hyperstition

plural hyperstitions

1. uncommonA cultural belief (especially a work of fiction) that makes itself real; a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy where some cultural idea or hype truly brings about the thing it describes.

   Currently, one bitcoin will trade for £42,973. But it wouldn’t be worth a dime if enough investors hadn’t decided to treat it as though it were gold. It is a “hyperstition”: a fiction that makes itself true because enough people believe in it.

   2021 December 6, Richard Seymour, “Jack Dorsey’s ditched Twitter for bitcoin. Has the social media bubble burst?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

   3 more examples

   A hyperstition can be loosely defined as a fictional work or belief system that somehow gradually takes on the appearance of reality. Obviously based on the concept of superstition, hyperstition is distinguished by being predominantly digitally spawned and proliferated.

   2005, Dave Szulborski, This is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming, Incunabula, →ISBN

   The lingering presence of a sensation long passed lies also at the core of the concept of hyperstition—a concept so commonly used by Nick Land and more recently by Steve Goodman that some might even consider it outworn. In an interview request to define hyperstition Nick Land replied in 2009 with this explication: Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies.

   [2020, Holger Schulze, Sonic Fiction, Bloomsbury, →ISBN, page 117

   In an interview with Estselle^([sic – meaning Estelle]) Gervais, Emily Segal, a member of noted art and trend-forecasting collective K-HOLE, says that “Hyperstition is a term coined in the 1990s to describe fictions that make themselves true. […]”

   2023, Zachary Kaiser, quoting Emily Segal, Interfaces and Us: User Experience Design and the Making of the Computable Subject, Bloomsbury, →ISBN, page 149