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Ccru: Writings 1997-2003
This first comprehensive collection of utterances from the Ccru-entity to appear in book form tracks the incursion of Lemurian signal, from the period immediately before the Apocalypse of the Numogram, to the fall-out from calendric Zero-Event at the turn of the new Millennium. Contents include Cthulhu Club and Cybergothic commentary, a multitude of hyperstitional portraits, theory-fiction diagonals, Mu ethnography, a detailed elaboration of the Pandemonium system, The Book of Paths, Axsys-AOE exposures, and more.
666 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 5, 2015
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3906 people want to read
About the author
CCRU
9 books74 followersThe Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU, or Ccru) was an experimental cultural theorist collective formed in late 1995 at Warwick University, England and gradually separated from academia until it dissolved in 2003.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 78 reviews
August 7, 2023
As brilliant as it is ridiculous. It helps if you've read/watched the following:
Fanged Noumena - Nick Land
Much of Lovecraft, particularly the stories that reference the so-called Cthulhu Mythos (as well as Land's essay on abstract horror from Phyl-Undhu)
Ghost of Chance - William S. Burroughs (for the Lemurian stuff)
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (as well as Apocalypse Now, Land's story "Chasm," and I suppose Ballard's The Day of Creation)
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze and Guattari (I have not read this and have only a basic understanding of it, which probably means I do not understand it at all)
Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials - Reza Negarestani
Any number of books by Freud (for the theory) and Philip K. Dick (for the paranoia)
"Terminator vs. Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism" by Mark Fisher (as well as Terminator: "If time travel ever happens, it always does.")
"Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism" by Robin Mackay
"A Brief History of Geotrauama" by Robin Mackay
"On Nick Land" by McKenzie Wark
Fanged Noumena - Nick Land
Much of Lovecraft, particularly the stories that reference the so-called Cthulhu Mythos (as well as Land's essay on abstract horror from Phyl-Undhu)
Ghost of Chance - William S. Burroughs (for the Lemurian stuff)
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (as well as Apocalypse Now, Land's story "Chasm," and I suppose Ballard's The Day of Creation)
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze and Guattari (I have not read this and have only a basic understanding of it, which probably means I do not understand it at all)
Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials - Reza Negarestani
Any number of books by Freud (for the theory) and Philip K. Dick (for the paranoia)
"Terminator vs. Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism" by Mark Fisher (as well as Terminator: "If time travel ever happens, it always does.")
"Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism" by Robin Mackay
"A Brief History of Geotrauama" by Robin Mackay
"On Nick Land" by McKenzie Wark
Want to read
February 25, 2019Absolutely hilarious. Perhaps the culmination of self-indulgent, obscurantist Continental philosophy. Cyberpunk writing meets Deleuzoguattarian jargon meets William S. Burroughs. There is literally a chapter where the writer wonders if the missing fifth Teletubby is part of a conspiracy. It comes right at the end, even after the glossary (which itself is hilarious because half the words are made up and the glossary just raises more questions than it answers), it's like the climax to a joke, the comedic timing is perfect.
July 13, 2017
A Thousand Plateaus frapped in a neural networked Vitamix with a lost Lovecraft manuscript and a forgotten treatise on cybernetic demonology. Hand shaken by hooded chef cultists with professorial day jobs in obscure philosophy departments.
My favorite was the letter from P. B. Carruthers to the producers of the Teletubbies, worrying about the missing fifth teletubby and the occult rituals of the Tzog-Murtha portrayed on the show, among other esoteric concerns.
My favorite was the letter from P. B. Carruthers to the producers of the Teletubbies, worrying about the missing fifth teletubby and the occult rituals of the Tzog-Murtha portrayed on the show, among other esoteric concerns.
April 3, 2022
So much Twitter schizoposting takes its tonal/topical/stylistic cues from the CCRU.
September 10, 2019
The Heideggerian inscription of temporality, in which the potential of the future finds its grounds in the past is historically indesputable, but the question lingers, haunting this ecstatic temporality - from whence the past? What if the past is always already infected by the virus of a cybernetic demon, the temporotechnical forces driving towards their own eventual emergence in a dispossessed future; a horizon without horizon for the anthropo-phenomenological system? The future that is breeding within and without us is erasing us as it writes itself parasitically into the fictions which displace and replace "our" reality.
Temporality is thus always already ecstatically extensive, tending towards the absolute outside from which we, human life, are excised. Time is the vector of a radical transformation, a machinic becoming of the radically inhuman which has been working and unworking itself from (within) us since before the beginning. As Nick Land wrote in his piece entitled "Cybergothic," "time produces itself in a circuit, passing through the virtual interruption of what is to come, in order that the future which arrives is already infected, populated." But what is it that infects the future, from the future, decomposing the present as it putrifies into a dead future, human life degree zero? It would be at once absolutely outside of us, alien to us, and yet so near to us that we could not recognize it as of our own. A viral element within the system of conscious life which allows it to be, constitutes its operations, while also working to undermine these very operations as it underwrites them; perverse elements which distort and twist the fate of the human away from its goals, and towards the desires that it could never rationalize to itself. Such a devious element appears, has ever appeared, under many guises, written under many names - affects, passions, Trieben, demons, monsters, viruses, outsiders, etc.
