Argument of the work
Amy Ireland opens the first of four lectures by refusing the usual shortcut: hyperstition is not a mystical slogan about self-fulfilling prophecy. She routes it back through genre, through the mechanics of world-building, through the question of what fiction does when it stops pretending to describe. The lecture series, *Hyperstition & The New Weird I: Entities and Worlds, Genres and Climates (1/4)*, reconstructs the concept from its CCRU-era operational sense, where fiction functions as a carrier, an infection vector, a method for installing entities into consensus reality.
The argument's first move is to locate hyperstition inside storytelling practice rather than above it. Ireland's framing treats genre as a climate, a set of ambient conditions under which certain entities can become locally real. The New Weird, in this reading, is a laboratory. Lovecraft's Cthulhu, Ligotti's puppets, VanderMeer's Area X: these are not metaphors dressed up as monsters. They are test cases for what a world has to be like for such an entity to walk.
This matters because CCRU's original hyperstition archive, the *Digital Hyperstition* issue of *Abstract Culture* from 1999, already staged the concept through fictional reportage. Melanie Newton, Echidna Stillwell, Lemurian time sorcery: the material reads as documentation of encounters rather than theory about encounters [[w4]](https://www.urbanomic.com/edition/digital-hyperstition-original-edition/). Cyberspace as a black mirror where time flips over, telecommerce pulling ever deeper antiquity back through the net [[w7]](https://www.urbanomic.com/chapter/ccru-writings-cybergothic-hyperstition/). The concept was born inside a genre operation. Ireland's lecture reactivates that birthright.
The clarification is load-bearing. A decade of loose usage has collapsed hyperstition into a synonym for memetic virality or right-accelerationist myth-making. By anchoring the term to entities, worlds, genres, and climates, Ireland restores the texture that made it do work in the first place. Hyperstition needs a world dense enough to carry the entity. Without the climate, the fiction stays inert. The numogram, the Lemurian timelines, the Nma: these functioned because the surrounding corpus built a consistent atmosphere for them to breathe.
The stakes are practical for anyone trying to read CCRU now. If hyperstition is storytelling machinery, then the critical question stops being whether you believe the Lemurian material and starts being how the apparatus works, what entities it can host, what climates it requires. Ireland's opening lecture hands back the toolkit. The three that follow have somewhere to go.
How to read this
Treat this as the first of four lectures by Amy Ireland, keyed to the pairing in the title: entities and worlds, genres and climates. Track how hyperstition gets pulled out of slogan form and into the mechanics of storytelling, where fictions function as carriers that alter what they describe [c11]. Read alongside the CCRU hyperstition corpus (Abstract Culture 4, 1999) for the Lemurian material Ireland inherits ([Urbanomic](https://www.urbanomic.com/book/abstract-culture-digital-hyperstition/)). The New Weird frame supplies the genre test case.
Argument map
Hyperstition beyond the slogan
Amy Ireland opens the first of four lectures by refusing the usual shortcut: hyperstition is not a mystical slogan about self-fulfilling prophecy. She routes it back through genre, through the mechanics of world-building, through the question of what fiction does when it stops pretending to describe. The lecture series, *Hyperstition & The New Weird I: Entities and Worlds, Genres and Climates (1/4)*, reconstructs the concept from its CCRU-era operational sense, where fiction functions as a carrier, an infection vector, a method for installing entities into consensus reality.
Genre as climate, New Weird as laboratory
The argument's first move is to locate hyperstition inside storytelling practice rather than above it. Ireland's framing treats genre as a climate, a set of ambient conditions under which certain entities can become locally real. The New Weird, in this reading, is a laboratory. Lovecraft's Cthulhu, Ligotti's puppets, VanderMeer's Area X: these are not metaphors dressed up as monsters. They are test cases for what a world has to be like for such an entity to walk.
CCRU's Digital Hyperstition archive
This matters because CCRU's original hyperstition archive, the *Digital Hyperstition* issue of *Abstract Culture* from 1999, already staged the concept through fictional reportage. Melanie Newton, Echidna Stillwell, Lemurian time sorcery: the material reads as documentation of encounters rather than theory about encounters [ W4 ](https://www.urbanomic.com/edition/digital-hyperstition-original-edition/). Cyberspace as a black mirror where time flips over, telecommerce pulling ever deeper antiquity back through the net [ W7 ](https://www.urbanomic.com/chapter/ccru-writings-cybergothic-hyperstition/). The concept was born inside a genre operation. Ireland's lecture reactivates that birthright.
Restoring texture against loose usage
The clarification is load-bearing. A decade of loose usage has collapsed hyperstition into a synonym for memetic virality or right-accelerationist myth-making. By anchoring the term to entities, worlds, genres, and climates, Ireland restores the texture that made it do work in the first place. Hyperstition needs a world dense enough to carry the entity. Without the climate, the fiction stays inert. The numogram, the Lemurian timelines, the Nma: these functioned because the surrounding corpus built a consistent atmosphere for them to breathe.
Stakes for reading CCRU today
The stakes are practical for anyone trying to read CCRU now. If hyperstition is storytelling machinery, then the critical question stops being whether you believe the Lemurian material and starts being how the apparatus works, what entities it can host, what climates it requires. Ireland's opening lecture hands back the toolkit. The three that follow have somewhere to go.
