Cultivating Hyperstitions
On images of the future as cybernetic belief systems
This is a slightly modified version of the paper I presented at the 23rd World Conference of the World Futures Studies Federation “Uses of the Futures” in Mexico City, September 2019. I want to thank my friend and colleague Emma Herrera for reading my paper.
I explored the same ideas in two different talks during the year. Last January, in Madrid, I presented the talk “Cultivemos Hipersticiones Chingonas” at the second gathering of the group Madrid Speculative Futures. In February, I was lucky to share these ideas with my colleagues at Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California.
The objective of this paper is to connect the somewhat obscure concept of hyperstitions — as developed by the group of researchers that operated under the banner of Cybernetic Culture Research Unit — to the concept and theories of ‘images of the future.’
The latter, arguably, constitute one of the main backbones of the futures studies field. Looking at ‘images of the future’ through a hyperstitional lens may achieve a three-fold aim: First, by illuminating a specific set of social and social-psychological mechanisms, it may allow us to construct a better model of how images of the future participate in processes of social change. Second, it may allow us to better orient our practices considering the risks and opportunities that exist when images of the future are said to operate in a hyperstitional way — including those that pertain to ethical issues. Third, it will allow us to present a few directions for further development of theory and practice.
I’m probably not the only one here who finds it extremely useful to mention Fred Polak, and his seminal work The Image of the Future, in almost every introduction to futures studies and strategic foresight both in the context of consulting with organizations and in the student classroom. For example, in the two programs that I participate in at CENTRO — the Bootcamp on Design Futures and the Diploma on Design for Tomorrow — the “Polak Game”, as introduced to us a few years back by Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan, has proved to be an excellent activity to gauge the attitudes that new participants have regarding the future as well as providing them with an initial provocation about the challenges involved in imagining futures. Following that activity, students are always interested in knowing more about the game and about the ideas that underpin it as developed by Polak. In this way, those introductory discussions invariably serve to present a passage from the book that, to a great extent, works as a condensation of Polak’s “big idea”:
The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society’s image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive. [1]
In writing that book, Polak set himself a daunting task: to introduce the future (or, “noncompleted time”) as an altogether new dimension to the study of social change. From his perspective, societies have always been pulled forward by their “own magnetic images of an idealized future.” He argues, as well, that the historical development of utopian thinking entails the conviction that human freedom plays a role in shaping the course of history. And yet, writing in the early 1970s — almost five years before the Sex Pistols popularized the slogan ‘No Future’ — his book was an attempt to raise the alarm regarding that generation’s nihilistic attitude which, according to Polak, was stifling its ability to forge positive and constructive images of the future.
In this context, Polak suggests an exciting possibility. The introduction of the image of the future into the social sciences may achieve more than just extending the diagnostic toolkit of the discipline. “The formulation and description of images of the future,” Polak writes, “may influence the future itself, the social scientist may rewrite the history of the future.”
From this perspective, the study, evaluation, and formulation of images of the future may allow the social scientist — i.e., ‘the futurist’— to become a better participant in the steering of human cultures towards better futures. However, it may be argued that Polak fails to provide a sufficiently explicit mechanism by which the formulation of images of the future may influence the future itself.
How is it, exactly, that the rise and fall of images of the future precede or accompany the rise and fall of cultures? In fact, which one is it: precedence or merely accompaniment? At this point, Polak proposes the concept of “influence-optimism” to describe an attitude characterized by the belief in the possibility of human intervention in the unfolding of the future. This is opposed to “influence-pessimism”, i.e. a rejection of the possibility of human intervention, and to both “essence-optimism” and “essence-pessimism”, characterized by the belief in a predetermined course of events.
I will come back later to the concept of “influence-optimism” to explore how it may be updated through a hyperstitional lens. To get there, let’s explore first an interesting interpretation of Polak’s theory.
In a recent paper, Dan Lockton and Stuart Candy [2] suggest an intriguing idea: Polak’s notion of a culture’s image of the future “may be said to represent a kind of self-fulfillingness”, a phenomenon that they refer to as “circularity.” This interpretation, in turn, operates at two levels: a weak and a strong version.
At its most basic level, as Lockton and Candy explain, compelling images of desirable futures may “inspire people to work towards making those visions reality — to fulfill the prophecy.” Of course, this idea is not strange for people working in the futures field and, to a great extent, coincides with Polak’s understanding of “influence-optimism.” Moreover, it may be said to be the working conviction of many ‘futures’ practitioners at least since the field started to swerve away from its predictive ambition. The best way to predict the future, we are fond to say, is to create it.