The traditional, tripartite ordering of time is a control mechanism of measurement and stabilization. Even Heidegger's conception of temporal ecstasies and the future as possibility opened through relations to the past is contaminated by these hyperstitional intercessions that the CCRU rends open and renders operative in the inscription of history, breaking down the arborescent ordering of time in letting loose the contagion of temporal disorder, of futures which alter the past and infect "the present" with haunting affective forces or powers that (re)inscribe the effacement of conscious or cogitoal foundationalism in relation to action and history.
Essentially, the common misconception is that the future is actual, just not yet so. But as the CCRU aptly grasps, the future exists virtually. And such virtual futures can have (in)direct inscriptive effects upon the actualization of temporal flux. From the aforecited piece by Land: "The virtual future is not a potential present further up the road of linear time, but the abstract motor of the actual." The motor of this machinic process is disclosed by the CCRU by means of the retro-inscription, or, perhaps better, the retro-revelation of virtual inscription, which the future produces as the rupture of the present or the actual. They realized, and subsequently realize through their writings, that fiction is a means of disintegrating and destabilizing the ordering of time and reality. By exposing and intensifying the fictional parasites infecting and underwriting the real, the potencies of alter-futures is (re)opened. Writing, qua the complex intersection of virtuality and actuality, is always a double writing, manifesting actualization as well as desctruction or absenting. The virtual may recede in the process of actualization, but traces of this withdrawn potential remain, and when traced can map out the cyclonic templexity in which the future has always already begun its own altering of history, festering in the wound of this ungrounded present. Unbelievable? Perhaps, but does this not feed back positively into the surprising eruption of this future, providing unwitting ground for its infectious plague?
Fiction, then, is the machinic inscription of the future upon the flux of time, virtually realizing itself through disturbing the human conception of temporality, rending open the potential for its own virile, viral, and virulent expression or realization. The future always already haunts us as a temporal spiraling, a cyclonic and cthonic (pan)demonium of forces and Potenzen which subversively and subterrainianly inscribe and unground through the multiple movement of a machinic unconscious, an unliving death as the abyssal ()hole or absence of origin. From when and whence is time inscribed? Why must it flow linearly from some beginning? The unidriectional flow is but a anthropo- or cogito-centric concession, and there is no resolution as to any single conception of such a beginning (even the so-called "Big Bang" must assume a time and space in which it can occur - a before the bang in which there is a material singularity, necessarily already spacial, and thus divests this theory of its originary status). We are left with an absolute time which distorts and disturbs our conceptions, twisting our rational thought as it casts it into the void, the abyss, in the place of any origin. The break or schitz that these writings open up are the wound in time which allows for the breakdown of human time-scaling in order to let free a demonic or inhuman temporal spiraling, an infectious opening for the proliferation of these mad complexifications and displacements of reality by the interruption of these fictions which un(der)write it.
But this chaotic inscription is not only marked comologically - it is also traced upon our own existence, as individual, as species, and as biological life. Fiction inscribes and is ever inscribed in our default of origin, fating us to fictions which efface us as they inscribe us; a displacing destiny which, by its potency, renders us powerless, offered up to death. There is no choice but to comply; defiance ends in the same end, devoided of its escape, erasing evasion in its inevitability. The lemurian hyperfiction is destinally carved into our spines, the vestigial trace of our delayed effacement, our perpetual lapse into nothing that we anthropo- and bio-centrically cling to as "life." For life is but a delayed descent back into the abyss of death, the absolute absence, which ever preceded us and which awaits us ever, virtually, affecting each instant as it tends towards the extreme (even if this is manifest in a denunciation and a refusal of intensity, a nullification and vain distention of dying).
So perhaps this is all true. Perhaps not. Perhaps truth has little significance here, now, in the wake of fictive and viral inscription. But we still might ask: Did the CCRU fail in its attempts at demonaic temporal complexification and transition? Aparently yes; obviously so. But it remains a question of whether or not this failure, as an event and a histoical happening, was not just a cover, a disimulation of their real success. This book is being read, after all. Its effects spread their venomous tendrils through life, contaminating and letting the repressed and putrific influences of a dead future rise up once more, for the first time. Who has won? Or have we all lost? It remains to say - the future remains but a fiction, gestating like a mutant abortion in our illusion of a present.
This (It?) is all always already tracing us, through us and through time, beneath the masks of such figures as AI, demonology, the Old Ones - all arche-fictions tracing the marks of this anoriginary absence, the silent yet violent inscription of death...
