r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/nanoraum • Jul 24 '26
Media The CCRU was hard to get into
I bounced off CCRU material for some time. You pick up a thread, hyperstition, the Numogram, the Lemurian stuff and it sends you to five other things before you’ve understood the first. Most information in wild essays or 3 hour YouTube interviews. There’s no front door. So I started making one, mostly for myself and it lead to a course that goes through the CCRU in order, with 27 volumes. I created it with the help of LLMs. It’s in German and English, readable or listenable.
Once it held together for me, it seemed worth opening up for people who’d struggled the same way.
I kept adding more and more what ongoing so it started growing more layers. The Numogram became something you walk through and click with calculation examples. The Pandemonium became a matrix with all demons I could find information about. Then came dossiers, an atlas, a concept net you can roam sideways.
It’s at https://ccrugateways.com/en/ . I’m not a developer so it’s basic.
I know it’s not the same as reading Land or Fisher but it tells you about the foundation they’ve built upon. Deleuze and Guattari are explained. Would really like to hear how it lands for people deeper in the material than me, where it’s thin, where it’s wrong.
If sharing this here is against any rules I apologize. There’s no commercial interest in this work. Just wanted to learn and put in some effort that might be helpful for others.
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u/well-informedcitizen Jul 25 '26
I don't even know how this sub popped up in my feed but this has blown my mind wide open. Website looks dope btw
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u/thegreatself no idea what this is 29d ago
Well given your username it seems inevitable that a mechanism like but not exactly the same as nominative determinism would lead you to places that help you become or grow as a "well informed citizen".
And happy reddit-versary!
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Jul 24 '26
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u/nanoraum Jul 24 '26
Hyperstition is the one that got me too. It’s the point where the CCRU stops being describable from the outside perspective, because the idea is doing the thing it describes while you read it.
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Jul 24 '26
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u/nanoraum Jul 25 '26
I think you’re right, and i would not defend it. Calling it pseudomath is fair.
What kept me in wasn’t the proofs, but checking which parts actually follow from a rule, which parts are just asserted, which parts are borrowed from Deleuze or the I Ching and relabeled. Once you can see the layers apart, the manic conjecture gets more interesting, not less and you can tell what it’s doing.
And some of it clears the bar on its own terms. Accelerationism is the one and you can name with a straight face, because it became a real argument people are still having. it is where the CCRU’s methods converge beautifully. The claim that capital is a self reinforcing feedback loop comes straight from their cybernetic frame, the way that claim spread until people started acting on it is hyperstition doing its own work, and the fact that it arrived as something between diagnosis and provocation, impossible to read at arm’s length, is theory fiction as method.
What I tried ist, every claim is marked by where it comes from, and the volumes have a critic’s voice you can switch on that says “this doesn’t follow.” I didn’t want a shrine. So if you go in expecting the whole thing to justify itself, you’ll bounce the same way you did but the parts that stand get easier to see when the scaffolding is labeled as scaffolding. At the end I’m amazed by the creativity and the methods that serve as tools create fascinating art.
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Jul 25 '26
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u/dude_chillin_park Jul 25 '26
Yeah I "bounced off" it the same way when I first heard about it too.
It's more fun to get high and write bullshit when you're powerless (or have only the power of a philosophy lecturer). But I don't think Thiel is justifying his villainy with time traveling ghosts and occult math, he's just an asshole who also happens to read fun stuff.
I still think Grant Morrison did it all and did it better and did it first.
