Hyperstition

= "“fictions that make themselves real.” They can make themselves real because they are, in fact, anticipatory emanations from the future." [1]

Context

Geoff Shullenberger:

"Here is how he put it in a 1993 essay called “Machinic Desire”: “What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.” Interdimensional lemurs may sound strange; this may be even stranger. That said, it is also familiar from, for one, the Terminator movies—a constant reference point in Land’s earlier work—in which a future artificial intelligence sends emissaries back to the past to secure its own existence.

The fact that his idea echoes a movie plot isn’t incidental. One of Land’s most famous coinages is “hyperstition,” which he defined as “fictions that make themselves real.” They can make themselves real because they are, in fact, anticipatory emanations from the future. This was also the idea behind the lemurs, which first came into Land’s writing by way of William S. Burroughs’s 1987 short story “The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar,” which in turn, drew on the legend of the lost continent of Lemuria invoked by Madame Blavatsky.

Like capitalism, lemurs come from what Land calls the “Outside,” a realm beyond direct human apprehension in which Kant’s “things in themselves” mingle with Lovecraft’s Old Ones. The Outside is the future, but also the pre-human past of Lemuria and Atlantis. It is beyond our space-time coordinates, so these amount to the same thing. Such ideas may still seem bizarre at first glance, but not much more so than those held by many in the AI industry, increasingly the motor of the global economy. The possibility that we might soon fall under the sway of an alien superintelligence is regularly discussed in mainstream venues and in the highest policy circles. The culture has caught up to Land. Carlson’s baffled contemplation of the numogram is a picture of our shared condition."

(https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-faith-of-nick-land/)