SUBLUNAR SPACE - ccru

Outside Attractor

2025-08-09T13:00:00+02:00

Part two of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and praxis and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times that emerged out of conversations with The Others on Discord.

In the first part we mapped out the Gnostic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism and the Gnosis of Acid Communism. Here we take the red thread further into uncharted territory.

Post Empire

Speculative Acid Communist Praxis centers around interventions of how to counteract and overcome a certain flavour of capitalism. The Capitalist Realism¹ Fisher describes operates on one core idea: neoliberalism², the hyperstition that "market dynamics" will naturally produce the best outcomes for society.

On an economic level it operates by minimizing state intervention and maximizing competition as the most effective way to achieve growth. On the individual level it frames each person as an autonomous "entrepreneur of the self", responsible for continuously optimizing their skills, choices, and market value with minimal external support.

Sounds familiar? Yes, but it's old news. The operating system of capitalism got recently upgraded. Let's take the red thread and enter new territory: Technofeudalism.

In this new era, but also already during the pandemic the state has re-emerged as an active economic agent instead of remaining a mere passive regulator and occasional crisis manager: fiscal stimuli, targeted bailouts, and trade tariffs, tools considered heretical to neoliberalism have suddenly become acceptable practice again. Of course not to the benefit of the citizen but to consolidate the capital accumulation of the ruling class.

As Yanis Varoufakis argues³, markets flooded with state money didn’t revive production but inflated asset prices and fueled speculative behavior. What began in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was only intensified by the pandemic-era bailouts: cheap money got sucked up by tech corporations and gave rise to what he calls "cloud capital", where value is no longer generated through production but extracted through digital rent, data capture, and control of internet infrastructure. Under the guise of crisis management the state empowered a new technofeudal class to entrench its sovereignty.³

No politicians saw the damage cloud capital would inflict upon democratic politics. In the same way that capitalism came about against the will of everyone, including the kings and bishops as well as the peasants, the rise of the cloudalists happened out of sight and behind the back of the vast majority, including the most powerful of historical agents.³

What has already been predicted by left theorists like McKenzie Wark⁴ or Jodi Dean⁵ before the pandemic is that the new capitalism does not progresses through linear innovation anymore, nor does it operate on the once holy principle of globalized free trade. Instead it decentralizes, both spatially and temporally: it now operates in localized zones of influence and online platforms and it metabolizes remnants of older systems into its own flesh.

In her latest work "Capital's Grave"⁶ Jodi Dean describes this as temporal montage: capitalism stitches archaic feudal residues like vassalage and dependency into digital infrastructures that masquerade as cutting-edge yet reintroduce the old choreography of servitude: remote work comes paired with digital surveillance, drivers use their own vehicles to serve opaque platforms, tenants are ruled by algorithmic landlords, e‑commerce now reaches deep into meatspace and has normalized the exploitative gig economy.⁶

In contrast to Fisher's overarching Archonic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism¹, Varoufakis and Dean argue that the once so globalized market is in the process of dissolving into a patchwork of micro-fiefdoms, platforms, and private sovereigns without any democratic oversight, that not only commodify user data but shape sociality itself. Individual agreements (Terms & Services, NDAs) have replaced law, loyalty has replaced rights, and obedience is rewarded with awards and colorful badges.³ ⁶

Beneath this structural transformation is what Dean calls the psychic order, a disciplinary regime that doesn’t just extract labor, but emotional allegiance. In this new era individuals are cast as "subjects supposed to care", constantly managing visibility, compliance, and self-optimization in systems that offer no care in return.⁶

The service sector bleeds into servants bleeds into serfs trapped for life in a life they didn’t choose. When the whims and consumption choices of a class of lords drive the visible economy—influencers, tech giants, strange billionaires—it registers affectively, in the feeling of hierarchy, inequality, and entrapment.⁶

Outside Attractor

It looks like we have entered the new Middle Ages, plague and robber barons included. Now, where's the church?

Ah, of course: Artificial Intelligence has emerged as the latest hyperstitional promise to the new serfdom: an omnipresent "agent" that offers "assistance" with simulated care and polite obedience, always ready to help but never accountable.

Behind the facade of usefulness it extracts the most private behavioral patterns and harvests "training data" from all of our cultural artifacts without any accountability for violating intellectual property rights or in fact any kind of rights. And it's just the beginning. The end goal is AGI: Artificial General Intelligence.⁷

The word Catholic comes from Greek καθολικός⁸ which means "general" or "universal" (from κατά "by / according to" + ὅλος "whole"). Technofeudal Catholicism is training itself on our desires while smoothing over the violence of its own instrumental logic.

Ancient medieval times were dominated by "superstition", late capitalism by "hyperstition", the new Middle Ages see the widespread phenomenon of "hypostition", a term not coined but picked up and described best by the Centre for Experimental Ontology (CEO)⁹ as the process by which an accepted fact or "reality‐vector" is deliberately undermined or recast as fiction.