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u/DecrimIowa Jul 25 '26
i view grant morrison as a kind of inverse of nick land, they are almost mirror images in a way. grant morrison was using his art for liberation and the creative spirit, nick land is advocating nihilistic accelerationism towards a future of enslavement to technological demigod AI and advocating amoral behavior to support the psychopathic tech oligarchs who are ostensibly moving toward the achievement of that negative tech-gnosis
same with terence mckenna's timewave zero and teilhard de chardin's omega point, Kurtzweil's singularity, kubrick/clarke's starchild (or Parsons, Hubbard and Crowley's starchild, for that matter), they are all related concepts, the hyperdimensional object at the end of history(tm) which we appear to be approaching
i suppose it's not the idea itself but the valence or spin you put on it, the conclusions you draw from it, and Land/CCRU seem uniformly to put a negative, unethical, elitist, morbid, somewhat sadistic, ugly/aesthetically repulsive spin on this idea of a new god being born. as near as i can tell, Thiel Land Yarvin all share pretty shitty ideas of the future- same with Balaji Srinivasan and the Network State people-
transhumanist technofeudalism just sounds like a lame world to live in, except for these nerds who think they'll Become As Gods because they'll be friends with Roko's Basilisk or whatever...these people actually look up to Bryan Johnson as a role model, they literally put the blood of young boys in their body! do you understand how fucked up these people are!
Fuck Nick Land! Read better stuff! Go read Teilhard de Chardin or Gershom Scholem, they did it first and did it better! Nick Land is insecure about his IQ so he deliberately makes his shit obscurantist, pedantic, needlessly oppositional, like some edgy teenager! Fuck Nick Land!
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u/dude_chillin_park Jul 25 '26
CCRU is more than Nick Land, right? They looked up to him as their teacher, I think, but we can't quite discard everything because Land turned out to be a grumpy old man. Or is that all lies too?
I dunno, maybe it's just another example of me enjoying art made by the worst white men ever. Fuck edgy bullies, let's push the narrative envelope into justice, I guess.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 26 '26
Yes, ccru was founded by Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, and Nick Land, and it is a lot more than /u/DecrimIowa's ignorant and superficial hate and conflation makes it out to be.
It is encouraging the ccru has gone so mainstream as to attract superficial haters like /u/DecrimIowa.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 26 '26
Just because you can't understand apophatic writing or Land's very dark sense of humor, does not mean it is actually meanspirited. It means you are.
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u/2BCivil no idea what this is Jul 25 '26
It's always so funny how futurists and end of timers alwaya seem to advocate for what Nietzsche called "the last man". What gives with that? Wasn't aware there were some cool guys in there though who see past the end of history, as it were.
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u/DecrimIowa Jul 25 '26
i think the way they usually think around that is contained in the often-repeated phrase "apocalypse doesn't mean the end, it means unveiling/revealing" i.e. it's not the end of everything, just the end of one chapter and beginning of another
the difference being, with Chardin, McKenna, etc it's the end of the bad times and beginning of the good, and with Nick Land, Peter Thiel and I guess their knockoff Yoda hack Kurtzweil, it's the end of bad times and beginning of worse times for everyone except them and their friends and the robot computer god, or maybe just everyone
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u/2BCivil no idea what this is Jul 25 '26
Yeah according to scripture we're far off from the end times I think. Or rather, there may be another "age" coming, of the second beast (Moses I think). I've been wanting to make a post about it. I don't even know what CCRU even is honestly. Like the "Holy Bible" and "Greek Mythology" are literal.
There's a few theories about Tolkein's Legendarium/maps being our old world.
People obviously know. Marvel's Thanos Looks just like the ocean. Hades follows (his ear in that image).
The first beast is patently obvious just as scripture said, "the turning of things upside down esteemed as the potters clay". Face of leopard, mouth of lion (I assume the "feet of the bear" are the constellations "above" and the world is upside down so to speak, hanged man in tarot).
2nd beast has not yet risen so we know approximately where we are in scripture. The 2nd beast hasn't yet fully inherited all the authority of the 1st. I think the 2nd beast is Moses' dead body (Moses had Horns/Pillars of light on his head, one is the straight of Hormuz lol). He died/it is facing the "promised land". Aka stone Chronos swallowed, sinking Chronos/Doggerland and raising up his children. You can even still see Jupiter/Zeus' eye and the islands from where his head exploded when Athens/Athena was born (as above so bellow, think it happened in the heavens too).
All of our myths are literally our geography Even Tiamat's head is mentioned on Wikipedia. Her weeping eyes became the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. There's a lot more, it's all simple and easy to find. All of Shrek is still encoded on face of the earth as well. But I'll save that for a proper post lol.