Temporality is thus always already ecstatically extensive, tending towards the absolute outside from which we, human life, are excised. Time is the vector of a radical transformation, a machinic becoming of the radically inhuman which has been working and unworking itself from (within) us since before the beginning. As Nick Land wrote in his piece entitled "Cybergothic," "time produces itself in a circuit, passing through the virtual interruption of what is to come, in order that the future which arrives is already infected, populated." But what is it that infects the future, from the future, decomposing the present as it putrifies into a dead future, human life degree zero? It would be at once absolutely outside of us, alien to us, and yet so near to us that we could not recognize it as of our own. A viral element within the system of conscious life which allows it to be, constitutes its operations, while also working to undermine these very operations as it underwrites them; perverse elements which distort and twist the fate of the human away from its goals, and towards the desires that it could never rationalize to itself. Such a devious element appears, has ever appeared, under many guises, written under many names - affects, passions, Trieben, demons, monsters, viruses, outsiders, etc.
The traditional, tripartite ordering of time is a control mechanism of measurement and stabilization. Even Heidegger's conception of temporal ecstasies and the future as possibility opened through relations to the past is contaminated by these hyperstitional intercessions that the CCRU rends open and renders operative in the inscription of history, breaking down the arborescent ordering of time in letting loose the contagion of temporal disorder, of futures which alter the past and infect "the present" with haunting affective forces or powers that (re)inscribe the effacement of conscious or cogitoal foundationalism in relation to action and history.
Essentially, the common misconception is that the future is actual, just not yet so. But as the CCRU aptly grasps, the future exists virtually. And such virtual futures can have (in)direct inscriptive effects upon the actualization of temporal flux. From the aforecited piece by Land: "The virtual future is not a potential present further up the road of linear time, but the abstract motor of the actual." The motor of this machinic process is disclosed by the CCRU by means of the retro-inscription, or, perhaps better, the retro-revelation of virtual inscription, which the future produces as the rupture of the present or the actual. They realized, and subsequently realize through their writings, that fiction is a means of disintegrating and destabilizing the ordering of time and reality. By exposing and intensifying the fictional parasites infecting and underwriting the real, the potencies of alter-futures is (re)opened. Writing, qua the complex intersection of virtuality and actuality, is always a double writing, manifesting actualization as well as desctruction or absenting. The virtual may recede in the process of actualization, but traces of this withdrawn potential remain, and when traced can map out the cyclonic templexity in which the future has always already begun its own altering of history, festering in the wound of this ungrounded present. Unbelievable? Perhaps, but does this not feed back positively into the surprising eruption of this future, providing unwitting ground for its infectious plague?
Fiction, then, is the machinic inscription of the future upon the flux of time, virtually realizing itself through disturbing the human conception of temporality, rending open the potential for its own virile, viral, and virulent expression or realization. The future always already haunts us as a temporal spiraling, a cyclonic and cthonic (pan)demonium of forces and Potenzen which subversively and subterrainianly inscribe and unground through the multiple movement of a machinic unconscious, an unliving death as the abyssal ()hole or absence of origin. From when and whence is time inscribed? Why must it flow linearly from some beginning? The unidriectional flow is but a anthropo- or cogito-centric concession, and there is no resolution as to any single conception of such a beginning (even the so-called "Big Bang" must assume a time and space in which it can occur - a before the bang in which there is a material singularity, necessarily already spacial, and thus divests this theory of its originary status). We are left with an absolute time which distorts and disturbs our conceptions, twisting our rational thought as it casts it into the void, the abyss, in the place of any origin. The break or schitz that these writings open up are the wound in time which allows for the breakdown of human time-scaling in order to let free a demonic or inhuman temporal spiraling, an infectious opening for the proliferation of these mad complexifications and displacements of reality by the interruption of these fictions which un(der)write it.
But this chaotic inscription is not only marked comologically - it is also traced upon our own existence, as individual, as species, and as biological life. Fiction inscribes and is ever inscribed in our default of origin, fating us to fictions which efface us as they inscribe us; a displacing destiny which, by its potency, renders us powerless, offered up to death. There is no choice but to comply; defiance ends in the same end, devoided of its escape, erasing evasion in its inevitability. The lemurian hyperfiction is destinally carved into our spines, the vestigial trace of our delayed effacement, our perpetual lapse into nothing that we anthropo- and bio-centrically cling to as "life." For life is but a delayed descent back into the abyss of death, the absolute absence, which ever preceded us and which awaits us ever, virtually, affecting each instant as it tends towards the extreme (even if this is manifest in a denunciation and a refusal of intensity, a nullification and vain distention of dying).
