A few years back I wrote a story about what seemed to be a curious coincidence: that famed rocket maker (for both the Nazis and NASA) Wernher von Braun had written a science fiction novel about humans traveling to Mars, in which the leader of Martian government was titled ‘Elon’. This fictional reference seemed almost too specific to the reality unfolding around us, to the point of perhaps being paranormal (note that Musk’s father has since offered a prosaic explanation, claiming that the book actually inspired the naming of his son, but I’ve explained elsewhere why that seems unlikely).
However, in recent months, while diving deep into the history of the neo-reactionary political movement (NRx) that seems to be staging a bloodless coup in America right now, another possibility came to mind. One of the central philosophers of NRx is Nick Land, who bestowed the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ name upon the movement in his essay of the same name. Way back in the 1990s, Land co-founded, with Sadie Plant, the influential Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at the University of Warwick in England, and during that time coined the term ‘hyperstition’. In short, hyperstitions are “memetic ideas which bring about their own reality”, or as Land himself described it:
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. –
And as another influential philosopher from the CCRU, the late Mark Fisher explains it: “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… 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…”
During the 2000s, as Wikipedia puts it, “Land suffered a breakdown after a period of ‘fanatical’ amphetamine abuse.” But in the decade after, his star rose again – although in a very different space: he became a huge proponent of Curtis Yarvin’s neo-reactionary ideology (basically, that democracy and nation states were no longer relevant, and that only a small band of smart/rich people should be in charge through the creation of corporate nation states – see my article ‘The Technocratic Conspiracy‘ for more details on this), and espoused a number of toxic, racist far-right views.
But it is this crossover of his idea of hyperstition, along with his role in popularising NRx among the tech elite, that got me thinking. As Professor Roger Burrows, an expert on NRx and Nick Land, has noted:
Land’s concept of ‘hyperstition’ – the idea that speculative ideas can shape reality simply by being propagated – plays a significant role in NRx ideology. Cyberpunk literature, particularly novels like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and William Gibson’s Neuromancer, serves as a foundation for hyperstitional thinking in NRx circles. In Snow Crash, Stephenson introduces the concept of the ‘metaverse’ and envisions a world of quasi-sovereign city-states that closely resemble Yarvin’s Patchwork model. Similarly, Neuromancer, which popularized the concept of ‘cyberspace,’ depicts a future where corporations control society, side-lining national governments and public interest. These novels, with their privatized, authoritarian structures, provide NRx advocates with a blueprint for reimagining governance as a privilege reserved for an elite.
Many of the inspirations that they draw upon are science fiction tech, like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, or especially Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and the role of various kinds of movies, Bladerunner being probably the most marked one, where these entities become what they call hyperstitions: fictions that will themselves into existence.
In discussing the role of hyperstition in NRx’s grand plans of ‘Exit’ – that is, leaving modern democracies/nation states behind, and establishing their own micronations (whether through seasteading, online spaces/Network States, or even going to Mars – all noted by Peter Thiel as goals in his infamous 2009 Cato Unbound essay about why he no longer believed in democracy), Burrows notes that “NRx is all about dreaming or a certain kind….this process is central to the NRx hegemonic strategy…so that others ‘will dream up and implement more practical alternatives’.”
We can see this embrace of hyperstition by NRx in the naming of Curtis Yarvin’s company: Tlon. This comes from the Argentian writer Jorge Luis Borges’ story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, which “describes a secret society, Orbis Tertius, that architects an entirely new world, ‘Tlon’, by publishing an encyclopaedia describing it. Over time, bits of this fictional world begin to emerge in the real world, consuming it, such that “the world will be Tlon”.” Given the developments in the US recently, once might see Yarvin and Land’s publishing of NRx ideology online over the past decade and a half as a parallel of the efforts of Orbis Tertius – they appear to have (almost, at this stage) architected their new world into being.
In any case, given that Musk sits well within this NRx environment (while he has never explicitly aligned with it, he has long been an associate of Thiel, since their days together founding PayPal a quarter of a century ago; his ex-wife Grimes has been associated with it; many of his tech billionaire buddies are explicitly aligned with it; and his own grandfather was a technocratic authoritarian), I was drawn to wonder whether Wernher von Braun’s science fictional rendering of the Martian leader being named Elon might literally be inspiring and pushing the world’s richest man to focus all of his efforts and wealth into making that fiction into a reality, using von Braun’s science fiction in a hyperstitional way as “a positive feedback circuit…[to] bring about their own reality”, as Land puts it.
As Musk said almost a decade ago:
…the main reason I am personally accumulating assets is in order to fund this. I really do not have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets except to be able to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multi-planetary.
Now, at this stage, with everything we know about Elon Musk – courtesy of his own big-mouthed Twitter account – perhaps this was all just marketing, a way to justify him accumulating an obscene amount of wealth. But also, perhaps, between the NRx goal of ‘Exit’ from current nations and democracies, and von Braun’s fiction, the Mars goal has always been an attempt to make fiction into reality; a destiny written by a space rocket pioneer, for a modern space rocket entrepreneur to bring into existence in the next millennium?
The cold water to pour on that idea, of course, is that when I wrote about the coincidence back in 2017, hardly anybody knew – probably including Elon Musk – about it. And it didn’t really become ‘public’ knowledge until a few years after that. So it seems unlikely that Musk was originally inspired by this ‘hyperstition’, as he created SpaceX a decade before this.
But, if we want to be a bit mystical about it, as Roger Burrows (with Harrison Smith) has pointed out about Nick Land’s view about hyperstition:
For Land, time, like much else, is non-linear and thus relations between cause and effect are always complex. Futurity is in the here and now in the sense that it is not something that just unfolds; it is something we create.
On occasion portended social imaginaries – designs, diagrams, fictions, maps, movies, plans, philosophies, prototypes, theories, dreams and more – become generative of the future; it is as if the tentacles of future entities reach back through time in order to bring into being the very elements necessary for their own materialization.
Once we view literary hyperstitions in this way, with an outcome of sending humans into space, William Burroughs’ suggestion that “language is a virus from space” seems like it could be taken a whole lot more literally…