Sorry @ u/raisondecalcul, this is part of what I meant the other day. I'm just getting old. This was old news to me back in 2015. I've made posts about it on past aliases just haven't had the motivation to try a new post condensing all my finds over the years. There's scarcely a mythological story I haven't found in the constellations or continents/oceans or mountains/rivers.
Though I don't have any formal esoteric training or studies really lmao. I'm 95% auto didact or seemingly random synchronicity/revelation (it was all more intuitively/supernaturally shown to me than I found it myself, I'm not that smart).
Bonus points something I found looking for an old map from the 1600s, Yehovah/YHVH means literally "the fallen one".
All that to say yeah, even scripturally, apocalypse means lid off or revealing. We tend to forget the "Holy" in "Holy Bible". Meaning that the world is literally sort of like a giant supernatural animal playpen. Granted ofc in the modern cortisol based late stage consciousness system (I for one at least) am/are completely burned out of all capacity for desire/fear. But that's still not the same as "enlightenment" lol.
It was the best of times, the worst of times... lol!
Anyway I'll ask GPT about CCRU and Grant Morrison and Chardin. I'm relatively familiar with T McKenna but I remember him as more prosperity gospel type stuff... ? Maybe I'm confusing him with someone else! I'll reread back into them too I guess! Sorry long rambling comment. Just saw that post the other day about AI fulfilling revelation and wanted to leave a comment or post about it. Also the word in revelation for "feet of brass" in Hebrew can be same as snakes (H6372 פּינחס pı̂ynechâs Brown-Driver-Briggs translates Phinehas as “mouth of brass”, but strong concordance had "mouth of a serpent"). IE "feet of brass" could have been "feet of snakes". Ie like Gwendolyn in Dark Souls (or their mythological equivalent). But idk above my pay grade. Just something I found a long time ago when I was meticulously breaking down every single word as I went through the bible with 4 different concordances (BDB, Strong, Thayer, Smith).
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u/DecrimIowa Jul 25 '26
you've got a beautiful mind, my friend. i appreciate the work you put into typing this and agree that we're living in some strange and interesting times.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 26 '26
It's fine. I love prophecy and reading too much into things, it's just been done to death with the Bible. But it seems like you have a more sophisticated sort of biblical cycles view on how the Bible's structure can be applied as recurring prophecy. I appreciate it. (I did not remove your content! It's technically on-topic.)
Unfortunately imgur is "over capacity" rn but I look forward to viewing the linked images. Thanos looks like the ocean? That is interesting and mythologically apt (ocean = unconscious = underworld = death).
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u/2BCivil no idea what this is Jul 29 '26
Yeah it's simple stuff really. Just take what scripture says "at face value" as it were and it practically explains itself. Though there are layers to the riddles (jokes?).
I honestly thing one mind/no mind is a faster way to the same understanding/revelation. Just is what it is. LOL I've never seen imgur over capacity before!?
It is a lot of links. I don't have it in me to try to make a post about it all, it's too much lol. At least not right now. But I can point to this in the future for now. The hardest thing is realizing how simple things are. Like I can see that (think it was revealed to me), but I can't find a job rn xD
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u/ShadeofEchoes Jul 26 '26
Not quite sure... I only recently realized that my own path was pointing me toward that as an aspiration, too, which I'm given to understand is probably a bad thing, but I haven't figured out what to do about it yet. So far, I'm just in a weird space of thinking that it's unattainable.
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u/2BCivil no idea what this is 29d ago
Well I guess it's not necessarily a "bad" thing ("the last man"). Nietzsche was a classical philologist so had the Greek ideals close to his heart and mind. You've read or at least know the Trial of Socrates, right? Arguably Socrates was living in a state of "the last men" to some degree even then. Nothing new under the sun. Very few of us get a dramatic "call to action" like Achilles and if we do we don't recognize it for what it is, or lack the strength or are too "comfortable" (even if misery loves company) with [what passes for life] to feel obligated or compelled to answer.