Whereas hyperstition moves from fiction toward being treated as real, hypostition pushes from fact toward doubt or untruth. In practice, a hypostitional agent identifies a well‐established claim and undermines it by introducing a competing narrative that doesn't naturally belong. Through the naturally occurring human experience of receding time, ambiguous evidence, and the absence of firsthand perspective, hypostition invites people to question or reject what was once taken for granted, eroding consensus without the burden of proving an alternative truth.⁹

It is the legitimate mode of operation in science, where models are questioned and replaced by more accurate ones. But outside of that context Hypostition is a tool of ideological manipulation. Agents knowingly deploy misleading hints, using cultural anxieties and the fuzziness of memory, conspiratorial framing, or selective "evidence" to spread uncertainties and cast doubt on shared realities: from denying historical atrocities to discrediting science (vaccines, masking, climate change).⁹

Neofeudal era hypostiton accelerates the corrosion of any notion of the Real faster than ever before. Fisher himself had an eerily prescient insight in one of his blog posts from two decades ago:

In conditions of third (and fourth-order) simulacra, the giddy vertigo of hyperreality banalizes a coolly hallucinogenic ambience, absorbing all reality into simulation. Fiction is everywhere - and therefore, in a certain sense, eliminated as a specific category. [...] The ludic becomes the ludicrous.¹²

Reality is rapidly dissolving into make-believe fiction all around us to such an extent that the "fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality"¹ which Fisher saw as moments charged with revolutionary possibility are now drowned out in the constant noise of high-speed hypostitional spectacle.

The hyper-normalization of political post-truth anomalies has shocked even veteran anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour, who assigned it in his pre-pandemic 2018 essay Down to Earth¹⁰ its very own category he dubbed "Out-of-this-World".

In opposition to the classical concepts of political polarization between the "Local" attractor of the conservative right and the "Global" attractor of the progressive left this attractor is dominated by cynicism, lack of political vision, performativity, lack of trust, and a push away from the world that one inhabits.¹⁰

In a sense this can be understood as a new vector away from the Inside towards an Outside. Not from Kenoma to Pleroma, but a different kind: the new Outside is inherently irrational, alien, and destructive, which is completely in line with Jodi Dean's observation on the logic of Technofeudalism:

While destruction has always accompanied capitalist production—destruction of lives, communities, and the environment—it increasingly operates as a compulsion rather than a side effect: investors raid and dismantle functioning firms; tech start-ups aim at demolishing entire sectors; cryptocurrency-mining operations consume enormous amounts of energy while making nothing at all, cryptocurrency being the ultimate anti-commodity.⁶

In this climate, the spectre of Fascism has re-taken center stage during Trump's second term and opened the Overton window for neoreactionary politics worldwide.

We are now witnessing what Slavoj Žižek calls "Soft Fascism"¹¹: not overt barbarism, but a conservative revolution that sustains neufeudal capital through cosplaying a strong state apparatus that cloaks authoritarian control in hypostition and cultural nostalgia.

As in the past, fascism tends to bring with it both ideological and technological innovation. Its new bundle includes two projected axes: Artificial Intelligence and a large-scale adoption of Accelerationism.

For Re-Accelerationist Neoreaction, escape into uncompensated cybernetic runaway is the guiding objective — strictly equivalent to intelligence explosion, or techno-commercial Singularity. Everything else is a trap (by definitive, system-dynamic necessity).¹³

This quote comes from the intellectual originator of contemporary accelerationism, CCRU's Nick Land. He developed an obsession with the term "Outside" early on, using it to refer to any intelligence beyond the sphere of the human.

Between an incursion from the Outside, and a process of emergence, there is no real difference. [...] Capitalism is — beyond all serious question — an alien invasion¹⁴

The notion of the Outside mutated from a pleromatic realm of potentialities to a more Lovecraftian version of inorganic machinic space, capitalism itself, reaching in to pull us towards an AI singularity.

What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space.¹⁵

The "Outside" has become Latour's "Out-of-this-World" attractor on steroids, a vector towards a high-speed form of machinic Accelerationist Catholic Neofeudalism, dominated by soft fascist versions of control and spectacle and dissolving all remains of rational consensus reality while going full throttle towards the looming climate apocalypse.

Refutation of All Heresies

The above may sound like yet another installment in the genre of speculative doom, but the intention here is not to mythologize collapse or aestheticize despair into some type of Gnostic cosmology.

Despite these new seemingly irrational apocalyptic conditions I am confident we won't need a revealer to save us.

This is not a prophecy. Rather, it is an attempt to map the contours of a system that is already operational: the rituals of platform obedience, the feudalization of labor, the sacralization of AI, and the mindset of the ruling class. If hyperstition and hypostition thrive on ambiguity and fiction, the aim here is to make its mechanisms visible.

I believe that we can treat capitalism as what it really is and always has been: not an alien, cosmic force but an artificial egregore run and maintained by mere humans, powerful but not at all omnipotent, with flaws, holes, and predictable patterns. Instead of treating it like a demiurgic force, we need to understand it as a set of human behaviours, human cultural activity, and a result of a certain mode of human thought.

If that holds true we can find blind spots and faults in the human made systems around us. We can attempt to alter our epistemological models, create new modes of relating to each other and shift our own perception. We will probably not be able to stop the climate catastrophe, but if we rethink and adapt our strategies toward more haunted and numinous modes of endurance and resistance, we will persevere in these new Middle Ages.

