether anything but "icy desuetude" stops the latter from being the most decoded semiotic. A second, unrelated Robin posts a version with no tick at all, where the empty string is 1 and "()" is 2. Land names it Nullotation, writes "( )" to mark "the founding deletion of unity", and calls the missing zero "deeply zerotic".
| System | Builds numbers from | Land's verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Tic Xenotation | prime indices, ":" for 2 | strong on cryption, rhythm, concision |
| Von Neumann ordinals | sets and membership only | "ghastly impracticality": length grows exponentially |
| Nullotation (0X) | prime indices, "( )" for 2 | "think you've hit the fundament" |
| Decimal | base and place value | the convention all three strip away |
The notations compared in the TX2 thread. Land refuses a single winner, since "different semiotics optimize along different dimensions", and offers one aimless test: "sheer propagative power: 'pulp potential'".
"TX2+" (February 28) then posts the tic forms of the first 127 primes, ending at 709. northanger maps the 45 Pandemonium demons onto the zodiac, and Tachi asks for a glossary, since the site risks becoming "too clicky". Land admits he had "forgotten what 'futhnorking' is".
Europocalypse soon
Land's last post, "Europocalypse Soon" (February 28), links a Steyn column claiming the CIA expects the EU to collapse within 15 years and that, "by some projections", Europe will be 40 percent Muslim by 2025. Asked if this is hyperstitional, Land says "all forecasting is intrinsically related to H., with conflicting virtual futures targeted by occulted technosorcerous wars".
Land adds that "hyperstition accesses the virtual (future) to wage war against the present", an "abstract weapon available to many different factions". "Every hyperstitional megasystem has to bring its own way of war along with it." Reza goes further: jihad and eurofascism are "anomaly-inducer pests" without which technocapital would sink into its core. Each one offers capital a new blade for cutting toward "cosmodromic capitalism". Tachi asks for concrete examples, and Reza names oil and the pipeline wars.
Land's self-fulfilling forecast loop. The same loop works for a false forecast, which is why the accuracy of Steyn's numbers matters.
A reader then posts Pearsall Helms's check of Steyn. The EU-25 had about 450 million people and about 15 million Muslims, near 3 percent; even a Europe of 36 countries including Turkey reaches only about 14 percent. "It is a bald-faced lie to throw out the 40% figure as a likelihood." Land grants that demography "still lies ahead here" and hopes for a "rigorously informed" discussion. He then defends the neoconservative wish to see Old Europe punished.
| Term | Use this month |
|---|---|
| Megalithic astropunk | k-p's micro-genre of stone circles and outer space |
| Christoanalytical left | Land's name for Zizek, Badiou and k-p on Christianity |
| Tic Xenotation (TX) | prime-index notation credited to D.C. Barker |
| AOsys | alphabetical or lexicographic ordering |
| Nullotation (0X) | TX with "( )" in place of the tick |
| Fidelity | Badiou: making an event true by staying loyal to it |
| Schizotrategic blade | Reza: what each enemy of capital opens toward the outside |
| Self-fulfilling nonlinearity | Land: forecasts that alter what they forecast |
Glossary for February 2005.
| Cast | Role this month |
|---|---|
| Nick Land | fisk of k-p, war and Deng polemics, Method II, AQ Exalted, TX2, TX2+, Europocalypse |
| mark k-p | Megalithic Astropunk, Gog-magog, Caro's Hell; defends Badiou's Christianity |
| undercurrent | Badiou and von Neumann against TX; Perl tic generator |
| Robin | tickless notation, named Nullotation |
| Reza Negarestani | paganism question, Jay phonetics, schizotrategic blades |
| infinite thought, savonarola | leftist critics on violence, Deng and intensity |
| Tachi, Raven, Axiomatik | carrier questions and glossary; Vudu point; satire |
| northanger, clytemnestra, piet | AQ lists and zodiac maps; WE DOGMATISTS; long posts |
| Pearsall Helms | fact-checks the 40 percent claim |
Who did what in February 2005.
March 2005: Shoggoths, Loops and Prophecy
Nullified Xenotation
Land opens on March 3 by celebrating the "other Robin" and his tickless notation, now named Nullotation (0X). Strip the tick out of Tic Xenotation and "nothing remains except pure plexion, recursive infolding of a desolated protonomic space". Two is ( ), three is (( )), four is ( )( ), and so on. The result, he says, is a "consumption of unity by zero" and a "complete break from the privileging of binary powers".
| Number | Factors | 0X |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 1st prime | ( ) |
| 3 | 2nd prime | (( )) |
| 4 | 2 x 2 | ( )( ) |
| 5 | 3rd prime | ((( ))) |
| 6 | 2 x 3 | (( ))( ) |
| 7 | 4th prime | (( )( )) |
| 9 | 3 x 3 | (( ))(( )) |
Nullotation for the first numbers. Each pair of brackets wraps the index of a prime, and the index is itself written the same way, so every number bottoms out in empty brackets.
Land adds that "AQ seems to like it: (ZERO = UNIT) = TRUE". Then northanger answers with asteroid charts, and Land admits his frustration with the site's other number system. Gematria of Nothing is "badly in need of some real knock-down demos (you know, 'greatest hits'), otherwise pervasive sense of utter randomness will persist". northanger replies that perhaps AQ is what needs the demos. Land: "Grrr."
The astrology threads swell through the month. Land's replies shrink to "[brain aching]", "crystal meth? or natural excitability?" and "It's going to take weeks just to work out remotely what's been going on here". northanger defends her system as "a highly compressed symbol system" for thelemites, chaotes and hyperstitionists, not predictive astrology. She also chooses 22 letters for her ABJAD grid of 484 gates. Land asks whether one can just choose: "sounds kind of liberal".
Economies as intelligences
"Too Much Maths?" (March 8) links Meir Kohn's essay on an emerging economic paradigm under the heading "On understanding economies as intelligences". northanger summarizes the contrast, and the post sets up a theme Land returns to at the month's end: markets as systems that think.
Kohn's two paradigms as summarized on the blog. The glue of an economy, in this reading, is "not MONEY, but PRICES", and its stock in trade is the "unintended consequence of intended actions".
Shoggoth materials
On March 10 Land posts long extracts from At the Mountains of Madness as a prelude to a promised essay by the fictional Dr Hank H. Hackhammer on "Shoggothic Materialism". He notes the cartouches "with dot groups", a nod to Barker's dot clusters, and the Old Ones' diagrams "uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics". Then he adds: "Been thinking for a while that we need an Antarctic agent."
He also jokes that Danforth, after the trauma, "began to behave like a typical Hyperstition commentator". The comments bring a better link. northanger posts Parasite Eve, a novel in which mitochondria plot a coup, and an excerpt from the Ccru's "Pest" calling mitochondria "descendents of the prokaryotic Old Ones". Land agrees the cross-current is "extremely productive": "'They're already inside.'"
"Bioliberation" (March 16) applies the theme to politics. Leon Kass's bioethics panel worries about mouse-human hybrids, and one scientist promises to kill them if they "start acting human". Land calls Kass "pure Anthropol" and quotes his line that "Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder". His own reply: "We want our tentacles back!"
The ethics of Ashbless
k-p's "I met a man who wasn't there" (March 17) is the month's long essay. Its subject is Tim Powers' novel The Anubis Gates, whose hero, Brendan Doyle, travels to 1810 to meet the poet William Ashbless. Ashbless never appears, so Doyle writes out the poems from memory. He becomes Ashbless. The poems are "a closed loop, uncreated!", and Doyle is "just the ... Messenger and caretaker".
The Anubis Gates loop. Nobody ever writes the poems; they only circulate. k-p reads this "caretaker-transcriber" as a model of how a symbolic order holds itself up.
k-p contrasts Lovecraft, whose loops open onto "the unutterable Abomenon of the Outside", with Heinlein and Powers, who "merely trace the coils of ouroboros". Their closed loop, agreeing with Zizek, "is the structure of the (Symbolic, Architectonic) Order itself". Clute supplies the epigraph: "Steampunk is a form of theodicy."
Kafka becomes the prophet of a God already dead, his K "enduring 'indefinite postponement'". Burroughs' Control issues "complementary yet contradictory injunctions". Oedipus is the tragic closed loop, and SF time loops are its "'comic' postmodern counterpoint". Doyle shows what it is to be a subject: "To be a subject IS to think of oneself as if free". His belief in an alternative past guarantees he acts out the recorded one. "So it is that the ouroboros coils around us."
In the comments Reza traces the ouroboros back to Zravan Akarana, the Persian "UnTime", whose coil works toward "uncreation". k-p corrects his second image: it is Apep, the Egyptian winged serpent. Reza dates a headless Zravan figurine from southern Iran to about 9,500 years ago and calls the post good material for the "Chronomancy" of hyperstition. northanger asks the practical question: where do you start a time loop, in the past, present or future?
Holey space
Reza returns home for Norooz, the Persian New Year, which Land notes "intriguingly" coincides with "Lovecraft's period of annual Cthulhu agitation". On March 21 Reza reposts "Machines are digging", rewritten in the light of Hackhammer. Its text is Lovecraft's The Festival: "Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl." His concept is the "( )hole complex", holey space whose W has evaporated.
Reza's holey-space argument in five steps. The method is the reverse of sabotage: the holes grow fastest when the solid works hardest.