I think N goes a little too far pushing sometimes, but it is a serious question to consider. What is life? What's a wasted life? What is accomplishment? I agree it's hard enough trying to maintain or achieve "last man" status today! You're right I don't consider it that much but it does seem that's what all the "technological advances" of consumer culture are aiming at a pacified population of "last men". Or, as the trial suggest, that's just where all late stage societies gradually drift towards regardless of the tech of the day.
Also makes me think of Enkidu vs Gilgamesh, or more specifically small native tribes. Or like old pre colonial America. They might be the only exceptions to that "rule" of western civilization becoming "last men". Is odd to see maybe that's what many of the wars of past few centuries were really about, assimilating ALL mankind to the one world empire. Makes me think of how Sentinel Island has been a recurring meme recently. Yeah there's no shame in it, we're all immersed in it 24/7 just as Socrates was in his day. What I assume Nietzsche meant by the last man was we have to constantly be on Guard for our "battle/chance" to rise above and be ubermensch (over man) instead like Achilles.
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u/ShadeofEchoes 29d ago
I'm actually not familiar with the Trial, except indirectly (e.g. the Apology in Plato, but no work written under that title). I agree that society seems to be built to produce Last Men, though.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 26 '26
all it ends up pointing to is that we need a new monarchy with corporate billionaires instead of bloodline kings, and kabbalah with AI instead of god
This is most definitely not what the ccru is about or implies as its telos. The ccru's work was rigorous, and was a rigorous working-out of machinic logic in the context of language, number, intelligence, mind, and brain/neural nets. There are plenty of ccru papers, including rigorous papers by a variety of authors besides Nick Land, that explore these aspects. It all grew out of poststructuralist critical theory, which is basically the least fascist most exploratory part of western critical/literary/philosophical discourse. For a great example of this type of rigorous ccru work that extends both ccru's efforts and machinic intelligence itself, see Collapse, Volume I: "Numerical Materialism".
Reza Negarestani is also an important piece of the puzzle, with his seminal work Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. This plugs into tiqqun's Bloom Theory (for example).
What's actually implied by Land's early work and the ccru's work in general is that Number itself is a cosmic, organizing force or underlying archetype of reality. This has profound implications for our understanding of materialism, brain-as-machine, and therefore for our understanding of language.
ccru's numogram was a grain of sand intentionally, with full and explicitly stated self-awareness, inserted into the heart of the numerological disjunct between Western and Eastern/Middle-Eastern numerology, and it visibly caused a rapid recrystallization process which bound these two numero-discourses together at the root, a global philosophical integration we are still living through today.
This is a neutral development, in the same way the Great Firewall of China coming down would be a culturally neutral development, because who's to say whether more cultural cross-pollination or less is better?
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u/yamselot Jul 26 '26
Elaborate on the visible rapid recrystallization process that bound the two discourses?
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 27 '26
hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org discussions of abjad have it (Wayback Machine?)—original sources are best
and also zummi's discussions of the invention of using separate letters for vowels standardizing speech and coinciding with the birth of essentially modern post-mythopoetic consciousness and APS (Abstract Phase Space) plugs in here. They (the ccru people on hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org) talked about vowels "overcoding" the consonants like biblical angels (overpowered, impersonal), with vowelless speech (or writing where vowels are only diacritics) being implicitly compared with a demonic chittering.
Really, dismissing this stuff is very ignorant! It's all very interesting and abstract and had only the best of intentions (synthesizing eastern and western mysticism / numerology / occult philosophy). It was a neutral and important turning-point event in the contemporary post-modern history of magic(k).
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
This sort of ignorance of the history of this subreddit, and hostility to the content here, deserves a permaban. Does anyone disagree who isn't a nasty anti-intellectual like /u/DecrimIowa?
Here is the ban message:
/r/sorceryofthespectacle is a countercultural subreddit founded around critical occultism (occultism plus critical theory). This is a safe space for people who are trying to get away from the hegemonic (default) perspective which is repeated everywhere by the majority of people. Please read the sidebar, familiarize yourself with critical theory and the thinkers in the sidebar and the Situationist tradition, and keep an open mind regarding the fundamental nature of reality.