In a similar vein, in a discussion about the supposed predictive power of science fiction, the writer Cory Doctorow argued:
I believe that in nearly every instance where science fiction has successfully ‘predicted’ a turn of events, it’s more true to say that it has inspired that turn of events.
The stronger interpretation suggested by Lockton and Candy draws more closely from the theory of self-fulfilling prophecies elaborated by Robert Merton in a seminal paper from 1948 [3]. Following, in turn, the sociologist W. I. Thomas, Merton proposes a mechanism capable of illuminating many, if not most social processes. “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” The classic example of a “run-on-the-bank” provides the most explicit articulation of the mechanism: if customers of a bank believe rumors of insolvency, and they attempt to protect their savings by withdrawing them, they will bring about the rumored insolvency, even if the rumors had no basis, to begin with.
“The parable,” writes Merton, “tells us that public definitions of a situation (prophecies or predictions) become an integral part of the situation and thus affect subsequent development.” According to Lockton and Candy, this phenomenon is constitutive of both design practice and futures work given their reliance on “imaginaries” of the present and visions of the future. “If we believe something to be real,” they write,
and act as if it is real, and design and build institutions and infrastructures around that ‘reality’, the effect may be the same as if it had been real in the first place. What were once fictions become fact.
The key issue, then, is that beliefs, when they are sufficiently strong to push us to act in response to them, have the power to turn fictions into reality. The same idea was central to the theoretical work developed by a group of researchers that operated, from around 1997 to 2003 in the UK, under the banner of Cybernetic Culture Research Unit or CCRU.
The CCRU was a loose network of thinkers — most of them postgraduate students and academics in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Warwick led by the writer Sadie Plant and the philosopher Nick Land. They explored a new form of conceptual production (a precursor to what would later be known as “theory-fiction”) that merged a variety of sources in both form and content: poststructuralist theory and continental philosophy, cybernetics and complexity theory, futurism, science fiction, mysticism, numerology, occult studies, as well as rave culture. One of their main objectives was to make sense of the culture that during the late 1990s was emerging around digital networks at the same time that they deployed the new conceptual tools that such culture was making available to understand their wider social and techno-scientific milieu. Cybernetic culture, then, refers not only to the culture associated with the “cyberspace” but also to a proper cybernetic understanding of the mechanics of culture.
Their concept of hyperstition — a portmanteau of the words hype and superstition — was key to this work. As Nick Land explains:
Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions — by their very existence as ideas — function causally to bring about their own reality.
In one of CCRU’s pamphlets, Linda Trent explains:
It’s not a simple matter of true or false with hyperstitious systems. Belief here doesn’t have a simply passive quality. … Hype actually makes things happen, and uses belief as a positive power.
Land himself provides two general examples, one from economics and one from technology. He writes:
Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely. The (fictional) idea of Cyberspace contributed to the influx of investment that rapidly converted it into a technosocial reality.
The fact that things continue to work hyperstitionally in those two realms can be attested using two recent headlines:
In March 2019, the site Quartz published an article with the title: “Will the next recession be a self-fulfilling prophecy?” The piece recounts how several recent surveys report that business leaders and consumers are becoming pessimistic about the prospects of the economy most of them fearing that we’re approaching a recession in the next couple of years. The key problem, though, is that those groups are not merely fearing a potential recession but are actively changing their behavior in preparation for it — that is, they are properly anticipating the recession. The warning should be clear. As the article explains:
When consumer and businesses start spending less en masse, it creates the conditions that can spark a slump. Instead of preparing for a slowdown, it causes it.
A similar example can be found in the intersection of technology forecasting and business strategy. At this point, we’re all getting used to the litany that surrounds us in the media about the new threat of automation in the workplace. “Every industry will be impacted by AI,” read an advertisement for a recent conference hosted by the MIT Technology Review. “Will you lead or will you follow?” Of course, as a recent article by The New York Times recounts, not one single business leader wants to stay behind. The article, entitled “The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite,” explains that business leaders are anticipating the supposedly imminent impact of AI. By doing that, they may well be turning that possibility into a reality.
All over the world, executives are spending billions of dollars to transform their businesses into lean, digitized, highly automated operations. … They are racing to automate their own workforces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.