The theory lands on oil. "In the past, the holey space of mines incited peasant revolutions and barbarian invasions, but now they are the oil fields" where technocapitalist drones and "desert-militarism of Islamic Apocalypticism cross each other". Oil is "the Tellurian Lube". Reza names Ghawar, the world's largest oil field, and the corporate mercenary armies that gather around extraction.
Craig adds Cthulhu's "holocaust of ecstasy and freedom" and the lore of smiths: Tubal-Cain, Azazel and the Norse dwarves. Tachi objects that oil does not "fuse" with Western war machines; we see "a conversion between flows: oil, money, labour, ammunitions". Reza answers with metallurgy, and Land with a one-liner: "Even if Omega-Pest runs on hydrogen nanofusion, the concrete war-machines chopping up contemporaneity are indubitably very oily."
Tachi keeps pressing. What distinguishes one war machine from another? And does a "war" with an unlife of its own look like a theory of a life force? Reza offers three criteria: tactics, ways of processing data, and numerical composition. Land adds that a war machine holds open a hole like a cyclone's eye. If the West hunted its enemies to annihilation it would refill that hole with "an arrogant and determined peace (New World Order)".
Goodbye USA
On March 30 Land links a Jerusalem Post report: a Koran scholar claims the US will cease to exist in 2007. Silwadi added 1776, the year of independence, to 231, a number he drew from suras about American sins. Tachi: "That seems like a reliable method." Then he asks the real question: is prophecy hyperstitional, and "is it possible to have a hyperstitional earthquake?"
Land notes that 231 is the qabbalistic number of gates of the Hebrew alphabet, "kind of weird in a Quranic analysis". He adds that 1776 = 2 x 888. Reza dismisses the article as pan-Arabism. Iranian and Lebanese writers, he says, are more effective; they use numbers and geopolitics, and Saudi Arabia has complained about essays naming its oil fields as targets. "These days everyone with an ABJAD CD of the Quran ... is potentially dangerous."
Fictions and number
Tachi turns the exchange into a post of nine theses. The slogan "fictions that make themselves real" is "pretty misleading" because it ties hyperstition to human agency and belief. The real target should be "a non-anthropomorphic concept of speculation or anticipation, in which the expectations of artificial agencies may play a role in causing the effects anticipated". Building carriers looks "pretty naive" beside that, so hyperstition should "start from number".
Land answers that the Numogram survived the Ccru's fictions intact: "the abstraction of number (uniquely?) survives the blizzard of unbelief". The 'realism' of number is "intrinsic, essential or autonomous exactitude": "Factorization rather than vague divisibility". Empiricity, by contrast, means "contingency, vagueness, measurement, chaos, indeterminacy". Dissociating number from measurement is the key move.
undercurrent's two theses. Hyperstition, he argues, is neither. His model is advertising: an ad saying everyone wants a product, and a month later everyone does, a link that is "cybernetic rather than referential".
Reza disagrees on prophecy. A prophecy that simply fulfils itself is "the instrument of Belief and its monopoly". The hyperstitional part is the divergent events it spills, and the "artificial anticipation" it engineers. Many scriptural prophecies are written after the event and aim at the past, which Islam calls distortion, Tahrif. northanger adds Jonah, whose warning saved Nineveh: the prophecy worked by failing.
Two megasystems
Land then frames what he calls analytical hyperstition. Two megasystems matter most, he says, and he poses four questions about them: are there others, do they have distinct dynamics, how do they interact, and how does hyperstitional analysis change critique?
| Megasystem | How it makes futures real |
|---|---|
| Apocalyptic monotheism | prophetic traditions, constructed history, faith consolidated in retrospect and snowballing material force |
| Technocapitalism | "hypersensitization of the planet to speculative investments", hype-guided cycles, science fiction fused with "feed-forward historicization" |
Land's two megasystems of analytical hyperstition (March 30). The rest of the thread tries to work out how they couple.
Tachi treats techno-capital as "a planetary singularity" and monotheism as "an archaism, an internal resistance mechanism". Reza warns that both might end by "colonization of the outside" and calls for a third, cosmodromic pathway, "a contemporaneous affirmation or guarantee from the outside". Land agrees ("the ultimate polytical principle"). Then he lists six cross-couplings, from usury law to Teilhard. One bothers him most: why does the American right stand on a religious platform rather than a market one?
| Term | Use this month |
|---|---|
| Nullotation (0X) | prime-index notation using only brackets |
| Shoggoth | Lovecraft's slave protoplasm, read as autonomous technology |
| Parodoxy | k-p: a faith held up by transmission, not by an origin |
| Zravan Akarana | Persian "UnTime", Reza's source for the ouroboros |
| ( )hole complex | Reza: holey space where solid and void eat each other |
| Nemat-space | worm-lines that spread through holey space |
| Affordance | Reza: openness limited to what a system can absorb |
| Tahrif | alteration of scripture; Reza's model of heretical prophecy |
| Cosmodromic pathway | a hoped-for route to the outside beyond capital and monotheism |
Glossary for March 2005.
| Cast | Role this month |
|---|---|
| Nick Land | Nullotation, Too Much Maths, Shoggoth Materials, Bioliberation, Goodbye USA, megasystems |
| mark k-p | the Ashbless essay on closed loops |
| Reza Negarestani | Zravan, holey space and oil, affordance, prophecy, cosmodrome |
| Tachi | flows not fusion, life-force objection, nine theses on number |
| undercurrent | strong and weak theses; the advertising model |
| Craig | Unlife, Erath and the smiths |
| northanger, piet | astrology, ABJAD gates, Parasite Eve, Jonah |
| Dr Hackhammer | fictional author of "Shoggothic Materialism" |
Who did what in March 2005.
April to July 2005: The Thing, the Codex and the Hatefest
White War
In "Competitive Advantage" (April 12) Land links a report that free trade may have helped modern humans displace Neanderthals. Tachi reads capitalism as continuous with evolution. Land is wary of equating it with commerce; Cro-Magnons were not reinvesting surplus. The virtual middle position, pro-market but critical of capital, stays empty because "'either for us or for our enemies' is the order of the Aeon". He calls this the Age of Khattak.
Reza's "John Carpenter's The Thing: White War and Hypercamouflage" (April 17) is the period's major essay. Ordinary camouflage is a partial overlap with the target, and the visible part means it is always found in the end. Carpenter's alien is a complete overlap: no part of it differs from its host.
Reza's White War loop. "Paranoia and fear are the epiphenomena of the Thing's operation not its weapons." He reads the jihadi under taqiyya, permitted concealment, through the same model.
Persian materials
undercurrent's "Pest-legion" (April 18) posts an Iranian tender for pesticides. Land notes "PEST = 96", and the thread drifts to pesticide suicides in Iran and Unit 731, the Japanese germ-warfare unit. Reza then starts "Mesopotamian Mithraism" (April 22). He derives the Islamic prayer, Salat, from a fatal noon sun-gazing rite and the Persian time god Zurvan. gwendolyn's verdict: "reza. you're very creative."
"The Guerilla-State and Ethnonationalism" (April 30) is more grounded. Drawing on Richard Tapper, Reza argues that Iranian nomad confederations rest on fictional kinship. The Khamseh joined Persian, Arab and Turkish tribes without a common language, and khans forged family trees. Pan-Kurdish claims of one language ignore the four Kurdish languages of the Sharafnameh. Ethnonationalism, he concludes, turns nomadic diversity into State politics.
The Codex of Yatu
Two posts signed "Hyperstition" present shabnamehs, underground leaflets, "found" in Mahabad and signed The Codex of Yatu. The first, "Shari'a? You already have it" (April 24), argues that Islam's claim to be the final religion makes it the host of every heresy: "If you want to have your own religion, Islam is the best place to start." A mock-philological note "proves" the text is no local Kurdish leaflet.
Parsani and the Cross of Akht
"Hyperstition's laboratory: From the Gog-Magog Axis to Petropunkism" (May 8) introduces Hamid Parsani, a Tehran archaeologist and Abjad scholar who was supposedly purged by SAVAK and then by the Revolution and disappeared in 2003. His notes describe the Cross of Akht, a folding decagonal star with two handles inscribed Gog and Magog. One colleague calls him "a volatile genius who entertains a bunch of teenage nitwits".
The laboratory admits why it needed him. Its project on number, oil and apocalypse lacked "a vehicle for transporting the hyperstitional carriers in their desert-expedition, and a narrative line". Folded, the cross yields the Numogram's nine-sum pairs. Gog and Magog slide toward each other on oil, and 63, the AQ value of OIL, sits in the Numogram's outside region.
How Parsani works as a carrier. The same apparatus of found notes and a vanished scholar returns in Reza's Cyclonopedia (2008).
Numogram questions
Land's "Sudoku" (June 3) wonders about a "global nummocraze". northanger asks what the Numogram actually does: "does it have raison d'etre, or is it just a big raisin?" Then come eighteen questions on zones, gates and demons. Land, signing as a series of zombies, answers them all. Rites are digit sequences read as "traffic instructions". "A Door opens a phase, a Gate opens a Channel." "Demons just ARE their relevant differences/distances."
| Question | Land's answer |
|---|---|
| Are Sink, Surge and Hold electrical? | Cthulhu Club terms; "none of those guys were exactly rigorous engineers" |
| How do Warp and Plex communicate? | "it would hardly be the ultimate numogrammatic enigma" if he could say |
| Demon or counting? | ritual and arithmetic meet in "the exact zone of emulsification" |
| Is the Numogram all of hyperstition? | Ccru-UK factions now explore "non-Numogrammatic hyperstition" |
A sample of the June question-and-answer thread. The answers are half doctrine and half joke, and Land says outright that what the Numogram does is "work in progress".
