Of all of the concepts that came out of Ccru, “hyperstition” is perhaps the one that interests me most. It is perhaps best captured in the following quote: “We are interested in fiction only insofar as it is simultaneously hyperstition – a term we have coined for semiotic productions that make themselves real – cryptic communications from the Old Ones, signalling return: shleth hud dopesh.” Hyperstitions are temporal heresies, blasphemies against metaphysics, that either invert causality or grant agency to the inhuman, or both, depending on one’s interpretation. The idea of a cultural fragment that is able to be self-positing does not normally exist within our frame of reference which relies on the belief in an “author” who will write the story, drawing on some collective cultural language or recognizable set of experiences from our shared past.

The idea of a hyperstition upends this and is perhaps best explained with an example. The story of human refugees fleeing a dying planet earth and colonizing a new world is well established in our collective cultural imaginary. From books like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars to films like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, the idea that some catastrophe might befall the earth and consequently that we might have to make a new world for ourselves by colonizing and perhaps even terraforming some other planet, is very popular indeed. Perhaps less common is the image of the alien race that flees their own planet and tries to transform Earth (or the population of it) so that it might more closely resemble their home-world.

The trope has existed in different ways in the history of science fiction and can be seen in Thomas M. Disch The Genocides (1965), Raccoona Sheldon’s The Screwfly Solution (1977), and Ian McDonald’s Chaga (1995). It is also becoming increasingly popular in film. In the 1996 film The Arrival, the protagonist discovers alien underground bases disguised as power plants which are terraforming the planet. In the 2013 film Man of Steel, the same central thematic plays out. Aliens arrive from a distant galaxy and begin to attempt to xenoform the Earth, this time using an enormous “World Engine” that spews clouds of dust and gas. In the 2018 film Annihilation an zone of disjuncture called “The Shimmer”, is created around a crashed alien ship, which rewrites DNA and distorts the world around it in frightening ways that produce transmogrified flora and fauna. These stories may well be appearing at an increasing rate signalling that at some future point they may make the transition from fiction into reality and appear on the pages of our newspapers, once some critical point of density is reached.

The question raised by hyperstition is simply “Who is telling this story of the colonization of the earth?” Our common sense answer would say that it is a wide variety of human actors entangled in particularly identities, relations of power, and discourses that make certain stories sayable, intelligible, and thinkable. However, could it be that these stories are telling themselves, that they are possessed of certain libidinal energies that are capable of using the human subject as a vector in order to actualize themselves? Or, could it be that certain entities or events are of such significance that they have effects that travel back from the future through what we perceive as time, creating effects in the form of fragments of storying that serve to facilitate the bringing of these events or entities into existence?

This is the core of the notion of hyperstition, what is either a new theory of time or is an account of possession as “The Old Ones” seek to shape human affairs, all of which connects to Land’s vision of Capital as an alien intelligence or AI from the future that is acting through time in order to make itself real. He ends the essay Circuitries by asking provocatively:

How would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions? To be a cyberguerrilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one ‘s software was part of the disguise? Exactly like this?

Theorized in this way, we ask what cultural fragments are being effected back out of the future by some event, say the final emergence of the planetary technocapital singularity that replaces the human, or the death of the last human in the anthropocene? 

Indeed, in light of the most recent IPCC report one might ask how could the anthropocene make sense other than as a concerted attempt to xenoform the planet Earth by or for some other form of life-to-come? It is patently absurd to think that world leaders, organisational stakeholders, and a civilised global populous, would simply resign themselves to do nothing in the face of global ecological collapse. Instead, it makes far more sense that the Earth is being prepared for some other form of like which needs higher and warmer oceans, burned forests, and mass extinction of existing wildlife, in order to arrive and thrive with its own forms of life. If it is Capital and not some other form of alien intelligence that requires this new form of life in order to continue to expand proliferate and grow as it always has – humans having reached their full potential of usefulness to it – then it is necessary for us to acknowledge this coming obsolescence and to see the anthropocene as the mechanism by which simultaneously preparations are made for something new and useful and a process by which the irrelevant detritus of human existence is disposed. Capital may simply no longer require the intelligence and affects of bipedal primates and is preparing for what form of life will next advance it. Why else would we be creating a toxic lake of black sludge filled with run-off from the processing of rare earth metals, growing underwater DDT dumps, or generating many areas rife with nuclear radiation, other than to support something to come which would need such places in order to live?

In the final analysis, the anthropocene represents the hyperstition of the xenoformed earth attempting to make itself real.