Using those two examples, it is possible to make explicit the cybernetic mechanism that drives hyperstitions. It all starts with an image of the future: a rumor, a prophecy or prediction, that is, a fiction. In some cases, the hype will cause more and more people to believe that fiction to be potentially real. If the belief is sufficiently strong, people will act in anticipation. In doing so, they increase the reality of the fiction thus feeding the hype. And so on… We say that the mechanism is cybernetic because it is driven by feedback loops in the form of cycles of hype and anticipation.
An important question emerges at this point: Can we, as futurists, intervene and perhaps even cultivate these hyperstitional processes?
In one forgotten entry from the CCRU blogosphere, Linda Trent raised the question: “How do fictions become hypersitions?” She uses the literature of H.P. Lovecraft as an example to provide a two-fold answer: the fictional system needs to be, first, collectivized, and, second, it needs to be practically deployed. In the case of Lovecraft, it is well-known that he opened up his fictional universe for the continuation and expansion into what later become known as the Cthulhu Mythos. Moreover, some of the most eccentric followers of Lovecraft, such as the occultist Kenneth Grant, actually used Lovecraft’s system within magic rituals.
Lovecraftian magic, secretive investments in AI, and consumers’ worries about the next economic recession: these are the strange phenomena that we can grasp when we start to model culture, in general, and images of the future, in particular, as cybernetic belief systems. What do these three hyperstitions have in common, besides the fact that they all operate like self-fulfilling prophecies?
They all operate through a specific type of anticipatory belief, namely panic.
This is a worrying realization. Especially considering the current moment, full as it is with clear and present threats such as growing inequality, xenophobia, and an unprecedented climate emergency. If Polak was worried about a nihilistic turn in our imagination of the future, he would be terrified by our generalized cultural incapacity to imagine futures other than collapse.
Not surprisingly, our culture is starting to give birth to more and more calls to imagine positive futures: from Arizona State University’s project Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, to a magazine such as The Verge publishing the collection Better Worlds, all the way up to the emergence of a science fiction genres such as solarpunk and hopepunk. What can we add to these developments, as futurists, from the standpoint of a hyperstitional understanding of images of the future?
First of all, we need to find ways to disarm or defuse those images of the future that may be operating hyperstitionally, specifically the negative ones, that is, those that operate through panic and other negative affects. How may we, as futurists, better counteract and defuse those images of the future — such as the belief in a new economic recession or the widespread automation panic — that are currently becoming self-fulfilling prophecies?
Second, and most importantly, we need to find ways to cultivate and grow hyperstitions that are based on positive images of the future. How?
We may find a provisional answer in some passing comments by one of the most brilliant members of the CCRU, the late Mark Fisher. Unlike most of his colleagues at CCRU who, arguably, rejoiced in the negative hyperstitional dynamics of late cybernetic capitalism, Fisher was always committed to finding appropriate tools to work within cybernetic cultures in order to advance progressive political and cultural values. Accordingly, he was the only one to imagine a “positive” version of hyperstition, that is, in a Spinozian sense, one that is not driven by a negative affect, namely panic, but a positive one: confidence. As he writes:
Confidence is essentially hyperstitional: it immediately increases the capacity to act, the capacity to act increases confidence, and so on — a self-fulfilling prophecy, a virtuous spiral.
In this way, Fisher suggests the possibility of a radically different form of hyperstition: not a debilitating self-fulfilling prophecy which, driven by panic, puts us in a reactive (and, indeed, reactionary) position, but an empowering self-fulfilling prophecy driven by confidence pulling us in a proactive (and, perhaps, “proactionary”) tendency.
In a similar vein, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams wrote:
Utopias are the embodiment of the hyperstitions of progress. They demand that the future be realised, they form an impossible but necessary object of desire, and they give us a language of hope and aspiration for a better world. [5]
In the end, then, confidence may be a simpler way to understand Polak’s “influence-optimism” and the most important element in a rekindling of utopian thinking. In order to influence or even rewrite the future itself, we may not only need to cultivate positive images of the future but specifically those that, by virtue of their concreteness and plausibility, are powerful enough to generate confidence and, thus, a positive feedback loop between our agency and the world. In Fisher’s words:
A hyperstitional spiral: the more we believe it, the more we can make it happen, the more we make it happen, the more we believe it…
[1] Polak, F. (1973). The image of the future. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
[2] Lockton, Dan and Stuart Candy (June, 2018). A Vocabulary for Visions in Designing for Transitions. Proceedings of DRS2018, Vol. 1.
[3] Merton, R. K. (1948). The self-fulfilling prophecy. The Antioch Review, 8(2), 193–210.
[4] Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. (2004, Junio). Polytics. Hyperstition.
[5] Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London. Verso.