So perhaps this is all true. Perhaps not. Perhaps truth has little significance here, now, in the wake of fictive and viral inscription. But we still might ask: Did the CCRU fail in its attempts at demonaic temporal complexification and transition? Aparently yes; obviously so. But it remains a question of whether or not this failure, as an event and a histoical happening, was not just a cover, a disimulation of their real success. This book is being read, after all. Its effects spread their venomous tendrils through life, contaminating and letting the repressed and putrific influences of a dead future rise up once more, for the first time. Who has won? Or have we all lost? It remains to say - the future remains but a fiction, gestating like a mutant abortion in our illusion of a present.
This (It?) is all always already tracing us, through us and through time, beneath the masks of such figures as AI, demonology, the Old Ones - all arche-fictions tracing the marks of this anoriginary absence, the silent yet violent inscription of death...
May 28, 2025
In the hyperstitional model Kaye outlined, fiction is not opposed to the real. Rather, reality is understood to be composed of fictions – consistent semiotic terrains that condition perceptual, affective and behavioral responses.
Update: decided I should round up to three stars as I certainly proceeded with rapacious interest, even if i was frequently disappointed. Yeah -- there's Burroughs and Lovecraft and an unsettling strumming of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia but the results are unexceptional and perhaps because this has filtered out, it has saturated our theory-view, perhaps Fisher and Land took the traditional postures a few steps further-- keeping the rats in rationality as the Nietzsche of Shanghai once quipped.
I enjoyed aspects of this, found it nearly riveting whereas other elements were tedious and simply sketches for bad science fiction. I thought the placement of Oedipus in symbolic terms intriguing but the taxonomy of the solar system a poor execution of fiction-theory.
Update: decided I should round up to three stars as I certainly proceeded with rapacious interest, even if i was frequently disappointed. Yeah -- there's Burroughs and Lovecraft and an unsettling strumming of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia but the results are unexceptional and perhaps because this has filtered out, it has saturated our theory-view, perhaps Fisher and Land took the traditional postures a few steps further-- keeping the rats in rationality as the Nietzsche of Shanghai once quipped.
I enjoyed aspects of this, found it nearly riveting whereas other elements were tedious and simply sketches for bad science fiction. I thought the placement of Oedipus in symbolic terms intriguing but the taxonomy of the solar system a poor execution of fiction-theory.
May 31, 2021
What is the future? What is the past? How are they connected? Does the answer involve the Cthulhu mythos and a Lemurian Time-War grounded on a Heideggerian temporality? A group of “researchers” (disillusioned ex-academic and his students who relied on ‘the sacred substance amphetamines’ (c.f. A Dirty Joke) were involved in a group labeled “the CCRU” (Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit, started by Sadie Plant who left before any of these writings) took up the tools of alchemy, and mixed theory with fiction in their dirty shack after being ejected from an institution.
While Nick Land’s writings during this period were heavily cybernetic/internet influenced, in this collection, it’s more of a Lovecraftian and heavy Occult influence. There’s not much “theory” compared to what you might expect, the CCRU seem to be trying to emulate William Gibson and H P Lovecraft at the same time, but the collection is a particular relic of a culture infested with “trying to predict the future”, or, depending on where you stand, “hyperstition” it into being.
While Nick Land’s writings during this period were heavily cybernetic/internet influenced, in this collection, it’s more of a Lovecraftian and heavy Occult influence. There’s not much “theory” compared to what you might expect, the CCRU seem to be trying to emulate William Gibson and H P Lovecraft at the same time, but the collection is a particular relic of a culture infested with “trying to predict the future”, or, depending on where you stand, “hyperstition” it into being.
December 7, 2019
A strange collection of writing from the "cybernetic culture research unit" I'd describe as experimental, pseudo-religious / cultish fiction with philosophical and non-fiction undertones. A lot of it is obscurantist and draws heavily from H.P. Lovecraft, Helena Blavatsky, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, and others. If you are a fan of Aleister Crowley this is much better; it's very niche, borderline satire, and don't recommend for everyone. I gave it four stars because if you are an artist, a philosopher, or looking for something divergently inspirational there is a lot here to unpack. The chapter at the end (after the glossary) about Teletubbies reads like an out of place inside joke reminiscent of the infamous Elsagate.
September 24, 2020
A brilliant, brain-bending blend of Lovecraft, Gibson, Deleuze-Guattari and Burroughs.
July 31, 2019
Have you ever feel the need to do amphetamines and listen to Jungle (The music)?
Well I do now.
That and summon incomprehensible lemurian entities but the part about amphetamines sounded better on my head.
Well I do now.
That and summon incomprehensible lemurian entities but the part about amphetamines sounded better on my head.
November 30, 2025
No entendí ni la mitad de lo que he leído pero sé que estoy ante un hito abrumador. Terrible lo mucho que voy a robar con este libro. Debería tener 5 y 0 estrellas a la vez, se fueron a la mierda en todo sentido.
August 7, 2017
The CCRU is immensely admirable for many reasons; inspirational, even.