Whereas hope and fear are superstitious (although they may have some hyperstitional effects), 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.¹⁶

Being aware of the Outside Attractor means we know where to look for an antidote: tracing the opposite vector inward and downward.

...continue with the next part, in which we will descend down into the dark abyss we have managed to avoid so far: the liminal void of the pandemic, where time warped, and something terrifying, tender, and possible tried to emerge.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. zer0 classics, CollectiveInk, 2022. Publisher Link ↩↩↩
Wikipedia: Neoliberalism ↩
Varoufakis, Yanis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism? Penguin Books, 2023 Publisher Link ↩↩↩↩
Wark, McKenzie. Capital is dead: Is this something worse?. Verso books, 2021. Publisher Link ↩
Jodi Dean, Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?, Los Angeles Review of Books, May 12, 2020 ↩
Dean, Jodi. Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Verso Books, 2025. Publisher Link ↩↩↩↩↩↩
Justin Hendrix, Should AGI Really Be the Goal of Artificial Intelligence Research?, Tech Policy Press, March 9, 2025 ↩
Wiktionary: catholic ↩
Graham Freestone, Notes on the Concept of Hypostition, Centre for Experimental Ontology, January 6, 2020 ↩↩↩
Latour, Bruno. Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons, 2018. Publisher Link ↩↩
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on 'soft' fascism, AI & the effects of shamelessness in public life, OxfordUnion, YouTube ↩
Mark Fisher, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, k-punk, June 13, 2004 ↩
Nick Land (2013). Xenosystems Blog. Quoted on retrochronic.com ↩
Nick Land (2016). Xenosystems Blog. Quoted on retrochronic.com ↩
Nick Land (1993). Machinic Desire, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, p. 338. Publisher Link ↩
Mark Fisher, Abandon hope (summer is coming), k-punk, May 12, 2015 ↩

Capitalist Kenoma

2025-07-31T18:00:00+02:00

Part one of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and praxis and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times that emerged out of conversations with The Others on Discord.

#acid-chthomunism

In the midst of the raging pandemic in the spring of 2021, I had just finished reading two of Mark Fisher's books. At the time his harsh critique of life under capitalism struck me not only as depressingly pessimistic, but as too overcredited and reified, as I witnessed this very system begin to crumble under a viral insurrection that exposed the fragile fiction of normalcy we had all taken for granted.

I shared my thoughts with my fellow weirdos in the well-guarded Discord sanctuary known as The Others, where we discussed how the materialist mindset so dominant on the Left leaves little room for the kind of transcendental experiences needed to escape a worldview obsessed with being trapped in reality.

This led to the creation of a dedicated channel to continue our conversation about the potentials of progressive occultism, post-colonial forms of spirituality, and more earthly, emancipatory rites of magic for these end times of perpetual crisis, climate change, and fading empire. As a chthonic nod to Mark Fisher's concept of 'Acid Communism', I named the channel #acid-chthomunism.

Four years on, I'm finally carving out some time to distill our collective vibe into a series of magical‑realist political essays, probably with some segways into metaphysics. Not because I've suddenly found extra hours in the day, but because the growing urgency to counter this insane mind virus of an accelerationist, AI‑driven post‑truth dystopia that has emerged from the rubble of the pandemic's rift in our timeline.

My gratitude goes out to The Others, especially Dan and Ed, for their ongoing valuable input and engagement.

Before we begin our dungeon crawl let's tie the red thread to what had started our conversations in the first place: Mark Fisher's magnum opus "Capitalist Realism" and his hope for "Acid Communism."

Capitalist Kenoma

Mark Fisher was a British cultural theorist and critic, best known for his blog k‑punk, unequaled in his poignant rhetoric and commentary on neoliberalism's hollow promises and culture under late capitalism. He was part of the infmaous CCRU¹ and gained a reputation for linking topics from rave culture to corporate bureaucracy with reflections on depression and mental health.

In his magnum opus Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?², that was kind of a defining text for a disillusioned Millennial generation, Fisher coined the term "capitalist realism" to describe the pervasive belief that capitalism is not merely the dominant economic system but "seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable". Drawing on Soviet "socialist realism"³ he articulates the ambient depression and sense of impossibility that marked the post-2008 cultural and political landscape. Fisher shows that at its core Capitalism operates by exorcising "the spectre of a world which could be free"⁴, by erasing the very conditions that might make alternatives conceivable. He also lays out in painful details how market logic reshapes everything from education, healthcare, and culture.

The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. [...] In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself.

Fisher's harrowing diagnosis of a capitalist reality so totalizing that it shapes our perception and enforces conformity makes it seem like an almost metaphysical condition. It is strikingly reminiscent of how Gnostic myths describe the world as a false and flawed prison matrix ruled by an evil Demiurge⁵ and his Archons⁶. Although Fisher never explicitly invokes Gnosticism, the structural parallels struck me enough to run with this trope and dare a closer comparison.

