Storying against hope in the anthropocene: On the mechanology of hyperstitions

Nick Land (2012) once described hyperstitions as “semiotic productions that make themselves real” – stories that actualize themselves and produce their own realities, imagining new futures for us all. As the full effects of human industrial civilization continue to unveil themselves in the anthropocene as the beginnings of a process that will soon render the planet Earth uninhabitable, it becomes essential to track the stories that are developing and expanding their own mutant machinic systems of reproduction, in order to understand what futures will have been available to us. In this chapter we seek to become students of the mechanisms of the replicative processes of some of the hyperstitions that are at work in organizations, individual and collective, of the anthropocene. To do this we will track the imbrication of a series of stories of Thomas the fieldmouse, a meeting about something called “sustainable innovation”, and journal entries about a mall that lives forever at the end of the world, in order to understand hyperstitions and the role that they can play in the storying of the future.