The term 'hyperstition' was coined by philosopher Nick Land in the mid-1990s to characterize an excessive 'superstition': one involving more technology, more cybernetic millenarianism, a more digital occult. It is a concept, he explains in a 2009 interview, that exists, 'equipoised between technology and fiction'. Today, these qualities are coded with conspiracy theories and apocalyptic cults, ethnonationalism and racist ideologies. We see hyperstition, like superstition, as performative: involving rituals, knowledge and artefacts. Its power resides in its circulation, in its 'lore'. Lore is not only mythology and superstition, it is synonymous with teachings, advice and the traditions and knowledge held by a particular group. Lore is both knowledge and experience (cultural, organizational, institutional) transmitted by word of mouth and the artefacts and writings that contain, enable or even disallow the practices of telling. In our working, hyperstition is a concept rich in lore that both coalesces around itself, as concept, and the cultures through which it has passed and helped create. It is a vehicle for distributing disrupted sensings of time and space, designed to create the normative but also open up to deviation. And both of these-lore and hyperstition-inform design fictions. Significantly, this article will tell tales about this lore, with the aim to deviate it from its dominant codings. To encourage this concept's tendencies towards creative, rather than deathly, excess, we will introduce to the lore of hyperstition a swerve. Finally, we will offer this practice, as one that identifies and creates design fictions.
lorehyperstitiondesign fictionsDeleuze and Guattariconceptual personaeNick Land
NETL
NSTL
Taylor & Francis