Reading protocol for the lecture
Treat this as the first of four lectures by Amy Ireland, keyed to the pairing in the title: entities and worlds, genres and climates. Track how hyperstition gets pulled out of slogan form and into the mechanics of storytelling, where fictions function as carriers that alter what they describe C11 . Read alongside the CCRU hyperstition corpus (Abstract Culture 4, 1999) for the Lemurian material Ireland inherits ( Urbanomic ). The New Weird frame supplies the genre test case.
Lecture provenance and series arc
Delivered by Amy Ireland as the first of a four-part lecture series on Hyperstition and the New Weird, the talk revisits the CCRU's 1999 Abstract Culture 4: Digital Hyperstition ( Monoskop ; reissued by Urbanomic 2017 ) and routes the concept through genre theory, pairing entities with worlds and climates across the sequence.
Publication context
Delivered by Amy Ireland as the first of a four-part lecture series on Hyperstition and the New Weird, the talk revisits the CCRU's 1999 Abstract Culture 4: Digital Hyperstition ([Monoskop](https://monoskop.org/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Unit); reissued by [Urbanomic 2017](https://www.urbanomic.com/book/abstract-culture-digital-hyperstition/)) and routes the concept through genre theory, pairing entities with worlds and climates across the sequence.
How this work reaches the archive
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.
Public page exposes metadata and a short excerpt only. The full transcript remains in the internal canonical corpus.
Key concepts and people
People
Concepts
Best 3 moments
00:00:00
Okay
00:19:36
They released Abstract Dynamics, which is a section, a series of sort of zines that were released in swarms of five, comprising monographs by people like Ian Hamilton Grant, Land,…
00:39:18
00:39:18 — There's no ideal agenda
There's no ideal agenda
Timestamp jump list
Sections
- 00:00:00 — Section 1 — Okay
- 01:15:41 — Section 2 — So the Landian idea of positive feedback pits it against the human security system, the organism, social structures, the state, Oedipus, all of these homeostatic negative feedback…
- 02:18:26 — Section 3 — No problem
Key moments
- 00:00:00 — Okay — Okay
- 00:19:36 — They released Abstract Dynamics, which is a section, a series of sort of zines that were released in swarms of five, comprising monographs by people like Ian Hamilton Grant, Land,… — They released Abstract Dynamics, which is a section, a series of sort of zines that were released in swarms of five, comprising monographs by people like Ian Hamilton Grant, Land,…
- 00:39:18 — There's no ideal agenda — There's no ideal agenda
- 00:58:41 — That's, that's me — That's, that's me
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.
00:00:00
Okay
Okay. All right, so, hi everyone. Can everyone hear me? Am I loud enough? Yeah, you're good. I can control your sound too. Okay. So, just to start, I want to talk about the four terms, the entities, worlds, genres, and climates. And sort of talk about these and why I think those four terms make up a very basic equatio…
00:19:36
They released Abstract Dynamics, which is a section, a series of sort of zines that were released in swarms of five, comprising monographs by people like Ian Hamilton Grant, Land,…
They released Abstract Dynamics, which is a section, a series of sort of zines that were released in swarms of five, comprising monographs by people like Ian Hamilton Grant, Land, lots of people. And I suppose activity kind of subsided for a while. The CCIU really quietened down, didn't have a locus anymore. And every…
00:39:18
There's no ideal agenda
There's no ideal agenda. However, the analytic aspects of these sort of programmatic elements are very interesting. So there's a way to analyze hyperstition. And then the third is the hyperstitional production. And here they have the language of bringing in the hyperstitional puppets. We play them out in theaters. We…
00:58:41
That's, that's me
That's, that's me. It's sort of interesting, like, how he, how he's building his own narrative, and how it's sort of making the, making these connections, and, like, seeing himself sort of in relation, uh, if we, if you could, like, sort of see him as a, as a, as a carrier of, of this, and how sort of making it, uh, m…
01:15:41
So the Landian idea of positive feedback pits it against the human security system, the organism, social structures, the state, Oedipus, all of these homeostatic negative feedback…
So the Landian idea of positive feedback pits it against the human security system, the organism, social structures, the state, Oedipus, all of these homeostatic negative feedback constructions. And he describes two different positive feedback oppositional circuitries to this. One is a short wave of positive feedback,…
01:35:59
I mean, to do with Spinoza and this idea of ethics as Karnasas and stuff
I mean, to do with Spinoza and this idea of ethics as Karnasas and stuff. But yeah. Could be worth asking Lendl. It pluralizes Karnasas, right? And he's... I remember... I actually saw him speak on it recently. We will bring it up. And Amy mentioned that also the section in Psychonopedia did... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.…
01:56:47
I think that would be fair to say
I think that would be fair to say. Alright, so Eleanor kind of attributes Eleanor says the dissolution of species racial borders however terrifying in Lovecraft versus the borders that are very clear and pleasant and I think when Reza actually talks about this this form of collectivity in trying to find this part and…
02:18:26
No problem
No problem. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So that's the end of the first session. If anybody has any questions about how to get to the classroom, what to do, how to participate, if you need the, if you're, like, missing a reading or you need a reading, just feel free to post on there or email one,…
Key passage
Best entry extract · 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.
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.