Just as the Gnostics saw no way out of the material cosmos without salvation, the common contemporary sentiment that "there is no alternative" feels like an Archonic⁶ decree, closing off our political imagination before it can even begin. By pathologizing systemic injustice as individual failure, capitalism conceals the collective roots of our suffering, just as Archons⁶ in Manichaean⁷ or Sethian⁸ narratives insist that the soul's entrapment is inevitable.

In the realm of culture, Fisher draws attention to the collapse of genuine novelty into endless pastiche and ironic detachment. Corporate pop, blockbuster cinema, and hip start‑up aesthetics all recycle the same safe tropes, offering the illusion of choice while reinforcing a single marketable worldview.

Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled "alternative" or "independent" cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. "Alternative" and "independent" don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.²

This mirrors the Gnostic notion that Archons⁶ can simulate transcendence, pseudo‑visions of freedom that ultimately serve the Demiurge's⁵ ends.

The reification of capitalism as an all‑encompassing, omnipotent, godlike force does feel Gnostic. Yet, unlike the ancient Gnostics, who developed coherent methods of spiritual liberation, thinkers such as Mark Fisher and others in the influential Freudo‑Lacanian‑Marxist lineage⁹ adopt an obsessively materialist, psychoanalytic approach to the relationship between humanity and capitalism.

This trope is also present in Guy Debord's "Spectacle"¹⁰, Hardt/Negri's¹¹ as well as Tiqqun's¹² "Empire", and Mumford¹³ or Latouche's¹⁴ "Megamachine". Despite their claims of rational and materialist theory and praxis many of their analyses seem very much like religious eschatology, minus the salvation. Here an example from Tiqqun:

Empire is the kind of domination that knows no Outside, that has gone so far as to sacrifice itself as the Same in order to rid itself of the Other. Empire excludes nothing, substantially; it only precludes that anything present itself as other, that anything escape the general equivalence. ²⁵

Like his comrades in spirit Mark Fisher certainly put his finger into the collective wound of alienation and nostalgic longing for a lost past or unattainable future that haunts everyone who has been on similar trains of thoughts. There is a kind of romance attributed to the politization of despair and the affect of seeing things "how they really are".

The skeptical stance of metacognitively observing "the big picture" can be an quite seductive aesthetic but it would be negligent to ignore fact that it is also a symptom of depression. There is a danger in the reification of estrangement both individual and collective because it mutates into a demonic thoughtform that pulls its host into a downward spiral. In Gnostic cosmology as in Capitalist Realism the imagined and lived doom and gloom narratives become more and more real.

It is tragically ironic because it was the CCRU¹ itself that introduced the term "hyperstition"¹⁵, showing how fictional narratives infiltrate and reshape actual reality: invented names, stories, or rumors become treated as if they were real, and in doing so exert tangible influence.

Ultimately Fisher's work "Capitalist Realism" seeks to reveal the systemic flaws of capitalism, and it does so in very eloquent and captivating ways, but it also operates as catalyst of the hyperstition it seeks to counteract: by mythologizing capitalism it naturalizes and reinforces its grip on our collective imagination.

Towards Pleroma

To follow our thread, let's take Capitalist Realism a bit further and continue to map its central thesis onto the Archonic⁶ prison structure from Gnostic myth. This confronts us with the question of how to actually attain liberation and gnosis¹⁶.

In Capitalist Realism Fisher establishes a secular version of Gnosis¹⁶: collective critique and experimentation, building communal practices to dissolve the capitalist frame and reviving forgotten languages of solidarity and care.²

Where Gnosticism offers the promise of salvation through mystical insight and the guidance of a revealer like Sophia¹⁷ or Christ, Fisher posits a hyperstitional meme: despite reservations about the wording he dubs it "Acid Communism."⁴

If we are no longer to define ourselves negatively, by our opposition to Capital, what will be the name of our positive project? I don't believe that the old signifier communism can be revived for this purpose. It is now irretrievably tainted by terrible associations, forever tied to the nightmares of the 20th century. At the moment, our desire is nameless – but it is real. Our desire is for the future – for an escape from the impasses of the flatlands of Capital's endless repetitions – and it comes from the future – from the very future in which new perceptions, desires, cognitions are once again possible. As yet, we can grasp this future only in glimmers. But it is for us to construct this future, even as – at another level – it is already constructing us: a new kind of collective agent, a new possibility of speaking in the first person plural. At some point in this process, the name for our new desire will appear and we will recognize it.²⁶

It's heartbreaking that Fisher's own lost battle with depression prevented him from fully bringing this idea to life before his premature passing in 2017. Judging from his late fragments⁴, drafts, and lectures¹⁸ it becomes clear that his vision was to recover a revolutionary potential from the countercultural experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, an era fundamentally characterized by collective joy, communal experiences, and a belief in the possibility of radical social transformation.

For Fisher, the acid in Acid Communism is not merely a nod to psychedelics, but a shorthand for any experience or cultural form that dissolves the barriers imposed by commodified individualism and points toward a more fully social existence.