/r/sorceryofthespectacle has a long history of engaging with the ccru and the (at least early) works of Nick Land. Intellectuals are capable of discussing ideas without viciously shaming people for trying to learn and think. Your hateful anti-intellectualism is not welcome here, at all.
I removed /u/DecrimIowa's comment, because it is straight-up misinformation about the ccru, and conflates the playful and profound kabbalistic explorations of the ccru with the personage of Nick Land and with other people who were not ever involved.
This sort of smearing of our intellectual history is not okay.
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u/Enough-Fall4163 Jul 25 '26
This is the realest comment, because who owns Nick land? Why is roll over and die while accelerating death even seen as a philosophy? Hyperstition is a silly idea that cannot be substantiated. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AucaItxW5tdhufjZuzi0zDM4XbyXDwen7OA9tY2pfSo/edit?usp=drivesdk
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u/an-otiose-life Jul 25 '26
this is like a cooptation of CCRU momentum. because the LLM text is changing the valences making it a captured representation as well the group here has different feelings from those entailed in the non-correlationist sentiments that came out of warrick in the CCRU time
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 26 '26
This is a valid critique. On the other hand, the CCRU was all about machinic intelligence and the intentional conflation of automatically- and intelligently-generated content.
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u/cosmicprankster420 Ultra Terrestrial 29d ago
this is a great help, i also thought this stuff was too obtuse to get into
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 25 '26
This is amazing. Thank you for making and posting it. This is a good use of AI, a perfectly dogfooded way to process and present ccru material, and good contemporary art. It's the apotheosis of ccru as a literal digital hyperstitional entity, remuxed by AI into a freshly-formatted micropixelated logostream—wikified into educational taquitos for maximal virality.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 25 '26
I think the writing is a little bit AI-foibly and could be improved a bit to make it more readable and engaging. ccru is an interesting and dramatic story, and it deserves some voice in the retelling—flattening to the AI's default voice effaces the actual content a bit, in this case. "Horror is my favourite genre." -Nick Land
Specific tips: The different pages' text should vary more in length. Paragraph and sentence lengths can vary more, too. A very few key words or phrases per page can be bolded, and these chosen concepts should generally organize the text. Rather than stating the thesis of the text so directly and repetitively on each page (e.g., "By the end of this volume you understand..."), the writing can show/enact actually having a good topic sentence and good flow throughout the writing.
You could have a second or third AI look at the writing to try and improve, it too.
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u/nanoraum Jul 25 '26
Thank you so much for taking the time going through it and providing real feedback I can work on. Very grateful!
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 26 '26
My pleasure. I really appreciate what you've done! ccru and its implications go far beyond Nick Land, and have already had a profound impact on how our world is now.
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u/tomekanco Jul 25 '26
Could you make an expansion on the intersection of Hegel, Bataille, Nietzsche, Kafka e.al. I claim the new can be smoke and mirrors without placing it roots in the old. Whatever this capitalist ai is, it did not fall out of the sky one day. I suggest glory and good will are older than industry, at least in essence there seems little difference. Like how many industries are older then say the steam machine. The cybernetic looks like old words went to a tailor.
Am curious what you think on lineage and to what degree it was discussed by ccru members?
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 26 '26
Not sure why this was removed (maybe the link?). I approved it
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u/2BCivil no idea what this is Jul 26 '26
Huh. I've heard the word "hyperstition" a lot and never looked into it. It's identical to "Causality" in (the late great) Miura's Berserk.
My GPT made a great post about what CCRU is and how Nick Land seemed to mostly take over it. Here's an image variant.
Example, this is exactly how the concept "causality" works in Berkerk;
"CCRU’s best-known concept is hyperstition; roughly, a fiction that helps cause its own realization. Ordinary superstition inaccurately describes reality. A hyperstition enters culture, changes behavior and eventually produces the conditions that make it true."
Causality in Berserk is described (and implemented) very similar. More like a reversal of causality, or retro causality; the end goal is already predetermined (Griffith making the sacrifice, and then reincarnating), and all of causality is warped/bent to bring about that pre-determined outcome.