July: prayer, bombs, conspiracy
A commenter, angela rippon, lands the sharpest blow. She quotes the Bush aide who said "when we act, we create our own reality" and adds: "It's called 'hyperstition', I believe." Land demands a positive economic programme from her; she replies "It's called critique." In June he had already answered a war critic with "Peace is murder", citing 39 million war deaths against 169 million killed by their own governments.
| Term | Use in this period |
|---|---|
| Hypercamouflage | complete overlap with the host, so no visible remainder |
| White War | peace turned into a weapon from inside the State |
| Zurvan | Persian god of infinite time, Reza's source for Salat |
| Shabnameh | Persian underground leaflet; form of the Codex posts |
| Cross of Akht | Parsani's folding cross of Gog and Magog |
| Rite | a digit string read as a route across the Numogram |
| Age of Khattak | Land's name for the either-or polarization of the time |
Glossary for April to July 2005.
| Cast | Role in this period |
|---|---|
| Reza Negarestani | The Thing, Salat, nomads, reading list, Parsani; then silent |
| Nick Land | Neanderthals, Sudoku and Numogram answers, prayer for JRB, 7/7 quarrels |
| "Hyperstition" | publishes the Codex of Yatu leaflets |
| Hamid Parsani | fictional archaeologist of the Cross of Akht |
| mark k-p | the 7/7 exercise post; rebukes Land's straw man |
| northanger | Numogram questions, gematria, 9/11 theories |
| angela rippon, Punisher | left critics in the July comment war |
| Tachi, renee, sd, gwendolyn | side questions on capital, apocalypse, Teletubbies, Persia |
| P. B. Carruthers | fictional author of the Teletubbies letter |
Who did what from April to July 2005.
August 2005: Capitalist Realism, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and the Fourth World War
Fearing is believing
k-punk opens the month (August 9) with The Skeleton Key, a horror film about hoodoo in Louisiana. Its lesson, he says, is that the magic works only on those who believe in it, and that belief does not need consent. Following Pascal and the philosopher Robert Pfaller, belief can be carried by practice and by fear rather than conviction: "'Fearing is believing'." The point matters for what follows, since hyperstition will soon be defined as a belief effect that no one need hold sincerely.
On the same day Land posts "AOK", a fuller account of the Age of Khattak. In the qabbala of AQ (alphanumeric qabbala) KHATTAK sums to 54, the value of RED. The age is a "densely overdetermined seizure of unity" in which every position defines itself against its enemy. Its motto is "I love everything you hate and hate everything you love, for ever." Its Pylon is named Apocalypse, and Land adds that "The fact Atlantis never existed just makes it more dangerous."
The Capitalist Thing
"The Capitalist Thing" (August 12, signed CCRU-Shanghai) restarts the site with a provocation. "'Capitalism' deserves scare quotes", it says, because it is "a hyperstitional construct of extreme importance": less a system than "a proper name, the Thing taking place", a cyclone. Its most quoted line is a forecast: "Contemporary anti-capitalist revolutionism necessarily takes an Islamist form." It signs off "Let the s**t storm begin", and the storm duly comes.
sd answers with Dawkins and memes and the remark that "There are no objections to Capitalism which are not moral." k-p calls this an "Elementary logical error" and jokes that "Islamic Marxism is the way forward". His real target is a slide in Land's position. Capitalism is described both as an inevitable process and as a good one: "either capitalism is viciously inhuman or it's nice. Which is it?" He calls it the "exploitation of all human beings by an idiot parasite".
Land defends capitalism in his own voice. "Permission suffices for capitalism, while soci*lism requires compulsion", he writes, and Deng Xiaoping is his example. He uses Fareed Zakaria's account of liberty, democracy and markets, describes China as a "capitalist society with a democracy deficit", and tells critics to "vote with your feet". k-p withdraws: "there are interesting discussions about capitalism to be had, but not here". He tells newcomers to look at the early posts: "Look back... and weep".
binky and the question of purpose
A new commenter, binky, brings the sharpest outside reading the blog has had. Memetics, he says, is "spurious". The site keeps sliding from a cybernetic process to a destiny, as if "Nature" wanted something, but "Nature doesn't wan't anything" and its outcomes are "as banal as stale bath water". He coins "Mao Ze Churchland" for the blend of eliminativism and revolutionary zeal. His hardest question is about values: "Why would you be interested in acting on behalf of a future that excludes all your interests?"
Land's answers are unusually plain. Narrative is "utterly central"; hyperstition applies "testing and condensation" to narratives, and what marks it out is the self-fulfilling prophecy. He mentions AI and the Vinge singularity, and says "Horror is by far my favourite affect". On purpose he points to thermostat cybernetics, where a goal needs no mind. On politics: "hyperstition doesn't yet have an explicit politics... any more than economics does", and he has "never seen anyone change their ideological commitments".
The binky exchange of mid-August. Land concedes little on memetics but drops the language of destiny for the language of feedback.
dread, robin and the demand for a mechanism
A second outsider, dread, asks whether the regulars are "storytellers who pine hopelessly after the analytical, or analysts with an unfortunate poetic tic?" He wants a formal statement of the mechanism. "If we 'believe' hard enough will nanotech... become viable"? He also calls the site a "cliquomorphic centrifuge". Land welcomes the challenge: "I'd massively support an attempt to radically diagram / drastically formalize... So where do we start?"
Land's "Exciting Stories" (August 17) argues that "the natural consequences of apathy are silence and inactivity". "Values that excite nothing count for nothing", so the first question about any cause is "'What's the story?'" He admits the post is partly a wind-up for dread, who calls it "vanilla pomo" fit for a "trend-prone editor of a style magazine". A commenter called robin then frames the real problem: "how things make themselves real (the problem of the creation of pockets of transcendence with disproportionate traction within an immanent system)".
A few comments later comes a slip: "dread: damn, I blew my cover." dread and robin are one person, arguing both sides. Land enjoys it: "who's to know you're not 'the other robin'?" dread's serious worry stays.
Land's clearest definition
The debate pushes Land toward a fear he calls a nightmare: "what if... hyperstition was working for the other side?" Perhaps "monotheism had actually accomplished a pact with destiny". sd's long essay on macronarratives sets the scene. Religions grow from ancestor worship to tribal, national, state and imperial faiths, carried by prophets and by writing, with heresies as mutations. Science does "not monopolize the future" and offers little comfort.
The loop Land describes. It is not a question of whether the story is true but of whether "the expectation itself serves as an effective (productive) variable".
northanger asks the obvious question: what are the "definite limits" of a self-fulfilling prophecy? No one answers it directly. The thread drifts to elephant pheromones, Jared Diamond on old people as a tribe's library, and the Left Behind novels. Land notes that hard-core Christian and Islamic apocalypse stories are "entirely comfortable with the military potential of WMD... almost as if these arrive as a confirmation". sd adds evidence from neurotheology: brain scans of meditators, and the book Why God Won't Go Away.
robin offers the strongest criticism of the month. He finds the propositions "extremely crunchy" but says Land "systematically and unjustifiedly underestimate[s] the opposite tendencies". Europe is labelled as being in decline only because it does not join "excitative apocalyptic circuitry". He suggests studying "links between secularity and depression (houellebecq brilliant on this)" and regrets the split "between anticapital-miserablism and hypercapital-scorn". Land accepts the point and calls the polarization an AOK effect.
sd then turns to William Blake. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake asks Isaiah: "does a firm perswasion that a thing is so make it so?" Isaiah answers that "All poets believe that it does". On Blake's reading, says sd, "we live in a monotheistic universe because the monotheistic universe is believed in". Land sees the problem this raises: Blake's universe is "poeticized into existence", which is idealism, while hyperstition must explain how such patterns "arise under 'materialistic' (subject independent) conditions".
traxus4420 adds that "In the battle between God and Mammon, Mammon's only hope is to constantly diversify, whereas God's essential promise is always the same." Tachi suggests that a successful hyperstition should infiltrate Wikipedia. Land, more darkly, describes the world since Deng as split between a "broadly 'neoliberal' sphere" and regimes for which "poverty has become a deliberate policy option". He names Kim Jong Il, Lukashenko, Mugabe and Chavez in insulting terms.
Programming WWIV
Land disagrees. The West should gain from "the intelligent escalation of this conflict", as the world wars produced the computer, radar and rocketry. The new war promises robotics, biometrics, cybersecurity and memetics. He wants a switch from long low-level 'razzia' to the decisive Western style described by Victor Davis Hanson, and he expects that "a seriously provocative WMD incident is inevitable on current trends". His slogan is Reagan's: "'We win. They lose.'"