In his brilliant commentary¹⁹ on Acid Communism Dr Gregory Marks writes:

Acid Communism unites weird experience with collective becoming, to shatter the old forms of perception and cognition and bring about something other. We cannot expect to go through this process unchanged. The collective desire of Acid Communism transforms the very sense of time and space upon which our atomised and alienated selves are predicated. Yet there is a joy in dissolving into this new mass becoming, which destroys the categories that previously bound us.¹⁹

Even when "the weird" is brought into the conversation it is striking how oddly "unhaunted" Acid Communism is. It really feels like there is a longing for some transformative high strangeness while being stuck in a materialist mindset where the only way to conceptualize the numinous is through the psychedelic lense. I know because I've been there myself most of my life.

The part in his book where Fisher comes closest to the notion of metaphysical gnosis is when he invokes Lacan:

For Lacan, the Real is what any "reality" must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.²

Based on Lacan's Real²⁰ and also Kant's notion of the Noumenon²¹ the CCRU¹ established the term "Outside" in many of their works to describe the unknowable ontic reality beyond what human intellect can grasp with its psychophysiological and epistemological faculties of knowledge.

In Gnostic cosmology the incomplete and false material world is usually referred to as the 'kenoma'²², while the complete and true world of abundance from which we are separated is called 'pleroma'²³.

The enigmatic lure and hopeful ambiguity of Acid Communism as a hyperstitional thoughtform is a powerful magical tool. I do like the emotions and the ideas the term evokes and I love its experimental approach to "consciousness raising"²⁴ as a tool to map out the Capitalist Kenoma from the inside in order to imagine a Pleromatic Outside.

But I have doubts about its proposed implementation...

An Acid Communist Praxis as imagined by Fisher and his adherents might admittedly have had a small chance of pushing towards Pleroma in the era before the pandemic.

As might have the idea of just ridiculing the paranoid neo‑Gnosticism of Capitalist Realism as pessimistic hyperbole like we did during the pandemic.

But times have changed dramatically...

...continue with the next part, in which we will pull the red thread beyond the neoliberal kenoma, through digital acceleration and hypostitional collapse toward the pull of the Outside Attractor.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental collective of theorists and artists at the University of Warwick associated with figures such as Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, or Reza Negarestani who explored cybernetics, philosophy, science fiction, rave culture, internet culture, and occultism. They produced an impressive body of work that blurred the boundaries between theory and fiction. ↩↩↩
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. zer0 classics, CollectiveInk, 2022. Publisher Link ↩↩↩↩
Wikipedia: Socialist Realism ↩
Mark Fisher | Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction) ↩↩↩
The demiurge (Greek demiurgos, “craftsman”) is the being who created the world in Gnosticism. The Gnostics identified him with the god of the Old Testament. The Gnostic scriptures portray him as ignorant, malicious, and utterly inferior to the true God who sent Christ to earth to save humankind from the demiurge’s evil world. The Gnostic Demiurge, Gnosticism Explained ↩↩
In Gnosticism, the archons (from Greek arkhon, “ruler”[1]) were malevolent, sadistic beings who controlled the earth, as well as many of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of humans. They assisted their master, the demiurge, with the creation of the world, and continued to help him administer his oppressive rule. The Gnostic Demiurge, Gnosticism Explained ↩↩↩↩↩
Wikipedia: Manichaeism ↩
The Classic Gnostics ("Sethians"), Gnosticism Explained ↩
Wikipedia: Freudo-Marxism ↩
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967, Full Text on marxists.org ↩
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001. ↩
Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Vol. 28. MIT Press, 2020. ↩
Mumford, Lewis. "The first megamachine." Diogenes 14.55 (1966): 1-15. ↩
Latouche, Serge. "La société moderne face au défi technologique: la mégamachine et le destin." ETUDES INTERNATIONALES-QUEBEC- 29 (1998): 669-682. ↩
Delphi Carstens, Hyperstition, 0(rphan)d(rift>) archive, 2010 ↩
“Gnosis” is a special, mystical kind of knowledge to which the Gnostics claimed to have privileged access. Gnosis, Gnosticism Explained ↩↩
Sophia, Gnosticism Explained ↩
Mark Fisher, Matt Colquhoun, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, Repeater Books, 2021 Publisher Page ↩
More Than This: Notes on Acid Communism, The Wasted World, December 16, 2018 ↩↩
Jacques Lacan: Real, No Subject - an encyclopedia of Lacanian psychoanalysis ↩
Wikipedia: Noumenon ↩
Wikipedia: Kenoma ↩
Pleroma, Greek for “Fullness”, is the name the Gnostics gave to Heaven. The Pleroma and the Aeons, Gnosticism Explained ↩
Consciousness-Raising is a tool of the Women’s Liberation Movement and is sometimes called “telling it like it is.” In C-R, women answer a question using examples from their personal lives, then the group uses these personal testimonies to draw conclusions about the political root of women’s so-called “personal” problems. Source ↩
Tiqqun, This Is Not a Program, pg. 37, Semiotext(e), 2011 ↩
Mark Fisher, For now, our desire is nameless, The European, May 20th 2014, Web Archive ↩

Machinic Dendrophiles

2025-07-14T14:45:00+02:00

A Critical Reflection on Hyperstitional Occultism in general and the trope of the Tree of Life and the Numogram in specific, resulting from multiple attempts of working with these concepts. I know this article might rub practitioners of Golden Dawn style magick, Thelemites, Chaos Magicians and Neolemurian time sorcerers the wrong way, but it's just like my opinion, man ¹.

v.1.2 - July 18, 2025

I think it's for us to make sense of trees, not to use arborescence as a kind of criterion of philosophical insufficiency. Nick Land²⁶

Cutting Down the Tree

On my research journey exploring different popular Western magical currents I could not help but notice a widespread obsession with the trope of the 'Tree of Life'. It’s almost impossible to avoid. At first, I even assumed there was no way around it, since it’s so prominently featured in nearly all occult literature. While I totally understand the aesthetic lure of a schematic concept of reality, the more I delved into it the less it clicked with me. That also includes its cybergoth sibling, the Numogram.

