Why Hyperstition Now Rules the World

...and why Democrats Continue to win elections

Hyperstition is a term used to describe self-fulfilling prophecies that come true through their existence and spread. It is associated with science fiction, speculative fiction, futurism, occultism, and conspiracy theories.

Hyperstition was coined by the British cultural theorists Nick Land and Mark Fisher to describe the way in which certain cultural ideas or narratives can become self-fulfilling prophecies. The term is a portmanteau of the words "hyper" (meaning beyond or above) and "superstition" (meaning a belief or practice that is not based on reason or knowledge). In other words, hyperstitions are beliefs or stories that, through there very existence and dissemination, bring about their own reality, or truth. They are often associated with the fields of science fiction, speculative fiction, and futurism, as well as with certain forms of occultism and conspiracy theory.

Excerpts from the above video:

I will confess, when I have a question on a moral, ethical, even practical political kind of issue, and I don't have a strong opinion about it, even if I do, but I'm questioning my opinion, I will just figure out what St Thomas Aquinus said about it. I will go to one of the early search engines, known as the Suma Theologia. There's this, you know, great Theologian who wrote down the answer to pretty much every question, and I'll look it up. And nine times out of 10, more 99 out of 100, if I disagree with St Thomas, I'm probably just going to change my view and go with his. Now at least in that case, I'm doing that very intentionally. I'm saying, "I trust this guy, I trust his intellectual and spiritual formation, and I think he's going to be more correct than some, you know, Joe Blow on the street."

I guess every day I do the same thing to Google, except it's totally unwitting. There is, when I go to the Suma Theologia, there's no pretense of neutrality or some you know objective uh standard beyond the objective standard, that I guess, St Thomas and I would agree on. You know, God and religion. With Google, there is, it's there's no person that you're seeing. And then, what's very scary, is as you point out there might not even be some senior engineer there who's trying to. It's just like a some kind of ghostly entity in the algorithm that's pushing me, without any human even being aware of it. And people, as a result because they can't see the human element, they're very trusting of what Google shows them.

[...]

Okay at this moment in time, only my new friends whom I call my right-wing conservative nutcase friends...

Because you've been a liberal your whole life basically...

...Yeah, so I tell this to their face, and they laugh. They think it's funny because they think I'm just kidding. But anyway, NPR called me, so this was maybe a year and a half, two years ago. I was already seen somehow or other as a right-wing nutcase. Myself, I don't have a conservative bone in my body. But, point is, NPR calls me. I said, "wow, yes, mainstream... they're talking to me again." And, I mean, I used to write for all these places. I was editor chief of "Psychology Today," which is mainstream leftwing, and... but they stopped talking to me after I testified before Congress in 2019. So anyway, here's NPR. So NPR sends a crew to my house and they do all the set up, it's just you know, a big deal. And then, there's the host and whatever. So they finally start, just like you and I did a little while ago, and this host starts out by saying, "So, Dr Epstein, I know that in one of the very first experiments you ever conducted on Google you got some enormous shift something like a 43% shift due to the bias you thought in Google search results, and isn't that a bit hard to believe?" So of course I'm realizing now, okay, they didn't come here to learn about my work, they came here to make fun of me and discredit you this is a hitpiece. Yeah, so I replied, "Um, hard to believe," I said, "No, absolutely not. In fact, it was completely unbelievable." I said, "You're understating the nature of the problem. It was completely unbelievable," I said, "...and that happens all the time in science. You find things that just don't make any sense, you figure, I made a mistake somewhere, so you repeat it. So we repeated the experiment with another group of Representative voters, and this time we got a shift of 66%."

The poor guy, the poor guy, I felt so bad for him because I could just see his face drop. He was thinking, "Oh no, we're not going to get our hitpiece here," and so he did the whole interview, and then they all left. And they never aired the interview, of course, they never aired it. Of course, they didn't get what they came for. But what I'm trying to tell you is that I'm very skeptical about my work. I'm very skeptical about all these things I say. I'm skeptical about our discoveries. But we do what good scientists do. We replicate. W do variations. We talk to other teams. And other teams now have have replicated what we call "the search engine manipulation effect". So that's been replicated multiple times now. But all of this stuff though is so it's so inherently disturbing, which is kind of what you're getting at. You're saying, "Okay, this is disturbing and creepy and probably has a lot of implications for a lot of things, not just elections you know ."

When you believe in things

That you don't understand,

Then you suffer,

Superstition ain't the way...

...Hyperstition IS!