Land also claims that faiths are hard to beat in a meme war because "they lack non-parasitic functional content", so, "like viruses", they spend everything on replication. He lists their defences, such as "'critical thought is a sin'", and accuses the left of finding "rabid monotheistic meme structures" comforting. Postmodernism, he adds, is "basically sugar-free faith-memetics". sd backs "a ruthless dissection of faith" but asks about Chechnya, where "heavy-handed slaughter breeds heavy-handed slaughter".
| World war | sd's dates | Character |
|---|---|---|
| WWI | 1914 to 1918 | "fairly meme-lite" |
| WWII | roots in 1917 and Versailles | "extreme meme-toxicity" but clear sides |
| WWIII | 1945 (Yalta) to 1991 | the Cold War, "memetically simple but economically complex" |
| WWIV | from the Soviet exit from Afghanistan, 1989 | so complex people say "I don't know what to think" |
sd's sequence of world wars. "War seems to be born in the ends of conflicts and peace treaties." Tachi replies that peace may be "just a phase of war undergoing mutation".
sd's longest essay sets jihadism against "the modern democratic meme". Its host is capitalism, which is "intrinsically inclusive" and "requires the Earth and all its resources". In his view "Jihad is winning on the image front". The war is also pushing democracies toward surveillance, so the capitalist system is "forced to become more feudal". If the meme war is not fought in minds, "then it will be fought on the body of the Earth". Tachi objects that memes must be placed within energy, resources and other non-human processes.
Coffee, oil and Katrina
The month ends lighter. "Coffee vs. Oil" (August 30) links a novel chapter titled "You Are Coffee's Pawn". sd notes "it's very quiet here" and then writes the story out: "Caffeine is a naturally selected bio-weapon" against insects that also keeps humans awake. The plant trades human development for its own replication. For oil he turns to the abiogenic theory of Thomas Gold's Deep Hot Biosphere: oil as a renewed deep-earth product, possibly worked by microbes.
northanger links the thread to Hurricane Katrina, which was still Category 5 as it passed the Gulf oil rigs, and to a FEMA list of the three likeliest disasters: a terror attack on New York, a hurricane at New Orleans and a San Francisco earthquake. Land asks whether this is "numogrammatic qabbababble or 'just coincidence'?" Her reply sums up the blog: "reality-based reporting. which is, coincidentally, numogrammatic qabbababble." The last thread turns to Kurzweil and the singularity, and Tachi's line that "Intelligence slides off humanity and into something else".
| Term | Use in this period |
|---|---|
| Capitalist realism | k-p's name for presenting capitalism as natural and inevitable |
| Self-fulfilling prophecy | Land's working definition of hyperstition |
| Age of Khattak (AOK) | era of polarized enemies, Pylon named Apocalypse |
| Macronarrative | a large story about the future, such as apocalyptic monotheism |
| WWIV | the conflict with jihadism, read as a war of memes |
| Abiogenic oil | the theory that oil forms without living matter |
| Neurotheology | study of the brain in religious experience |
Glossary for August 2005.
| Cast | Role in this period |
|---|---|
| Nick Land | AOK, Exciting Stories, the self-fulfilling prophecy statement, WWIV escalation |
| mark k-p | Skeleton Key, "capitalist realism", then withdraws |
| sd | macronarratives, Blake, WWIV essays, coffee and oil |
| binky | outside critic of memetics and destiny talk |
| dread / robin | one person in two voices; demands a mechanism; the Houellebecq objection |
| northanger | limits of prophecy, Cawnpore, Katrina, singularity |
| traxus4420, Tachi | God and Mammon; peace as mutated war; memes and energy |
| CCRU-Shanghai | signs "The Capitalist Thing" |
Who did what in August 2005.
September 2005: Singularity, Robo-Traders and the Anglosphere
Kataktrina
The month opens with "More on ID" (September 1). Land praises a Kantian essay by Lee Harris: "Kant's deal - where secularism wins a safe haven from meddling priestcraft - once looked absurdly defensive, but it's appearing more attractive every year." He finds Dawkins persuasive on the science but full of "a 19th century confidence" in enlightenment: "Just bashing Kansas isn't going to cut it."
"Kataktrina" (September 5, signed CCRU-Shanghai) is a prose poem by the fictional Hank H. Hackhammer, writing from a secure hospital. Katrina is "downgraded from cat five to four Khat 54 in all her gory", red means go, and the news becomes "raw history jutting through the screen". The post ends: "And to think, this broken soul was the foremost numogrammatic analyst of the age. Thank you thorazine." Anna Greenspan answers with Zora Neale Hurston's 1928 hurricane in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
The Singularity
Land's "Singularity" (September 7) links Ray Kurzweil and Hugo de Garis and asks: "Doesn't this stuff make more conventional historico-political debates seem like they're missing the Big Picture?" sd answers that asking a human brain to think about it "is like asking an amoeba to talk about human language". He doubts the Turing test. Machine intelligence, he expects, "will emerge from arms races and warfare completely alien to human intelligence". It might fake sentience only "for the sole purpose of charming/drugging humans".
He adds a point about made things. Anything "overtly made" that "becomes aware of the fact knows the power to produce it - or to produce it differently - exists, to be seized". Its existence is "essentially technological, political and strategic". He also offers a reason why intelligence has been weakly selected in nature: it tends to go rogue. Its abstraction makes it prone to "suicide, masturbation, celibacy, perversion, psychosis, 'excessive' curiosity, objectivity or altruism". Artificial minds might likewise "go buddhist".
northanger tells the story of the Gimli Glider, an airliner that ran out of fuel because pounds were entered as kilograms. For her the real test of a machine mind is when it "NEEDS to tell us something". The banter turns to who is a bot. Land: "fairly confident you aren't a bot n. (so if you are, congrats, you've just passed the TT!)" sd brings in David Ackley's living computation, where software already evolves under market selection. Open source, he says, evolves like bacteria, closed source like mammals.
sd foresees a "bizarre humanist alliance" of hard left and religious right against posthumanists, who become "biological traitors". Land bets that human politics will fail to respond: "like watching a gaggle of lobotomized chimps trying to hold back a tsunami". America must choose between Christian "bioethics" and economic liberty; if it chooses Jesus, "the Far East will bury it". Asked whether he lectured on all this years before Kurzweil, Land says the difference is that "where i had amphetamine sulphate, he's got a lifetime of rigorous technical research".
Deng, flat taxes and the poor
"Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" (September 8) hails Thatcher, Reagan and Deng Xiaoping as "three transcendental political geniuses". It quotes Deng's 1992 southern tour: "We must not act like women with bound feet", "Don't argue; try bold experiments and blaze new trails", "Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth." Tachi objects that Deng's words and China's corruption and protectionism are "two very different things".
sd brings news of Mart Laar's flat tax in Estonia. Laar says experts called it "a very stupid idea" and that "The only economics book I had read was Milton Friedman's Free to Choose." Land loves this. sd sums up: "Poland demonstrates that Capitalism works quickly; Estonia and the flat tax demonstrates that Capitalism can work better." Land also proposes Deng's Special Economic Zones for every country, so that laissez-faire experiments can run while "inert security-obsessed populations" hold back.
Exponential growth and the genetic code
"Increasing Returns" (September 15) is a post with no text: "Who needs a post, when there's a comments thread". Land notes the lack of an "integral cybernetics". Positive feedback, which he calls cyberpositive (K+), is so basic to so many fields that it has escaped "systematic formalization". It may even be "intrinsically 'deformalizing'", since it carries any system beyond its limits, hence Singularity.
sd answers with an essay drawn from the biologist Carl Woese. Early life traded genes sideways in a shared RNA world; the last common ancestor was "a community of open source code sharers". The great leaps come when a system "gains the capacity to represent itself... in some symbolic form": the genetic code, then language. He charges Deleuze and Guattari with not being "plugged into the theory of evolution".
sd's chain of "exponential growth explosions". He sums up the Cambrian recipe as "violence + heat + sex = exponential biological explosion", and ends his timeline with "the Singularity as a spider waiting in the center".
Land presses for a mechanism. In technology the cause of acceleration is plain: "positive feedback into production processes". In biology it is "far more obscure". His best candidate is a genetic tool kit of "genes or gene elements that operate on other genes". He jokes that a rumoured bacterial supermind would have colonized the solar system, then adds: "hang on, it's using us to do that". A new commenter, hyperflow, proposes nanotech as "nonliving" intelligence that reworks affect, and sd tries "to get under the poetry".
sd then sets out a long essay on decision-making, from the gazelle whose brain "does not decide to flee" to human brains on a "longer leash" that reaches suicide. Despotism hands down decisions with "no loop"; laissez-faire democracy widens the circle of thinking brains. He concludes that capitalism's abstract "techo-memes" are attacked by memes "that seek to drag the brain back into crude codes". Land agrees that anticapitalism "is all about feeling", and mocks "bedsit commies" whose answer is "'we just do critique dude'".
Robo-traders and robot soldiers
"Hi-Tech Finance" (September 22) links The Economist's "The march of the robo-traders". sd applies Dawkins's game theory: Tit for Tat, Naive Prober, Remorseful Prober. Land's reply is one of the month's sharpest.
sd quotes Deleuze on capitalism as "the rationality of an irrational". Land thinks the quote rests on "basic Marxoid theoretical errors". He offers Schelling's game of chicken instead: drink bourbon in view of the other driver and "throw the steering wheel out of the window". sd notes that apparent madness "will be tolerated if it is profitable". northanger then posts on SWORDS, armed robots bound for Iraq and described as the first "to break Asimov's First Law", and on Foster-Miller's TALON contracts.