The pieces in this collection range from satire of academic writing to theory-fiction experiments. It occasionally seems like goofy Gibson+Deleuze wankery, and often dates as well as leather trenchcoats.
Cheeky gang; catch the wave and read a few of these joints. I liked "Flatlines" the best.
The pieces in this collection range from satire of academic writing to theory-fiction experiments. It occasionally seems like goofy Gibson+Deleuze wankery, and often dates as well as leather trenchcoats.
Cheeky gang; catch the wave and read a few of these joints. I liked "Flatlines" the best.
Read
October 19, 2025...cybernetic post-bible drivel
February 10, 2023
These texts are mad. I love them. I return to them all the time, with great relish. I used to be upset with the coy anti-Semitism but then I realized that the theory-fiction is deliberately trying to find exits in the moralistic monotheistic prison. The amazing thing is that they succeed, at least sometimes.
October 1, 2021
Read for the shitz and gigglez, which is the only way you should read this. It's what Land would have wanted.
[and do not be intimidated by the length, it's mostly quite funny and entertaining]
[and do not be intimidated by the length, it's mostly quite funny and entertaining]
June 14, 2024
The CCRU doesn't exist. This book doesn't exist. You don't exist.
Ok, question - how am I so impatient with Baudrillard's pretentious nonsensical wankery, and yet have time for this tome of insanity/inanity? Aesthetics? The fact that they seemed to at least recognise their own absurdity in a way that the French postmodernists seemingly didn't? I don’t know. But there it is.
"This volume is sheer documentation. It is not expected to clarify anything, but rather, the reverse."
This is our forewarning in the foreword. Which is good, really, because this one is a bit of a trip. Theory fiction is a fascinating medium. The CCRU has gained a bit of a cult reputation of the past decade or so. Ironic, as they seem to have started off as a gaggle of university misfits performing a sort of psychological terrorist attack on the stuffy and straight-jacketed ivory tower of academia, before moving out of halls, getting far too excited about the internet, mistaking speedballs for food and living in kata jungle-pumping raves, moving into Aleister Crowley's old yard and accidentally forming a cult.
"And you don't seem to understand…"
Nope. No, I don't. I sort of wonder if this is one of those ‘read this through multiple times and then it starts to make sense’ deals. I also wonder if picking extra meanings up in this case is just signs of a glitching mind - psychofiles corrupted by infoviral transmission through the medium of a strange green book that can't figure out if it's a grimoire, a cyberpunk novel, conspiracy screed, cultural theory essay, or a philosophical treatise. To which, the CCRU answers: "Yes." Communique two gives us, "CCRU is working on a cybergothic 'unnon-fiction'." If you’re aware of CCRU-adjacent writing, then, yes, expect an avalanche of weird techno-infused neologisms.
I'm wildly out of my depth here.
"AxS:03 Hypermythos of the 3-Faced God, with its stacked time domains (1st capitalist (((((indefinitely) deep) diachronic) re)axiomatising) Quasi- (2nd despotic (pure (( but always) retrospective)) ideal- (3rd aboriginal (poly-ancestral, cyclic) vague)) Chronos)."
Reading the CCRU texts, it's hard to resist the urge to attempt to make some sort of diagram or wiki or something. I mean, aside from the bastardised Qliphoth thing, ‘The Numogram’. How else to tie together and keep track of all the bits of overlapping textual references and terminology floating around. You start to get the idea that they're collectively alluding to some other bit of theory or what seems to have developed into an internal mythology, but what any of it points to with any specificity is well beyond me.
They seem initially obsessed with the whole Y2K thing. Presumably it's acting as an analogy or symbolic of something else. It's hard to imagine they actually imagined some abstracted technological doomsday was going to occur.
There's a whole bunch of 'k' stuff. K just stands for 'cyber' or 'digital', i.e., Mark Fisher's blog 'K-Punk'. K-goth = cybergoth, k-noun = cybernoun, K-guerrillas, K-time, K-tactics etc., become a recurring theme for a while - cropping up in other texts, becoming memes, etc. I know that amongst a subsection of weird nerds, putting 'k' in front of words acts as a signalling device to other weird nerds that they are, in some way, affiliated with this weird area of theory from the mid-to-late 90s.
Even dealing with the expanded universe of 'accelerationist' texts - if they can be called/lumped in with such - or commentaries on CCRU-adjacent subjects, it becomes hard to know how much is theory and how much is fiction? It's difficult without a bunch of research, to know how genuine they were about the whole kerfuffle around Y2K, the Gregorian calendar, etc. Are k-calendars and hyper-c topics people actually cared about? If they did, does anybody still care? If so... why? Nonetheless, the whole mess of tangled culture and theory wires is fascinating.