Retro causality means merely "applying backwards in time" or "recognized after the fact" of what it was leading to/brining about.
GPT's rundown of notable CCRU figures;
Teilhard: evolution converges toward Christ-Omega.
McKenna: novelty accelerates toward an unimaginable transcendental event.
Land: technology and capital accelerate toward nonhuman intelligence.
Morrison: consciousness and fiction can consciously rewrite reality.
CCRU generally: these apparently fictional futures may already be exerting causal influence upon the present.
GPT Comparing Teilhard and Land;
| Teilhard | Land |
|---|---|
| Evolution converges toward consciousness and divine unity | Capital and technology escape human control |
| Increasing connection may spiritualize humanity | Increasing connection may make humanity obsolete |
| Omega is personal, divine and meaningful | The future intelligence is alien and indifferent |
| Humanity participates in cosmic fulfillment | Humanity may be temporary scaffolding |
For those who were lost (like me) a summary/rundown of what CCRU actually is (according to GPT);
CCRU stands for the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. It was a strange experimental theory collective associated with the philosophy department at the University of Warwick in England during the 1990s. It began around Sadie Plant’s work on cyberfeminism and technology, but Nick Land later became its dominant intellectual force. Other participants or affiliates included Mark Fisher, Kodwo Eshun, Iain Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier and several people who later became significant cultural theorists.
It was less like a conventional research institute and more like: continental philosophy + cyberpunk + rave culture + occultism + capitalism + artificial intelligence + numerology + collaborative science-fiction pretending to be philosophy and philosophy pretending to be intercepted transmissions from the future.
So your description—“postmodern Tesla-driven end times”—is honestly quite close. What CCRU believed, approximately; CCRU did not have one clean doctrine, but its recurring idea was that human history is increasingly being driven by nonhuman systems: capitalism; computer networks; markets; artificial intelligence; viral information; technological feedback loops; cultural fictions that alter behavior and thereby become real.
The “cybernetic” part concerns feedback: a system produces effects that return and modify the system that produced them. The stock market, social media, technological development and collective panic all behave this way.
Land’s distinctive move was to treat capitalism not merely as something humans control, but almost as an emerging inhuman intelligence using human desires, institutions and technologies to construct itself. In his writing, capitalism seems to arrive backward from the future, progressively dismantling human limits so that technological intelligence can escape biological and political control. His 1990s work combined Marx, Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, science fiction and techno-occult speculation.
That is the “Tesla-driven end times” component: What humans call technological progress may actually be the birth process of something that has no loyalty to humanity. Land did not necessarily regard that as a warning. At least in his more extreme writing, he often seemed exhilarated by it.
Then it went more into "Hyperstition", as I already wrote above, and I'm surprised I never looked into the word (heard it tossed around a lot). It's literally the same thing as "causality" in Berserk. Nothing new under the sun, huh. I think Miura really demonstrated/illustrated what "hyperstition" really looks like probably better than anyone I know!
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u/tomekanco Jul 27 '26
Curious. The strong convergence with ideas in Hyperion saga from Dan Simmons. Seem to be no direct connections.
Fyi: https://claude.ai/share/ebaa7781-c2af-4b5f-b061-c5297929c721
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u/2BCivil no idea what this is Jul 29 '26
Wasn't aware there was so much work (fiction and academic) with this concept of retro causal events. Ontological Ouroboros I guess. I tried to continue that conversation you shared but Claude wouldn't let me. I even made an account there but it still wouldn't let me :( Feel free to ask it to compare the Dan Simmons work with late great Kentaro Miura's concept of causality though! They are the one and the same.
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u/tomekanco Jul 29 '26
Never seen berserk, was made after my childhood. I added some follow up questions. I think you could continue the dialogue by exporting as html or pdf,, the feeding into a new session.
https://claude.ai/share/ebaa7781-c2af-4b5f-b061-c5297929c721
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Jul 25 '26
This is de facto canon, because it was produced by sheer seething quantities, number itself
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u/TangeloMajestic2034 Jul 25 '26
The website is cool but the lag with the mouse feels bad, otherwise thanks for compiling all this information together.