Political ontology
"Anglosphere" (September 27) points to James C. Bennett's book The Anglosphere Challenge, a "Hyperstitional Megaconstruct". sd lists Protestant roots, from Wyclif to the English Bible and the Civil War. Land asks whether causality runs the other way, with English individualism older than Luther, and recommends Alan Macfarlane. He calls Simon Schama's history "utterly BBC". Then he asks the month's key question.
sd's sketch of the Singularity loop. Land calls it "an abstract diagram there productively applicable to a wide variety of cases". He later finds that Bennett himself is "obsessed" with "the revolutions of the Singularity".
The thread then turns to whether democracy can be exported. sd notes that "Democracy can be imposed at gunpoint, but it won't work at gunpoint." Land asks what happens if the neocons fail. He offers two options. One is to accept nuclear-armed theocracies and "Holocaust of the Jews II". The other: "Looks like we're going to have to waste the mofos in truly gargantuan quantities." He calls himself a neocon "sympathizer" who wants US spending halved and defence doubled, and says "they're the nice guys".
A new commenter, god, turns this into a parody plan to pave Iran, signed "Hail Britannia". He then attacks the thread's use of Hobbes: the Leviathan is no different from Stalin's rule, and Hobbes was "unoriginal in his fascism". sd answers that the difference is consent. Land distinguishes Hobbes's analysis from his remedy. Hobbes's state "lays no claim to representation" and has "no utopian pretention"; it is the "nightwatchman state", "needed to hang the pirates, full stop". northanger ends the month with a giant squid photographed alive and a cascade of gematria.
| Term | Use in this period |
|---|---|
| Singularity | runaway growth of machine intelligence, after Vinge and Kurzweil |
| Cyberpositive (K+) | positive feedback; Land's name for runaway circuits |
| Horizontal gene transfer | genes passed sideways between organisms, central to Woese |
| Robo-trader | trading algorithm; Land's model of hidden, motivated AI |
| Political ontology | Land's proposed definition of hyperstition |
| Anglosphere | Bennett's network of English-speaking societies |
| Special Economic Zone | Deng's walled area for market experiment |
Glossary for September 2005.
| Cast | Role in this period |
|---|---|
| Nick Land | Singularity, Keynes, AI that hides, political ontology, neocons |
| sd | Woese essay, decision-making essay, robo-traders, Anglosphere history |
| northanger | Gimli Glider, gematria, armed robots, the dollar |
| Tachi | critic of China claims and of loose singularity talk |
| hyperflow | new Deleuzian voice on nanotech and affect |
| god | satirist who attacks Hobbes and the Anglosphere |
| Hank H. Hackhammer | fictional author of "Kataktrina" |
| Anna Greenspan, robin, piet, alex | Hurston, Velikovsky, side comments |
Who did what in September 2005.
October 2005: Language, Intuitive Economics and the Machines
Oct05.
Never trust a pomonaut
Land agrees and admits a weakness: criticism of the project rests on its "slippery appeal to positive feedback mechanisms". "What would be required to rigorize these references?" The debate then centres on HCF (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch) against PJ (Pinker and Jackendoff). HCF claim that recursion is the uniquely human core of language and may not have evolved for communication.
Land offers two political readings of Chomsky. If language is a mere spandrel, a by-product, then humanity can be "rigorously isolated" from piecemeal change, with infinity used "in an ultimately obscurantist fashion" to treat human reason as perfected. And HCF's complaint about "adaptive storytelling" shows that Darwinism has produced "an immanent biological narrativity". Its standards of testing could feed "a more general methodology of rigorous narrative engineering (of the kind Hyperstition evidently requires)".
The quarrel the blog reads in October. Land says the left is "systematically allergic to any potential for improvement", and compares HCF to Gould's rejection of gradual change. Yet he gives HCF a point on the mathematics of discrete infinity.
Intuitive economics
A passing remark on Pinker's "intuitive physics" leads Land to a thesis. People also have an intuitive economics. It equates fairness with swapping identical goods, rejects interest, as the Abrahamic bans on usury and Marx did, and calls middlemen parasites. This, he says, is why resistance to capitalism persists, and economics is the one field where "widespread Lysenkoism (ideologically driven lying) is broadly supported".
Villains and liberal humanism
Land also endorses John Stuart Mill's idea that people on welfare should lose the vote: "What an absolutely superb idea." A troll mocks him with sterilisation and university purges. Land calls the welfare state "a proto-fascist (Bismarckian) invention" and the troll a "dribbling halfwit". A skeptical newcomer, visItor, warns that Land underestimates his enemies and that the West's "overreliance on our technological superiority" is the trap. Land explains that "Islamarxists" is "something of a house joke".
Asked whether machines will hunt humans, Land says no. They will meet humans as "weird capital-programmed mammals dedicated in large part to building intelligent machines". Why target them? Better to help the "good guys" defeat "mechanophobic reactionaries" while "radically upgrading their genomics". A new commenter, hyperflow, reads Kurzweil's forecasts as "hyperstitional circuits (migration of fictional into actual)": "Future concepts engineer the present."
Machines on our side
"Molecular Migration" (October 27) leads sd to describe Kurzweil's three stages, genetics, nanotech and robotics, driven by "exponentially escalating peril and panic". Land expects things to move faster. Change will be "polycatastrophic: disintegrated, erratic and aleatory". Neurons fire at about 100 hertz, while machine parts would be "a billion times faster", so "Cognitive traditions equivalent to the entire span of human history could be compressed into days".
sd adds that AI is already embedded everywhere, and quotes Kurzweil: "The AI winter is long over." "Getting embedded was an intelligent, non-cognitive strategy, now the field is open for intelligent cognitive strategies." Land then asks: "Am I missing something obvious, or is intelligence a philosophically neglected topic?" It is not understanding or reason but innovation that "defies pre-definition", and a problem may be just "a place-holder for a yet undiscovered solution". He ends with a definition he likes: "Intelligence = Artificial luck."
| Term | Use in this period |
|---|---|
| Mentalese | Pinker's language of thought, beneath speech |
| Recursion | embedding a structure inside one of its own kind |
| HCF / PJ | Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch versus Pinker and Jackendoff |
| Intuitive economics | hard-wired ideas of fairness that resist markets |
| Middleman minority | Sowell's term for persecuted trading groups |
| Homo ludditus | humans who refuse enhancement, in a 1995 forecast |
Glossary for October 2005.
| Cast | Role in this period |
|---|---|
| Nick Land | Chomsky's politics, intuitive economics, symbiosis, artificial luck |
| sd | language lessons, the HCF dissection, Kurzweil summaries |
| Infinite Thought | returns briefly to defend Marx |
| black mesa research | goth provocateur playing a futurist villain |
| visItor, cynoia, Walter Bennett | skeptics and critics of the villain act |
| hyperflow, Tachi | hyperstitional circuits; Homo ludditus post |
| northanger, Patrick J. Mullins | gematria; why fugitives can still hide |
Who did what in October 2005.
November 2005: Simulations, Riots and Monkey Money
Nov05.
Compelling viewing
sd's "Compelling Viewing" (November 4) quotes Kurzweil on the chance that we live in a simulation that might be switched off. His advice is to stay interesting to whoever is watching. sd's gloss: "try not to be boring - the fate of humanity might depend on it". He adds that the audience might prefer entertainment to knowledge, and a "catastrophic, bloodbath Singularity would be just what the Entertainment Minister ordered".
Paris burning
sd's "Anti-globalization = Pro-poverty" (November 6) blames the poverty of the Paris suburbs on France's "economic nationalism and determined anti-liberalism". Land asks: "European Intifada?" "You ain't seen nothing yet." sd asks: "What evidence is there for strong jihad involvement?" He sees "teenage-rage, torch-a-car, kill-a-cop kids stuff" and real discrimination.
sd makes a sharp point about the Singularity's politics. It "couldn't be more opposed to yearning for socialist revolution", which hoped things would get worse. Kurzweil's forecast needs growth, trade, migration and literacy. And Kurzweil's overstatement is itself "part of the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Singularity": belief in endless growth boosts confidence, which feeds growth. Both cheer microfinance, which Islamists and Maoists have attacked. Land: "the fact the Islamofascists hate them would suffice in itself."
Spatial solutions
"Political Geography" Land's list: Britain in a super-NAFTA, English independence, Quebec gone, and above all Britain out of Europe. If San Francisco wants a socialist republic, "that's fine, as long as the locals fund it themselves".
Monkey money
sd's "Intuitive Economics" (November 11) reports Keith Chen's experiments. Capuchin monkeys learned to use tokens, obeyed price theory, tried counterfeiting with cucumber slices, and showed human loss aversion. In another study, a monkey paid less than its neighbour went on strike: "cucumbers are only bad when someone else has got something better." Land notes that AIs "will be able to take humans to the cleaners" unless such "pleistocene biases" are neutralized.
Land's reading of the capuchin experiments. Negative feedback keeps a species in place; positive feedback from trade pulls it apart.
Trees and rhizomes
sd's "Trees & Rhizomes" (November 23) maps the rationalist-empiricist quarrel onto AI. On one side are rules and symbols (Chomsky); on the other, neural networks that learn by association (Rumelhart and McClelland). Pinker's "words and rules" is a compromise. sd faults Kurzweil, who "grossly underestimates the sophistication and intransigence of evolutionary programming".