They seem to have invented some kind of delirious mythos wrapping around a series of real-world analogues sidestepped into a digital Lovecraftian (k-Lovecraftian?) dystopia? All of it layered on top of an underbelly of philosophy, social theory, cultural theses and the like. Take all of that and drown it in a bathtub of amphetamines set it to a soundtrack of 90s underground death garage and kata jungle. Got that? No? Right. Yeah, this stuff is generally impenetrable.
How seriously should you even take it? Hard to say, really. Certainly keep your tongue close to your cheek, that's my general read. Some of it seems to be written in earnest, and Land's nihilistic neologism-riddled prose poetry concerning the progressive redundancy of the human race in the face of an auto-manifesting cyber-consciousness born out of the steel and ink of capitalism, can give the impression of a thoroughly po-faced endeavour. But really, how serious can you possibly be if you're filtering your grand theory of cyberculture and time, through the medium of Humpty-dumpty? For all the intensity and layering, there is also a sense that there remains the possibility that the whole escapade is a hoax that has run away with itself until it was far beyond recapture.
These were the guys who held seminars in university where they just blasted jungle and lay on the floor croaking into a microphone. Apparently, this kind of thing tended to piss off the kind of people who had really bought into the status mythology of The Academy. Which is hilarious. Which is to say, I can respect the people who wrote this unholy mess of a book.
This whole subsection of philosophy/culture theory isn't even a rabbit hole - it's a full-on rat warren. You can get lost down there and never emerge.
They keep talking about ‘the crypt’. The crypt is a shadow of cyberspace. Associate or linked with 'artificial death' (A-death). Also linked into their jumbled time/chronology concepts, which, again - doubtful that they're 100% serious. Despite devoting tens of thousands of words to the idea, the fact that a good chunk of that mass of text is about, or related to, the 'Lemurian time war', a concept so absurd that it has since become a meme. I'm not even going to try to explain it.
I talk about a mythos being built, but that's only half true. Presumably the different essays and chapters were written by different people, so I wonder where the overlap is here, because the mythos seems to be a side effect of a series of shared metaphors and intersections - but it's debatable how consistent any interpretation or use of any singular element is from author to author. Texts feature a barrage of nouns that have no further expansion or pre-existing reference. Other nouns change states; 'A-death' seems to go from some kind of state of being to being referenced as a drug, like Snow Crash.
In the writing world there are two concepts for types of authors - plotters, where you get everything straight before you start writing, and pantsers, who just throw things together on the fly. At times, the CCRU writings resemble pantsing like few other authors could manage.
I know a lot of people would love it if every sentence were loaded with significance and allusion, a great multi-layered web of theory to explain an emerging web of cyberspace. But the reality is simply that a lot it reads more like white noise. There is far too much inconsistency from paragraph to paragraph and text to text, to make any substantive structure. Which is not to say it has no meaning, just that even the core bits of allusion and meta-narrative etc., while needing some kind of piecemeal jigsaw into a coherent structure are all individually obscured by a fog of red herrings.
At times a bunch of this overlaps with Baudrillard's talk about signification and hyper-reality, but the specifics seem to be functionally non-existent. All the libidinal stuff is Bataille-centric and I don't know shit about Bataille, save for a half-remembered explanation wherein the sun is a cosmic arsehole or something? Whatever.
Reading around the subject a bit, I'm bombarded by piles of theory jargon and name dropping that I don't understand because I haven't read the pre-requisite eleventy-billion authors and their own bizarre niche takes on this, that, and the other. So, once again, and as I knew going into this, I'm wildly out of my depth here. I suppose I should just stick to the aesthetics, name drop Deleuze once in a while on social media and repeat-post the three most known Nietzsche quotes ad nauseum, or something. On the other hand, the aesthetics are broadly interesting, albeit quite jumbled and inconsistent. There's so much going on here that even at a surface aesthetic level it doesn't quite mesh. It's brilliantly fascinating but riven with fractures and cracks.
Culture-plague. Unlife. Uttunal. Yettuk. Pre-occupations with subcultures with subcultures and the thanatropic. And, of course, time.
Turn on to tune out. Xxignal were a real group. Death garage. If nothing else, this unearths such an interesting archive of art and media that it's worth the read for that alone. Death garage gets written about like substance D, perhaps consciously.
Link two fragments together, you think you've got the start of a puzzle piece. Is it worth the effort?
Did you know that Echidna Stillwell refers to Vysparov's 'Time Circuit' as 'The Hex'? Well, she does. She demonstrates the arithmetical consistency between this region of the Numogram and the Chinese Classic of Change.
I wonder if you could put the CCRU writings to practical use. They mention 'the Matrix' several times, which makes me wonder if it's possible to stealth inject bits of CCRU 'thinking' into random incel communities and observe the results. Idiots like Andrew Tate are always prattling about 'the Matrix' or whatever, but in leaving the definition of 'the Matrix' looser than your mum, to the point where the term is meaningless and literally anything can be attributed to 'the Matrix', there's an opportunity to infiltrate and experiment with that community's collective psychology. His followers aren't exactly the smartest bunch, so they're hardly likely to notice.
