Iperstizione

HYPERSTITION (hype + superstition) — a fiction that makes itself real through the act of circulating. Manufactures the future. An idea becomes hyperstitional when its spread alters the behavior of the systems it describes, closing the loop between narrative and infrastructure. The concept originates in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick, at the intersection of critical theory, science fiction, and systems engineering. Not to be confused with the classical "self-fulfilling prophecy": hyperstition doesn't require conscious belief — it works even, perhaps especially, when it propagates as noise, meme, glitch, low-fidelity cultural artifact. Signal detected in: algorithmic financial markets, pre-social network cultures, accelerationist aesthetics, AI narratives that end up steering AI development itself. STATUS: the term is now widely re-mediated and defanged through commercial/aesthetic use. Its original charge — the idea that language itself is a temporal weapon — remains under surveillance.