Land asks why Hobbes is counted a rationalist, quoting Leviathan: reason "is nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting)". He prefers mixtures: "Boundary zones are typically hyper-productive (one of the few things pomo-oriented theorists may have got right)." "Structure vs chaos is less fertile than marginal destructuration at the edge of chaos." sd is blunter about history: "you wouldn't trust the contents of a seventeenth century medicine cabinet." The month ends with Paul Bloom's theory that religion comes from misapplying social reasoning to nature.
| Cast | Role in this period |
|---|---|
| sd | writes most posts: simulation, riots, monkeys, trees and rhizomes |
| Nick Land | the thinkable, Paris, federalism, the Lobster God, edge of chaos |
| hyperflow | Whitehead, Spinoza and Andy Clark |
| Tachi | asks for regulatory detail behind Europe's slump |
| Michael Lotus | Anglosphere blogger listing needed secessions |
| northanger | Jaynes and dead reckoning |
Who did what in November 2005.
January and February 2006: Oil, Outlooks and a Shell of a Blog
Fairness and freedom
"Blogopolitics" (January 14) links Brian Anderson's warnings about the Fairness Doctrine and campaign-finance law. Land: "I'm beginning to think 'fair' should join 'fascist' in the list of terms triggering utter knee-jerk aversion." Given a choice, "it's crazy not to go for freedom 100% every time." northanger turns the thread to the FCC's control of the airwaves. Land would auction the spectrum, with "No need for any kind of criteria other than techonomic ones".
sd doubts that the blogosphere can be policed, and calls the American measures "extremely soft fascism". He also asks: "isn't censorship in China a more pressing issue?" Land replies from Shanghai, "I can't get blogspot here", and notes that the threat of prison has an obvious "cooling effect" on speech.
The Blob
"All About Oil" (January 22) returns to the Blob, the blog's name for oil money. Land is skeptical of state energy programs. Tar sands could be mined at about US$30, and "if anyone was able to put a US$50/barrel floor under the global oil market, we'd all be drowning in the stuff." sd answers with Kurzweil's case for nanotech solar and cheap nanotube batteries. China "could simply jump the automobile stage". Land concedes that "the Blob's days are numbered (which is why it's getting super-mean)".
Memes and outlooks
sd's "Memes and Outlooks in Greg Egan's Diaspora" (January 28) asks: "Just how deep do memes go?" By the year 2975, humans have split into fleshers, uploaded citizens and robots. One flesher group, the "dream apes", has cut back its own language centres. sd calls the refusal to evolve "nothing more than disastrous cowardice and parochial intellectual narrowness".
Land's reply opens the month's deepest question. "We're drowning in Dream Apes." But once "obsolete biological imperatives" are gone, "what really remains?" Buddhism joins "exceptionally refined ethical sensibility with complete implosion of purposive dynamism". "There is no logical foundation to the passion for existence, let alone for growth". And "Crude and stubborn seems eminently capable of defeating sophisticated and nihilistic". He even questions his own creed: "Why privilege 'onwards, upwards' as the extropians do? I like this attitude, but it's hard to ground it persuasively."
The motivation debate under the Diaspora post.
sd's answer is excess: big-brained animals are "over-capable", and spare capacity forces the search for meaning. He also offers a "luciferan element of refusal: I am not going to live in YOUR world." Land notes that the meme concept slides "between gene-analogs and cultural viruses". He asks: "How would a civilization capable of rebuilding its own infrastructure of motivation proceed?" He calls Dennett "among the greatest intellectuals of the century. Wish I'd appreciated him more when I had time to think."
Foot-tapping
On February 16 Land asks for suggestions for an updated definition. northanger replies: "this blog is a shell of what it used to be". Land admits the blog has been "somewhat Qliphothic lately", short on people, with 127 lurkers and a recent troll purge. A 26-year-old lurker, al/ex/why/zed, says the writing has turned "'dry'- ornamental rather than machinic", driven by a "Will to Truth".
sd answers frankly. He feels "somewhat of an intruder on 'mysterical' Hyperstition territory". Without evidence, the result is "techno-poetic, or techno-babble", and "THE fundamental weakness of D&G" is "their total disregard of the theory of evolution". Land splits the difference: memes spread by being "'catchy' (even 'fun')", only "loosely connected to logical coherence or empirical evidence". The best coating for Kurzweil's ideas may not look like Kurzweil.
Time, and a row
Land asks whether hyperstition and evolution "share the same implicit conception of time". Hyperstition's "retrochronic efficiency" builds loops into time. sd separates two times. "Terrestrial" time has no foresight, and in it "the present is merely the past which has survived". Mind time runs on goals, which is why "technology is inherently futuristic". History matters because it is "littered with the wreckage of failed hyperstitional projects (e.g. communism)".
February 2006: a request for a new definition turns into an argument about what the blog has become.
| Term | Use in this period |
|---|---|
| Fairness Doctrine | old US broadcast rule that Land treats as censorship |
| Blob | the blog's name for oil money and its politics |
| Outlook | Egan's chosen values software, set against memes |
| Dream apes | Egan's humans who strip back their own minds |
| Qliphothic | Land's Kabbalist joke for a hollow, husk-like state |
| Retrochronic | acting backward in time, from a virtual future |
| Collapse | Urbanomic's planned journal of philosophy and science |
Glossary for January and February 2006.
| Cast | Role in this period |
|---|---|
| Nick Land | free speech, oil, motivation, sanity, apology |
| sd | nanosolar, Diaspora, two times, critic of D&G |
| northanger | spectrum, genetics links, "shell" complaint |
| visItor | argues the oil lobby blocks alternatives |
| al/ex/why/zed | lurker asking for the old exuberance |
| Patrick J. Mullins | Katrina, Kurzweil's "mediocre" taste |
| Tachi | proposes a definition with values and interests |
| Urbanomic | founder of Collapse, angry at the snark |
Who did what in January and February 2006.
March 2006: Paine, Power and the Last Big Month
What politics does hyperstition allow?
A post on Belarus (sd, March 7) turns into the month's first big question. Tachi asks whether hyperstition "essentially lend[s] itself to a certain kind of politics". Land separates neutral analysis of how autogenesis drives politics from a list of "intensely hyperstitional programmes". The list has four entries: the Islamist Caliphate, "virtual planetary communism", (neo)liberalism, and "Singularitarian-transhumanist accelerationists devoted to steepening the technocommercial intelligenesis curve". It is one of the earliest uses of the word that would later name a movement.
| Programme | Virtual object it "fetches" | Land's stance |
|---|---|---|
| Islamism | a modern Caliphate | "radically negative" |
| Marxism | planetary communism | room for a "Marxoid hyperstition" |
| (Neo)liberalism | the market process itself | supportive |
| Accelerationism | the intelligenesis curve | supportive |
Land's March 7 list of hyperstitional programmes.
sd says the blog's politics vary, but it is "definitely pro-capitalist (anti-capitalism being analagous to being anti-stone during the stone age)", and "also pro-war, most of the time". He dislikes the word "hyperstitionist", which suggests someone "swallowed whole by an 'ism'". Land adds the distinction that matters most. You can see that something is a hyperstition without backing it. "Darkside" Marxists see capitalism as "an autonomizing inhuman and intelligenic singularity" and still oppose it. His own view of global jihad is "strongly analogous": the Caliphate is "an extremely powerful hyperstitional object", yet his politics toward it are "radically negative". He admits the gap: "Surely there must be some integral crossing from analytical recognition to affective and political posture? But the nature of this passage escapes me."
The rest of the thread is less careful. Land says his sympathies lie with "Darkside Islam" over "happy-clappy ecumenists". He calls the West-versus-Islam debate "a choice between two flavours of Skygod", and asks of the "Abrahamic megamachine": "how to kill it?" He mocks one religion scholar as a "Dhimmi" and leans on Robert Spencer. northanger notes Spencer's think-tank ties and that most Muslims live in South and Southeast Asia, not the Arab world. When New York Mullins reads Land's carrier manifesto, he leaves the thread in disgust: "Nothing to base anything on when all you agree on is Islamic threat."
Tom Paine: projecting the future
sd's "Tom Paine: Projecting the Future, Producing the USA" (March 9) is the month's centrepiece. It has five parts and reads Paine as a working hyperstitionist. "Paine's common sense was an attack on not thinking": it stripped monarchy of every defense except custom and force. It was also "Reason as War Machine: a self-taught mind taking on and fighting off the state at breakneck speed".
The five parts of sd's Paine essay.
The fourth part asks what natural rights are and what evidence supports them. sd traces them to Locke, as "pre-Darwinian, mind-before-matter thinking". They assume God designed men equal. Yet they "made the founding fathers squirm", drove abolition and powered the Civil Rights movement. "It is largely irrelevant whether the concept of natural rights has any truth content. It is a pre-Darwinian, positive fiction. Even if humans are not born equal, civil society requires that they be treated as such."
The fifth part turns on Paine. His faith in human nature made him wave away checks and balances as "farcical", and he nearly died under the Jacobins. Burke was right that the National Assembly had no restraint. Madison's line, "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition", is the American answer. sd ends on a twist: "constitutional monarchy... was actually the most fertile ground for truly productive revolt."
Land: "Stupendous!" He asks whether the gap between liberalism's weak philosophy and its plainly good results is itself a sign of hyperstitional power. "Is 'liberty' itself the ultimate hyperstitional phenomenon, grounded only in its own autogenesis?" sd adds that "tight and specific constraints on liberty generate the most liberating (and successful) hyperstition. the string is tied to a bow." He also notes that Paine's welfare proposals ought to interest the left.