Has anybody ever tried injecting techno-temporal deamonology into an idiot cult before? They could make fascinating lab rats.
The CCRU writings start to take on an increasingly esoteric bent, the further into the book you go, and this concept of the Numogram starts to become a central pillar around which other aspects of the writing revolve.
It's interesting to have a grimoire stuck in the middle of this messy mass of pseudo-cyberpunk theory fiction. I wonder if guys like Phil Hine ever looked into this? It seems like it'd be right up their alley.
The whole thing culminates with 'The Book of Paths', which is basically a bunch of poetry. I'm sure it's relevant to the broader CCRU lore or whatever, but, much like Tolkien, every time an author starts throwing random verse around my eyes start to glaze over. I know, I'm a philistine. Sue me.
I get the impression that deep diving into any one aspect of this book could provide fodder for thousands of words. If I understood half the allusions and connections it might make more sense to me, or I might stop every other page to freak out over some new interpretation of some other text, which is a genuinely appealing notion. But I think it's worth a gander if you're into any of the bizarre intersections that this collection of essays represent. There are certainly a lot of bookmarks in my copy.
Ok, question - how am I so impatient with Baudrillard's pretentious nonsensical wankery, and yet have time for this tome of insanity/inanity? Aesthetics? The fact that they seemed to at least recognise their own absurdity in a way that the French postmodernists seemingly didn't? I don’t know. But there it is.
"This volume is sheer documentation. It is not expected to clarify anything, but rather, the reverse."
This is our forewarning in the foreword. Which is good, really, because this one is a bit of a trip. Theory fiction is a fascinating medium. The CCRU has gained a bit of a cult reputation of the past decade or so. Ironic, as they seem to have started off as a gaggle of university misfits performing a sort of psychological terrorist attack on the stuffy and straight-jacketed ivory tower of academia, before moving out of halls, getting far too excited about the internet, mistaking speedballs for food and living in kata jungle-pumping raves, moving into Aleister Crowley's old yard and accidentally forming a cult.
"And you don't seem to understand…"
Nope. No, I don't. I sort of wonder if this is one of those ‘read this through multiple times and then it starts to make sense’ deals. I also wonder if picking extra meanings up in this case is just signs of a glitching mind - psychofiles corrupted by infoviral transmission through the medium of a strange green book that can't figure out if it's a grimoire, a cyberpunk novel, conspiracy screed, cultural theory essay, or a philosophical treatise. To which, the CCRU answers: "Yes." Communique two gives us, "CCRU is working on a cybergothic 'unnon-fiction'." If you’re aware of CCRU-adjacent writing, then, yes, expect an avalanche of weird techno-infused neologisms.
I'm wildly out of my depth here.
"AxS:03 Hypermythos of the 3-Faced God, with its stacked time domains (1st capitalist (((((indefinitely) deep) diachronic) re)axiomatising) Quasi- (2nd despotic (pure (( but always) retrospective)) ideal- (3rd aboriginal (poly-ancestral, cyclic) vague)) Chronos)."
Reading the CCRU texts, it's hard to resist the urge to attempt to make some sort of diagram or wiki or something. I mean, aside from the bastardised Qliphoth thing, ‘The Numogram’. How else to tie together and keep track of all the bits of overlapping textual references and terminology floating around. You start to get the idea that they're collectively alluding to some other bit of theory or what seems to have developed into an internal mythology, but what any of it points to with any specificity is well beyond me.
They seem initially obsessed with the whole Y2K thing. Presumably it's acting as an analogy or symbolic of something else. It's hard to imagine they actually imagined some abstracted technological doomsday was going to occur.
There's a whole bunch of 'k' stuff. K just stands for 'cyber' or 'digital', i.e., Mark Fisher's blog 'K-Punk'. K-goth = cybergoth, k-noun = cybernoun, K-guerrillas, K-time, K-tactics etc., become a recurring theme for a while - cropping up in other texts, becoming memes, etc. I know that amongst a subsection of weird nerds, putting 'k' in front of words acts as a signalling device to other weird nerds that they are, in some way, affiliated with this weird area of theory from the mid-to-late 90s.
Even dealing with the expanded universe of 'accelerationist' texts - if they can be called/lumped in with such - or commentaries on CCRU-adjacent subjects, it becomes hard to know how much is theory and how much is fiction? It's difficult without a bunch of research, to know how genuine they were about the whole kerfuffle around Y2K, the Gregorian calendar, etc. Are k-calendars and hyper-c topics people actually cared about? If they did, does anybody still care? If so... why? Nonetheless, the whole mess of tangled culture and theory wires is fascinating.
