Record page
Hyperstition & The New Weird I Entities and Worlds Genres and Climates 1 4
This lecture clarifies hyperstition by tying it to storytelling, genre, and world-building rather than leaving it as an abstract slogan.
Contextual work page available
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Access note
Public page exposes metadata and a short excerpt only. The full transcript remains in the internal canonical corpus.
Core idea
Hyperstition is defined here through story structure: entities, worlds, genres, and climates make fiction into an active force rather than a passive description.
The mechanism is world-building under recursive pressure. Narratives do not simply host characters; they generate conditions in which subjects become characters and atmospheres become causal.
The stakes are aesthetic and philosophical because the concept becomes legible through the new weird's experiments with genre, not through a single abstract formula.
Representative extracts
Definition · 00:00:49
what hyperstition does, and what it takes from the weird and the new weird, is that it turns the subject into a character.
Why this matters: The lecture's definitional move arrives here in the opening minute: hyperstition gets pinned to a narrative operation rather than an abstract slogan, setting the terms for every genre example that follows.
Mechanism · 00:08:34
Hyperstition basically says: no, we're actually responsible for creating different kinds of madness because we know that that's a fiction, but we know the potentiality of fiction at the same time.
Why this matters: This supplies the concept's mechanism and its ethical twist: hyperstitional practice is knowing rather than deluded, which separates it from superstition and grounds the record's claim about recursive world-building.
Stakes · 00:07:45
it basically says that the effect or the mood that results from all of this can actually be a force of creating worlds and entities. that is not genre-specific or even relegated to fiction per se.
Why this matters: Here the argument leaves literary criticism behind: by refusing to confine the claim to fiction, the speaker raises the stakes from genre analysis to a thesis about causation itself.
History · 00:11:53
The CCRU got kicked out of Warwick after a couple of really successful Virtual Futures conferences, and the work moved off campus and became a rogue institution, a prototype for para-academia.
Why this matters: A rare historical anchor in a theory-heavy session: the institutional backstory grounds the concept in lived practice and implicitly places the hosting seminar in the para-academic lineage it describes.
Style · 00:08:18
under the whim of outside forces. They're under the whim of outside forces, but this doesn't absolve them of responsibility or creativity.
Why this matters: The doubled phrasing does real argumentative work, holding exteriority and agency together in a single breath and closing off the fatalist reading that CCRU material often invites.
Provenance
Whisper transcription of the New Centre for Research & Practice seminar recording (part 1 of 4), re-transcribed for the canonical corpus on 2026-07-04 with segment-level timestamps.
Appears in sections
Hyperstition and Fiction-Making Primary section
The archive's central model of fiction as causal force, feedback loop, and world-making process.
Control, Virotechnics, and Swarm Systems Also in
Control processes, viral language, swarms, and abstract dynamics as a media-theoretical cluster.
Theory-Fiction and Cyberstyle Also in
How theory-fiction, cyberpunk prose, and anti-academic style became part of the archive's method.