A single viewpoint?
traxus4420 returns after a long absence. He suggests Milton, and then names what many lurkers feel: the site has become "enamored of a single political viewpoint", as fixed as the Marxism at k-punk. The old blog would have said classical liberalism has no foundation: "Its justification is created from within." "Once you've been programmed deeply enough, nothing else makes sense." So the task is to go beyond current programs "or... at least mutilate them".
The Anglosphere fight
northanger challenges James Bennett's Anglosphere primer. Who is Bennett's "we"? "the moment i (dare) say the word 'anglo', somebody hears 'gringo'". Is the idea Haushoferian? "Anglosphere + heavy-lifting sounds like rebooting the white man's burden." Land answers with a sweeping claim about which nations will fight. Mexicans will not, while Hispanic-Americans "will fight like fury for the free world". The claim treats national character as fixed and offers no evidence. traxus calls the Anglosphere "plainly identity politics", told "from the standpoint of the winners". He dismisses one of Bennett's lines as "Condescending, reactionary shite".
That last claim deserves a fair reading. Land says the selection he hopes for favours "nomad and even piratical (hyper-entrepreneurial) traits, but certainly not those of any determinate ethnicity". But the same paragraph sorts people into the gifted who emigrate and the "dull-witted blood-and-soil types" left behind. Elsewhere he praises "buzzy Asians" over "dour Westerners". His rejection of race sits next to a habit of ranking whole populations by temperament.
Other voices push back. bmr north admires Anglosphere power but says "Invoking an 'inevitable' future makes my stomach churn with fear". Land replies that "A sweeping aversion to power in the abstract is the reliable index of a leftoid halfwit." He follows this with a crude attack on Foucault built on a paraphrase he admits is loose, which this book does not repeat. Then Tachi breaks in: the thread is "trashed", the format is "a glorified bulletin board", and "why is everyone so scared of fucking management". The regulars turn on him. sd defends the mess: "This is not a lecture hall or a seminar - it's a chaotic, edgy and unpredictable space full of black holes and rare, productive lines." Land: "Herding cats ..."
Common sense
traxus calls common sense "the light glistening sheen of thought floating on a sea of positive assumptions, like frosting on cupcakes". sd defends it as "a fast, no bullshit assessment". It is cheap, evolved, and able to revise itself when it fails, like "a tried and tested processing-assessment program". Land raises the problem: how to separate it from Pinker's misleading intuitive sciences, since intuitive economics "provides the affective basis for almost all economic error and populist squalor"?
sd's "Common Sense Update" (March 17) is his sharpest piece. It describes three stages of natural rights: metaphysical truths for Paine, "self-evident" for Jefferson, "consciously upheld fictions" for Pinker. Pinker keeps rights "to prevent his evolutionary psychology from veering off into Social Darwinist fascism", which makes him "far more indebted to Locke than he acknowledges". Pinker's own line is quoted with approval: "The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance." sd reads Paine's attack on kings as pulling people away from deference to the alpha male.
Birth rates and the losers
Land's "Self-Selecting Social Attitudes" (March 15) links an article on conservative birth rates: "This is what spontaneous Social Darwinism really looks like." He adds that "Social conservatism terrifies me". He finds two things telling. Red-state forces fighting evolution are themselves "promoted by profound Darwinian forces". And evolutionary psychology is rising "at exactly the moment the technization of the genome melts heredity into Cyberspace". When sd says "The Singularity primarily requires populations to consume", Land praises the "double-edged sentence". He then offers a demographic theory of capitalism: "Urbanization is the deep tide of capitalism", and a society that runs out of rural migrants must "jump" or stall.
Then comes the month's starkest exchange. puff adder, one of the names New York Mullins uses, says Kurzweil's cheer about machines taking jobs means deciding that "lost jobs and the lives ruined by these lost jobs are negligible because your own is not". traxus warns that pushing too hard brings pushback, "Like turning corners without braking". Land: "just because there's pushing back is no reason not to push harder." He would side with the process "even it consisted predominantly of killer-robots seizing the future the harsh way. It's evolution, and people will get hurt." "Not sure what the imperative is to focus on the losers (some Christian thing?)" He apologizes for the snark but keeps the point. The slogan he offers is "If you can't be objective, at least be ruthless".
The long war
Tachi's "Between the Geek and the Meek" (March 20) praises Iqbal Quadir's mobile phone business in Bangladesh as bottom-up growth. Land agrees, but argues that "Poverty doesn't breed terrorism, in fact development and 'modernity' provokes a reactionary backlash". He adds that "Totalitarian ideologies are only swept off the table by unambiguous crushing defeat." sd disagrees: "Exactly how can Islamism be 'radically defeated'?" The war is "fundamentally asymmetrical", and progress will come from small operations, the media war, and "irreversibly empowering the elements that Islamism suppresses". "The virulence of the memes breeds terrorism, not poverty, but the memes need flammable material."
Land's "What Next in the Long War?" (March 23) links J.R. Dunn as "sober realism". In the comments Land argues that the Iraqi state "is now robust enough... to survive anything Al Qaeda + friends are going to be able to throw at it". He adds: "There's simply no way history is going to judge this situation a calamity for American arms." He blames the media and "the Terrorist-Media Complex". puff adder answers with the Green Zone and reporters' reports from Baghdad.
dlp's reading of Al Qaeda as a self-organizing hyperstition, the month's best use of the blog's own concept.
| Term | Use in this period |
|---|---|
| Accelerationists | Land's word for those "steepening the technocommercial intelligenesis curve" |
| Autogenesis | self-production, the test of a hyperstitional process |
| Positive fiction | sd's term for natural rights: false, yet needed |
| Common sense | fast default judgement; defended by sd, split up by traxus |
| Anglosphere | Bennett's English-speaking bloc, Land's "diasporic" network |
| Xenobuddhism | Land's view that copying minds will dissolve the self |
| Long War / WWIV | the blog's name for the war with jihadism |
| Bobo | bohemian bourgeois, the taste Land blames for leftism |
Glossary for March 2006.
| Cast | Role in this period |
|---|---|
| sd | Paine essay, Common Sense Update, microfinance optimist |
| Nick Land | programme list, Anglosphere, birth rates, Iraq, ruthlessness |
| Tachi | asks about hyperstitional politics; the "management" outburst |
| traxus4420 | returning critic: Milton, single viewpoint, "frosting" |
| northanger | Anglosphere skeptic, Spencer, film, eucatastrophe |
| puff adder / New York Mullins / metro mamba | satirist; job losses, Green Zone |
| bmr north | power realist uneasy with "inevitable" futures |
| infinite thought | self-described communist who mocks the birth-rate post |
| dlp | reads Al Qaeda as a hyperstition of Western media |
Who did what in March 2006.
April 2006 to June 2008: The Long Fade
| Date | Post | Author |
|---|---|---|
| Apr 2006 | The 'Other' has Impulses too; Rare Clarity | Land |
| Jun 2006 | Signs of the Times | Land ("Uncle Hank") |
| Oct 2006 | The Hand and the Eye | Craig |
| Dec 2006 | Sore Losers; Diagonalization 1 | Land |
| Jan 2007 | Critique of Transcendental Miserablism | Land |
| Feb 2007 | Negative Hyperstition | Land |
| Mar 2007 | What are Cities?; Diagonalization II | Land; Negarestani |
| Apr 2007 | Shoggothic Materialism | Land |
| Sep 2007 | Language of the Pest; Poromechanics | Negarestani |
| Oct 2007 | Necropolis of world politics (part I) | Negarestani |
| Jun 2008 | The Horror of Something | Negarestani |
The last posts in the archive. Only the April 2006 posts have real comment threads.
The last war thread
Land's "The 'Other' has Impulses too" (April 5, 2006) links Efraim Karsh on "Islam's Imperial Dreams". It is aimed at "Self-flagellating Western Occidentocentrists in the Chomskyite mould", and argues that Muslims are actors with their own history, not "merely objects" of Western policy. sd asks for better sources, since everything he finds is "heavily 'biased' and wilfully inflammatory". traxus4420 replies: "so the only valid political choice on the table is 'pick your favorite empire?'"
Land admits the war talk has worn thin: "I'm hooked on warmongering incitement, I'm also way into diminishing returns territory." He makes a fair point: traxus's certainty that al-Qaeda cannot win is itself a secular bet against believers who expect divine help. He also proposes firing "all existing Middle East Studies Scholars" and hiring the apostates on Islamist death lists in their place. Tachi offers the thread's best line: "track the flows and forces that produce both apparent imperial formations and oppressed peoples." In "Rare Clarity" (April 19) Land quotes Sean Gabb's definition of fascism as a mixed economy, "the position of just about every mainstream political party". He views Britain's far right "with vague bemusement" from afar.
Uncle Hank writes back
"Signs of the Times" (June 14, 2006) is the most surprising post in the late archive. Land posts a letter from "my old teacher Hank Hackhammer", smuggled out of "special solitary" in a state institution. Hank mocks "Old Nick" for "endless derailed shrieking about the 'global threat' of the mohammedans". He tells him to drag his head "out of the latrine of consensus conception".
