Weird Studies Episode 36 On Hyperstition

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: audio original (.mp3).

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

  Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel. For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to weirdstudies.com. Why don't we start by you telling me a little bit about how the class went, and that'll get us into the topic. Very briefly, J.F. was going to come…

• 00:11:40

  this in the collected publications of the ccru which is this kind of institution that ran unofficially within the university of warwick philosophy department back in the 1990s nick land led it but in any event the collected writings of the ccru which are always sort of collective and anonymous but a lot of them…

• 00:21:52

  And we want to live in a world where you have some agency, some way of navigating this reality. But it doesn't mean there's something wrong with the bourgeois subject. There's only something wrong with a reified bourgeois subject which doesn't allow for any other modalities, any other ways of expressing your being…

• 00:32:44

  immanent mind that creates stories, myths, hyperstitions, egregores, ideas that actually connect with cosmic forces. So that's a completely different way of looking at hyperstitions. Hyperstition is a way for us to enact particular narratives that inevitably connect with wider cosmic forces where the same patterns…

• 00:45:28

  They're into trolling. They're trolls. And so, they wanted Donald Trump to win, because that would make a more, you know, that would make for better TV. It would be more entertaining to see this guy kind of trolling the whole world. And then a bunch of weird synchronicities started happening. Like, they had replaced…

• 00:57:28

  Beneficial to the effect you want to get or whether all those things are completely arbitrary and are just there for psychological reasons. And you're going to get the same effects by just doing chaos magic using whatever's at hand at the moment. I think that's an interesting question. It's almost the same question…

• 01:05:09

  You know, a wicked person can use it just as easily as a good person. They can use it for different ends. I could pick up a hammer and cave in your skull with it or I can pick it up and build a house for the needy. Right. Exactly. But at the same time, on yet another hand, I think I'm up to three or four hands…

• 01:12:37

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