To recap, the Tree of Life is the central diagram of most prominent of schools of Jewish mysticism, the Lurianic Kabbalah. Likely influenced by earlier mystical frameworks such as The Seven Palaces ² it is composed of ten spheres called Sephirot (סְפִירוֹת). It maps the process by which the infinite divine source, Ein Sof (אֵין סוֹף), emanates into creation. Each sephira corresponds to metaphysical principles, ethical qualities, archetypes, and aspects of the soul. The Tree serves as both a cosmological map and a contemplative tool, guiding the mystic in a lifelong process of refinement and return to the divine. It is embedded in Jewish liturgy, halachic life, and inseparable from the communal, theological, and ritual contexts in which it developed. ³ ⁴

It's deeply fascinating but I am neither Jewish, nor do I believe that it can be fully grokked outside of its spiritual tradition.

Although the diagram reached its most recognizable form in 16th-century Lurianic Kabbalah, its basic structure was already established in earlier texts. Christian thinkers such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin were among the first to extract and reinterpret this structure outside its Jewish context ⁵. They appropriated the Tree of Life and reframed it through a Neoplatonic-Christian lens, using it to validate Christian theological concepts while severing it from its halachic roots. Fair enough.

My sincere apologies in advance to anyone using Victorian lodge magick in their practice, but in my opinion the really dumbed down misappropriation of the Tree of Life kicked off in the beginning of the 20th century when the magical order of the Golden Dawn placed the Tree of Life at its core, not in connection with any of its original Jewish theological depths but as a kind of aesthetic filing cabinet onto which planets, Tarot cards, Hebrew letters, alchemical symbols, archangels, astrological elements and other endless occult correspondences got mapped ⁶. This reification of structure and symbolic systemization was just the beginning.

Then came Aleister Crowley ("Hold my beer!") and took the Tree of Life further, subordinated it to his own take on pseudo-Kemetic philosophy called Thelema and layered it with Vedic chakras, his own numerological obsessions, erotic metaphysics, and personal empowerment ⁷. The result is even more of a cringeworthy intellectual and spiritual distortion.

From what I gathered, Jewish Kabbalists understood the mystical path as inherently bound to communal responsibility, reverence for the divine, and a centuries-long interpretive tradition. The occult appropriations, by contrast, are individualized, instrumentalized, and divorced from authentic mystical engagement. Where the Jewish kabbalistic Zohar spoke of the soul's yearning for union with the divine through humility and worship, or "Avodah" (עֲבוֹדָה), Crowley speaks of the magician imposing their will on the cosmos.

I find all of this especially problematic in the face of the unprecedented violence and marginalization of Jewish communities during the same period by the same cultures that romanticized their mysticism.

The obsession with the Tree of Life trope didn't die with the early 20th century occult revival. Fast forward to the end of the century where it was regurgitated during the 'Chaos Magic' fad and eventually mutated into something new when the academic artist collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) picked up the trope and cyber-fetishized it.

Enter the Numogram

The CCRU was an experimental collective of theorists and artists at the University of Warwick associated with figures such as Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, or Reza Negarestani who explored cybernetics, philosophy, science fiction, rave culture, internet culture, and occultism. They produced an impressive body of work that blurred the boundaries between theory and fiction.

The CCRU had a lot of innovative ideas that influenced occult thinking at the time, most notably the concept of Hyperstition ⁸. The neologism that combines the words 'hype' and 'superstition' describes the process by which fictional or speculative ideas can influence reality by circulating through culture and belief. Unlike traditional superstitions, which are typically rooted in inherited myths or fears, hyperstitions are understood as self-fulfilling narratives.

Another key occult innovation from the CCRU was the inception of the Alphanumeric Qabbalah ⁹, a system of English gematria that assigns numerical values to the letters of the Latin alphabet. I make regular use of this system ¹ and plan to explore it in depth in a dedicated article.

The CCRU's most iconic hyperstitional tool is the Numogram ¹⁰, a symbolic diagram built on the base-10 numerical digits and made of ten numerical zones grouped into five pairs, or syzygies, linked by their digits adding up to nine. The difference between the numbers in each pair creates a current, forming the system's primary flows ¹¹.

At a glance the Numogram resembles the Tree of Life in its geometry and like its Jewish predecessor proposes a universal map of forces and movements.

Part of the hyperstitional myth is an explicit critique of the original Tree of Life as a distorted, degenerated form of the Numogram, reduced to a baroque relic unworthy of serious occult inquiry. While both diagrams share structural similarities, such as ten zones, numerological methods, and symbolic mappings, the Tree is portrayed as an incoherent system upheld by tradition rather than principle. Its structure is dismissed as arbitrary, with numerical order and Hebrew letters assigned mystical weight without any internal logic ¹² ¹³.