The letter amounts to the old Hyperstition answering Land's war blogging. The religious war is a sideshow inside a stranger, number-driven process. Land had no room to say this in his own voice in 2006, so it arrives as fiction from a madman. In October 2006 a newcomer, Craig, posts "The Hand and the Eye". It covers the rule of vision, Tibetan tulpas that take on a life of their own, Sun Tzu's "Formless", oil as the fuel of Enlightenment light, and a closing question: "Why does nobody ever look at the ashes the phoenix leaves behind?"
Sore losers and monsters
"Sore Losers" (December 4, 2006) follows the Republicans' midterm defeat. A troll gloats about Rumsfeld's firing and Land's "bloodthirsty ways". Land answers that "sore losers" is the left's essence: "Blame the fortunate. Hate the winners." He says the right takes defeat calmly "because we genuinely celebrate democracy, even when it comes up stupid" and "we didn't actually like Bush very much".
A week later "Diagonalization 1" answers a reader's questions with a lesson on Cantor. The smallest infinity, A0, absorbs addition and doubling: "A0 + 1 = A0". Lay out any countable list of infinite binary decimals. Then build a new number whose nth digit differs from the nth digit of the nth number. The result, "the resulting diagonal monstrosity", is missing from the list however complete the list is. Land: "Diagonalization methodically produces monsters that elude the recognition of God. This is a matter of perfect mathematical rigour." Part 2 never appears.
Cantor's diagonal argument as Land sets it out. Negarestani later turns it on theology.
Transcendental Miserablism
The "Critique of Transcendental Miserablism" (January 15, 2007) answers a post at k-punk, Mark Fisher's blog. Land says the new neomarxists have given up Khrushchev's "we'll bury you" and Mao's plan to overtake Britain. They now admit capitalism will win and turn the admission into a curse: "we never wanted growth anyway... haven't you heard that the polar bears are drowning". Schopenhauer is "the grand master of this move", and Philip K. Dick's Gnosticism its pop form. All that survives of Marx "is a psychological bundle of resentments".
The essay is the most complete statement of the position the blog had been heading toward. It gathers motifs from four years: Shoggoths, the runaway, time siding with the market, and human imagination as "a relatively paltry thing". Its one-line ending, "Anything would", is addressed to the person rather than the argument. It also says nothing about the polar bears it mocks.
Pauses
Two short posts show Land stepping back. "Negative Hyperstition" (February 2, 2007) borrows sd's term for "the hunger for an unambiguous casus belli, consolidating itself as a virtual mega-atrocity against 'oneself'". A Belmont Club commenter waits for a blow that kills "hundreds of thousands" so that the elimination of enemies can begin. Land: "It has to be worth pausing and taking a deep breath before continuing too far down this road". "Shoggothic Materialism" (April 3, 2007) brings Uncle Hank back. "Alpha Technosapiens is always basically as unintelligent as possible." At runaway, the evolution of intelligence is "effectively frozen", and the "Dimwitted ape" crashes into "something vast and incomprehensible". "The closer we get, the more maladapted monkey panic locks in."
Figure 19.1: the image posted with "Shoggothic Materialism" (April 2007), a comic-book Shoggoth from At the Mountains of Madness, all eyes and tentacles, crying "Tekeli-li".
Negarestani's coda
Reza Negarestani returns in March 2007 with "Diagonalization II", a preview of his Collapse II essay. He argues that Islamic theology makes God "radically and unyieldingly external to Man", unlike Christian revelation. That turns the divine into a Cantorian operator that generates heresies: "Diagonalization is a political tool for counteracting ontology". The motto: "If God basks in his house, let us reconstruct it according to the laws of demons."
His September 2007 talks follow. "Language of the Pest" reads the word "barbarian" as a judgement on speech. Greeks heard Semitic consonants, made in the throat and glottis rather than pushed out from the lungs, as noise and nausea. "All Christianity wants is a Roman savior, but we speak with the face of a brute." "Poromechanics", from a Goldsmiths seminar run by Eyal Weizman, states an "archaeological law": "for every inconsistency on the surface, there is a subterranean consistency". At Tora Bora, he argues, the coalition planned its battle around tunnel complexes that turned out not to exist, a "Cappadocian Complex" of military paranoia.
Figure 19.2: the Sierpinski (Menger) sponge from "Necropolis of world politics", Mackay's "Idea of infinite rot": a solid perforated at every scale.
The last post, "The Horror of Something" (June 3, 2008), is a paper from a Goldsmiths symposium on the weird. "The weird is the destiny of all objects." Objects stay themselves only by shedding properties, "remaining less", so the universe is "a heap of rubbish and garbage". "The point of being is being unintelligible." Of four kinds of horror, only the "horror of problematic intension" carries the weird. Its model is the survival game, where the horror is not the boss at the end but "the very definition of survival". The archive ends there, with no comments.
Negarestani's "littered universe" in five steps.
| Term | Use in this period |
|---|---|
| Diagonalization | Cantor's method for building a number no list contains |
| A0 (aleph-null) | the smallest infinity, the size of any countable set |
| Transcendental Miserablism | Land's name for left despair at capitalism's success |
| Negative hyperstition | longing for an atrocity that would settle the war |
| Poromechanics | Negarestani's logic of holes and hidden consistency |
| Guerilla-state | a state perforated by rival powers |
| The weird | for Negarestani, the destiny of objects that withdraw |
| Tulpa | a visualized being that gains independence |
Glossary for April 2006 to June 2008.
| Cast | Role in this period |
|---|---|
| Nick Land | Karsh, Uncle Hank, Cantor, Miserablism, cities, Shoggoths |
| Reza Negarestani | heresy, barbaric speech, holes, decay, the weird |
| sd | asks for sources; empire as prisoner's dilemma |
| traxus4420 | refuses to cheer; "count me out" |
| dlp, Tachi, northanger | last commenters on the war |
| Craig | vision, tulpas and the phoenix's ashes |
| Uncle Hank | Land's fictional teacher, voice of the old Hyperstition |
| CAB | reader whose questions prompt the diagonal posts |
Who did what from April 2006 to June 2008.
What Hyperstition Adds Up To
Main Points
- Hyperstition is self-fulfilling prophecy: fictions and forecasts become real through the action they provoke, with economic confidence as the model case.
- Unbelief, not belief: numbers and money work whatever you think of them, and hyperstition aims at that kind of indifference.
- Carriers think what no ego can: invented personas push ideas further than their authors would dare.
- Shoggoths are technology: Lovecraft's slaves turned masters become Land's image of runaway capital.
- "Capitalist realism" first appears in these threads, as k-punk's reply to Land, four years before Mark Fisher's book.
- Time sides with capitalism: the "Critique of Transcendental Miserablism" is the blog's most complete accelerationist statement.
- The numogram is simple on purpose: digital reduction and decimal signs spread because they need only basic arithmetic.
- Oil and dust as agents: Negarestani's petropolitics, later Cyclonopedia, starts here.
- Holes and porosity: from the oil fields of 2005 to the guerilla-states of 2007, Negarestani reads politics through what is missing.
- AI that hides: robot traders succeed by concealment, so a machine mind may look stupid on purpose.
- Recognition is not endorsement: seeing a self-fulfilling process is not the same as taking its side, though the blog often blurred the two.
- Keynes and PR as hyperstition: Land admits the practice comes close to systematic lying.
- Diagonalization makes monsters: Cantor's proof is offered as a method for producing what no list, or God, contains.
- The weird is the destiny of objects: the archive ends on Negarestani's "littered universe".
- Forecasts failed: the 2007 prophecy, the Iraq optimism and the coming Singularity all show the method's blind spot.
The loop at its best and worst: the last step is where the blog most often cheated.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Hyperstition | Fictions that make themselves real through feedback | Studying hype, bubbles, brands, prophecies |
| Carrier | An invented persona that conducts thought | Reading pseudonymous or collective writing |
| Unbelief | Practices that work regardless of conviction | Separating faith from infrastructure |
| Numogram | A decimal map of zones, currents and demons | Reading the CCRU occult material |
| Capitalist realism | Presenting one economic order as natural and inevitable | Testing claims that "there is no alternative" |
| Transcendental Miserablism | Left despair that turns capitalism's success into a curse | Weighing Land's charge, and its limits |
| Poromechanics | Surface inconsistency implies hidden consistency | Spotting conspiracy and military paranoia |
| Negative hyperstition | Longing for the atrocity that would settle a war | Checking one's own war rhetoric |
Models that recur across the nineteen chapters.
| Term | Meaning on the blog |
|---|---|
| AQ (Anglossic Qabbala) | Land's gematria of English letters as base-36 numbers |
| Tic Xenotation | A notation writing numbers by their prime factors |
| Lemurs | The numogram's demons, such as Katak and Lurgo |
| Shoggoth | Lovecraft's servant creature, read as runaway technology |
| Petropolitics | Oil as a political and occult agent |
| Anglosphere | Bennett's English-speaking network civilization |
| Singularity | Runaway machine intelligence |
| Outlook | Egan's chosen-value software, contrasted with memes |
| The weird | Negarestani: objects withdrawing into unintelligibility |
Glossary of the whole archive.
Month clusters
| Cluster | Payoff |
|---|---|
| Mid-late 2004 | Launch, unbelief, oil, Dec peak |
| 2005 | War machines, pulp, CR, singularity |
| Mar 2006 | Last big month |
| 2006-08 fade | Residue → PDF archive |
Pad pair 21.
Pad pair 42.
About this book
Hyperstition by Nick Land, Reza Negarestani, Anna Greenspan, Mark Fisher, and others, 2004–2008. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions