Hyperstition Delphi Carstens at TEDxTableMountain

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: video original (.mp4).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Tijana Mihajlović Reviewer Reviewer's Name I'm going to be talking about how we can imagine ourselves differently. How can we imagine our date with a potentially ruinous destiny? More importantly, how is this destiny being culturally produced? Behind me are playing visuals by a group known as Orphan Drift. It's called…

• 00:01:21

  We are technologically obsessed. Technology promises not only greater access to the bounties of nature, but also promises to release us from the rhythms of nature. We live today in a mechanosphere, an electrosphere of gadgets and devices. We are swimming through a technological proteome or embryonic fluid into…

• 00:02:30

  It is a Chinese puzzle box that opens to reveal numerous sorcerous, cultural, and technological interventions in the world. There are four elements of hyperstition. The first element is that it is an element of effective culture that makes itself real. The stock market is a good example of this. Through this market…

• 00:03:31

  The digital industry itself prone to more hyperstitions. During the 1980s, cyberspace, a word from science fiction, became a buzzword in Silicon Valley. Programmers worked to make it real. In 1994, the internet came online, social networks are followed, and these accelerate our fictions about ourselves at further…

• 00:04:05

  The second element of hyperspition is that it is a fictional quality, functional as a time-traveling device. The future is imagined for us by the media industry. Movies like the Terminator series, Matrix, The Road, 12 Monkeys, the futures that they call, sort of, the future. They conjure into being or pursue plausible…

• 00:05:48

  The last instance of high prestition is that high prestition represents a call to the old ones. Our vision machines, our computing devices, our electron microscopes have revealed to us the hidden dimensions of nature. We imagine aliens on the other side of the historical divide that we are about to cross. The…

• 00:08:17

  She is a cyborg from this moment of her life from her birth from this moment of her life from her death from her death from her death from her death from her death from her death from her death from her death from her death from her death from her death from her death from her death from her death from her death from…

• 00:09:32

  But we also need to take a leaf from the ultimate old one, from Gaia. Gaia has survived numerous extinction events by forging networks of symbiosis, of alliances and partnerships that span the kingdoms of nature, and the world. We will have to find new ways of symbiotic with our machines and with nature. We will need…