Where the magical orders of the early 20th century simply appropriated and dumbed-down the Tree of Life to shoehorn endless correspondences into it, the CCRU explicitly rejects its esoteric value and ridicules its Jewish roots in favor of their own techno-occult version of it.

Lemurian Time Sorcery

Based around the Numogram comes a plethora of esoteric lore ranging from Theosophy-esque myths of a forgotten Lemurian magical current that runs in opposition to the western Atlantean tradition, to a matrix of Lemurian correspondences too deep and complex to explore meaningfully within the scope of this article. A great primer on the topic is this article by Mikal Mindzenty.

The gist of the core of the myth is that numeric pairings of the Numogram are haunted by demons representing particular types of temporal forces, as well as Lemurs, described as ancestral or undead time-beings who drift through the channels and gates. These hyperstitional entities turn it from a static diagram into a dynamic network of haunting, often hostile, intelligences.

Obviously borrowing from the structure of magical grimoires the 'gram lore has inspired plenty of chaos magicians to engage with the system in practical ways - from divination using the Numogram to invocations of the demons and communing with Lemurs.

Notable sources of Numogrammatic magic are

Anders J. Aamodt's 'Unleashing the Numogram'
'Time Sorcery' by Vexsys and Neospare
The Lemurian Times community

From a Chaos Magic perspective, this is all very sound, exciting, and innovative. And again: apologies to all neolemurian mages out there having a lot of fun delving into all this. As much as I feel drawn to the cybergothic vibe of the CCRU's ramblings, and prefer a flat circuit of equal numbers over a hierarchical tree of emanations, and love the idea of "time sorcery," I just can't help but cringe at the blatant disregard for magical tradition, dismissed as unnecessary baggage in both Chaos Magic in general and the CCRU's occultism in particular.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to the appropriation of magical traditions. I believe all of magic is, at its core, rooted in syncretism and appropriation. Just look at the Greek Magical Papyri, which blended Kemetic, Hellenic, Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Mesopotamian elements. But it did so with humility and awe, placing reverence and worship at the heart of its practice rather than discarding them.

My critique of the Numogram isn't primarily about its rejection or misappropriation of the Tree of Life's origins. More than that, I simply don't find any convincing evidence that the Numogram holds metaphysical or practical value beyond the self-perpetuating fiction of its hyperstitional myth.

Channeling the Nine

The Numogram poses as a metaphysical diagram of time and desire, although its entire structure is arbitrary. It treats the decimal system as if it were cosmic truth.

In that sense it's no more credible than other New Age concepts derived from decimal numerology, such as Vortex Mathematics by Marko Rodin¹⁴, or the 369 Manifestation Method¹⁵ that is based on a posthumous and unsupported attribution to Nikola Tesla:

If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have the key to the universe. ²⁷ ²⁸

I would even argue Vortex Mathematics offers a more elegant and coherent system of numeric relations than the Numogram and possibly even more potential for magical application, it just lacks the cybergothic coolness of CCRU inspired techno-occultism.

What all of the mentioned systems have in common are their insistence that the relations between numbers in the common base-10 system reflect some kind of metaphysical gnosis. In any base-n, patterns emerge. The moment you change the number base, the supposed special status of 9 (n-1) becomes completely arbitrary¹⁶ ¹⁷. The truth is that patterns pop up all the time in mathematics, because mathematics is basically just the rigorous study of patterns.

While the authors, commentators, and practitioners all acknowledge the Numogram's arbitrary nature ¹⁸ and even discuss alternative base systems ¹⁹, some still paradoxically insist that this arbitrary decimal structure maps reality itself. The claim that the Numogram "completes itself from the beginning"²⁰ relies not on metaphysical rigor but on the illusion of internal coherence derived from the cherry-picked arithmetic operations used. Like Gnostic sects obsessed with secret numerical codes ²¹, discrete digits are fetishized as keys to transcendence, but any theological or ethical grounding those traditions historically claimed are rejected.

Numogram praticioners claim that the CCRU's magic is valid even if invented, because it "works" and has inspired practice ¹⁸. But this overlooks a deeper problem: when everything becomes potentially true via belief and performance, magic is reduced to a speculative solipsism. The Numogrammatic system of magic is not a revelation, but a simulation of one: occult spectacle, where vibe replaces structure, and memes masquerade as mysteries.

Of course I understand that this spectacle is not accidental - it's the whole point! The Numogram is embedded in the CCRU's larger theory of hyperstition. Rather than seek truth or spiritual transformation, hyperstition revels in simulation that self-replicates.

The fact that both the concept of hyperstition and the creation of the Numogram originate with none other than the supreme edgelord of contemporary philosophy, Nick Land makes me wonder whether the nihilistic void at the heart of the latter isn't, in fact, intended.

Into the Dark Land

Best known for his provocative fusion of continental theory, cybernetics, and occult aesthetics Land's early work combined Deleuzian metaphysics, Gothic horror, and anti-humanist cybernetics to formulate a radical vision centered on fragmentation, machinic desire, and the breakdown of subjectivity.

Over time, Land's thought shifted dramatically toward far-right accelerationism ²², embracing the unraveling forces of capitalism not as something to resist, but as an inhuman engine to be unleashed. He became a key figure in the Dark Enlightenment ²³ movement, promoting neo-reactionary ideas and anti-democratic techno-politics. In his writings on Bitcoin ²⁴, Land treats it as a form of decentralized, algorithmic governance, an emergent intelligence he aligns with capital's escape from human control. His writings reject emancipatory politics in favor of techno-mysticism, elitism, and the aesthetic glorification of entropy ²⁵.

Numbo Jumbo

I totally respect the work and effort being put into Neolemurian Timer Sorcery to make it a valuable system of magic beyond PDF archeology, ironic memes, and schizoposting but for me personally it feels like yet another take on the trope of reifying dendriform graph theory into something metaphysical.

At the end of the day the Numogram is just a diagram of decimal number relations. It is a symbol of hyperstitional belief mechanics rather than an occult map of time. Its "magic" seems to work through sheer belief but without metaphysics. Lemurian Time Sorcery is ritual without responsibility based on myth without meaning. It is aesthetic nihilism wearing occult drag, built to deconstruct, to signal mysticism without ever submitting to it.

If the Jewish Tree of Life once served as a guide toward transformation and communion with something greater, the Victorian orders reduced it to a fetishized aesthetic. Mutated into the Numogram, it now gazes inward into a void of its own making, where meaning is endlessly deferred. The Tree of Life served as a ladder, the Numogram is a closed circuit. It remains a hyperstitional black box, a trap for the imagination, not a tool of liberation.

machinic dendrophiles = AQ 369 = a dubious inheritance = beautiful creatures = completely untrue = drowned continents = entirely by machines = everything counts = fear is the mind killer = intellectual dark web = little lemur people = master manipulator = mirror of existence = neosavage aesthetics = no room for excuses = numerology for life = pandemoniac practices = pathbreaking research = qabbalistic resonance = rituals and doctrine = struggle for power = subordination codes = the demons of unbelief = the ghost continent = the great conspiracy = they all look the same = vortex mathematics = warping into zones ↩↩
Bethsheba Ashe, The Trees of Life, Times of Israel, December 10, 2020 ↩
My Jewish Learning, Isaac Luria and Kabbalah in Safed ↩
Center of Online Judaic Studies, Lurianic Kabbalah and Mysticism ↩
Wikipedia, Christian Kabbalah ↩
Hermetic Library, Samuel Scarborough, The Tree of Life: Filing Cabinet of the Western Mystery Tradition ↩
Thelemapedia, Tree of Life ↩
0rphan drift archive, Delphi Carstens, Hyperstition, 2010 ↩
Hypestition Blog, Qabbala 101: Part 1, July 14, 2004 ↩
Cybernetic culture research unit, Decimal Numogram ↩
Each zone's digits add up to a gate, which determines a channel, a hidden path connecting different zones. These channels form the Numogram's secondary flows, connecting otherwise separate parts of the diagram. The currents divide the system into three time loops: the Time-Circuit (a central cycle), the Warp (upper loop), and the Plex (lower loop). Gates and channels link these time systems, enabling movement between them and shaping how time is manipulated within the diagram. ↩
Cybernetic culture research unit, absctract culture, digital hyperstition, 6a. The Vault of Murmurs, "1. Numogram and Otz Chaiim" ↩
Hyperstition blog, Qabbala Unshelled, December 28, 2004 ↩
Backup of the Rodinaerodynamics.org website ↩
Ipek Williamson, Tesla’s Code to the Universe: Understanding the 369 Manifestation Method ↩
Thayer Watkins, The Sum of Digits for Multiples of Numbers ↩
The Problem Site, Vortex Based Math - Ask Professor Puzzler ↩
Cluness, Bob. Step into the Pandemonium: On Breathing Life into the CCRU's Invented Magical Traditions. February, 2021. ↩↩
Colectiva Tzitzimiyotl, IMEX Research Reconstruction Program, X profile @Numogrammatix ↩
Vexsys, Time Sorcery, Gate Zero, 2020, p. 15. ↩
Kalvesmaki, Joel. 2013. The Theology of Arithmetic: Number Symbolism in Platonism and Early Christianity. Hellenic Studies Series 59. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. ↩
Nick Land, A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism ↩
Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment ↩
ŠUM | Journal for contemporary art criticism and theory, Šum#10.2 / Nick Land: Crypto-Current, An Introduction to Bitcoin and Philosophy, November 20, 2018 ↩
Verso Books Blog, McKenzie Wark, On Nick Land, June 19, 2017 ↩
The Dangerous Maybe, Nick Land Explains the Numogram, July 1st, 2025 ↩
While he was deeply fascinated by numbers, frequencies, and resonance, there is no documented evidence that Nikola Tesla espoused any specific theory about 3, 6, and 9 having mystical properties. The only attested anecdote is that he was especially obsessed with the number 3. ↩
OCD UK, The History of OCD, Nikola Tesla ↩