‘As Cage says, it is of the nature of the plan(e) that it fail. Precisely because it is not a plan(e) of organization, development, or formation, but of nonvoluntary transmutation. Or Boulez: “Program the machine so that each time a tape is played on it, it produces different time characteristics.” So the plan(e)—life plan(e), writing plan(e), music plan(e)—must necessarily fail for it is impossible to be faithful to it; but the failures are a part of the plan(e) for the plan(e) expands or shrinks along with the dimensions of that which it deploys in each instance (planitude of n dimensions). A strange machine that is simultaneously a machine of war, music, and contagion-proliferation-involution.’ (ATP)
A nascent hyperstition (provisionally –––⦅ ) becomes a successful hyperstition ( –––< ) under certain specific conditions—carrier proliferation, cybernetic uptake, memetic vigour, insertion into functional circuits of long range positive feedback, mutant suppleness (or - ‘making itself up as it goes along’ [Carver])—all, significantly, beyond the control of the hyperstitional cyberneticist. As Marc Couroux (whose reality is yet to be rigorously confirmed) reminds us by way of NLP: “[t]here is no failure, only feedback” in an immanent system.
With success emphatically decoupled from control ('all planning is theopolitics, and theopolitics is cybernetics in a swamp') and pushed out into the unpredictability of the system itself, what does it mean for a hyperstition to ‘fail’? Do we know of any that have? (Where do they go?) Positive feedback is a basic requirement, but then what?
Truth and falsity fall into irrelevance as reliable measures of failure or success, for it is the effect of hyperstition to destabilize the oppositional relationship between these terms precisely by manufacturing the former out of the latter. Traditional epistemology is among hyperstition’s most prized victims. It is impossible to ‘be faithful to’ the plan(e), just as it is impossible to believe in the Numogram (or, indeed, refuse to believe in it). Such things do not exist (or consist) in a manner that licences ‘faith’, not in the least because the temporality of faith requires that something stable pre-exist its being believed-in—a continual looping back (to the plan). But co-production with unbelief is something different altogether and approaches much more closely the condition of nonvoluntary transmutation that causes the plan(e) to fail. Not having to enter into a relationship of belief with a hyperstition is an indicator of its potential success. On the other hand, a hyperstition that crosses the line by entreating belief is, perhaps, the only other possible capacity in which failure in the appropriate sense could be ascribed here. As soon as a hyperstition becomes believable it inaugurates the supplementary dimension that returns it to the plan and in that moment annuls its particular, programmatic function, crossing into ideology. Could we say, then, that for hyperstition—the failure of failure is failure?
To fail in failing is to stymie flows of contagion-proliferation-involution and allow the system to rigidify (or to attempt to govern the meme in any manner that circumvents its internal logic). Believability is escorted by sclerosis. Things need to be inverted, flipped, and twisted from time to time: diagrams, angels, plots. Circulation must be maintained at all costs...
The tomb of dead hyperstition is Heaven.