They seem to have invented some kind of delirious mythos wrapping around a series of real-world analogues sidestepped into a digital Lovecraftian (k-Lovecraftian?) dystopia? All of it layered on top of an underbelly of philosophy, social theory, cultural theses and the like. Take all of that and drown it in a bathtub of amphetamines set it to a soundtrack of 90s underground death garage and kata jungle. Got that? No? Right. Yeah, this stuff is generally impenetrable.
How seriously should you even take it? Hard to say, really. Certainly keep your tongue close to your cheek, that's my general read. Some of it seems to be written in earnest, and Land's nihilistic neologism-riddled prose poetry concerning the progressive redundancy of the human race in the face of an auto-manifesting cyber-consciousness born out of the steel and ink of capitalism, can give the impression of a thoroughly po-faced endeavour. But really, how serious can you possibly be if you're filtering your grand theory of cyberculture and time, through the medium of Humpty-dumpty? For all the intensity and layering, there is also a sense that there remains the possibility that the whole escapade is a hoax that has run away with itself until it was far beyond recapture.
These were the guys who held seminars in university where they just blasted jungle and lay on the floor croaking into a microphone. Apparently, this kind of thing tended to piss off the kind of people who had really bought into the status mythology of The Academy. Which is hilarious. Which is to say, I can respect the people who wrote this unholy mess of a book.
This whole subsection of philosophy/culture theory isn't even a rabbit hole - it's a full-on rat warren. You can get lost down there and never emerge.
They keep talking about ‘the crypt’. The crypt is a shadow of cyberspace. Associate or linked with 'artificial death' (A-death). Also linked into their jumbled time/chronology concepts, which, again - doubtful that they're 100% serious. Despite devoting tens of thousands of words to the idea, the fact that a good chunk of that mass of text is about, or related to, the 'Lemurian time war', a concept so absurd that it has since become a meme. I'm not even going to try to explain it.
I talk about a mythos being built, but that's only half true. Presumably the different essays and chapters were written by different people, so I wonder where the overlap is here, because the mythos seems to be a side effect of a series of shared metaphors and intersections - but it's debatable how consistent any interpretation or use of any singular element is from author to author. Texts feature a barrage of nouns that have no further expansion or pre-existing reference. Other nouns change states; 'A-death' seems to go from some kind of state of being to being referenced as a drug, like Snow Crash.
In the writing world there are two concepts for types of authors - plotters, where you get everything straight before you start writing, and pantsers, who just throw things together on the fly. At times, the CCRU writings resemble pantsing like few other authors could manage.
I know a lot of people would love it if every sentence were loaded with significance and allusion, a great multi-layered web of theory to explain an emerging web of cyberspace. But the reality is simply that a lot it reads more like white noise. There is far too much inconsistency from paragraph to paragraph and text to text, to make any substantive structure. Which is not to say it has no meaning, just that even the core bits of allusion and meta-narrative etc., while needing some kind of piecemeal jigsaw into a coherent structure are all individually obscured by a fog of red herrings.
At times a bunch of this overlaps with Baudrillard's talk about signification and hyper-reality, but the specifics seem to be functionally non-existent. All the libidinal stuff is Bataille-centric and I don't know shit about Bataille, save for a half-remembered explanation wherein the sun is a cosmic arsehole or something? Whatever.
Reading around the subject a bit, I'm bombarded by piles of theory jargon and name dropping that I don't understand because I haven't read the pre-requisite eleventy-billion authors and their own bizarre niche takes on this, that, and the other. So, once again, and as I knew going into this, I'm wildly out of my depth here. I suppose I should just stick to the aesthetics, name drop Deleuze once in a while on social media and repeat-post the three most known Nietzsche quotes ad nauseum, or something. On the other hand, the aesthetics are broadly interesting, albeit quite jumbled and inconsistent. There's so much going on here that even at a surface aesthetic level it doesn't quite mesh. It's brilliantly fascinating but riven with fractures and cracks.
Culture-plague. Unlife. Uttunal. Yettuk. Pre-occupations with subcultures with subcultures and the thanatropic. And, of course, time.
Turn on to tune out. Xxignal were a real group. Death garage. If nothing else, this unearths such an interesting archive of art and media that it's worth the read for that alone. Death garage gets written about like substance D, perhaps consciously.
Link two fragments together, you think you've got the start of a puzzle piece. Is it worth the effort?
Did you know that Echidna Stillwell refers to Vysparov's 'Time Circuit' as 'The Hex'? Well, she does. She demonstrates the arithmetical consistency between this region of the Numogram and the Chinese Classic of Change.
I wonder if you could put the CCRU writings to practical use. They mention 'the Matrix' several times, which makes me wonder if it's possible to stealth inject bits of CCRU 'thinking' into random incel communities and observe the results. Idiots like Andrew Tate are always prattling about 'the Matrix' or whatever, but in leaving the definition of 'the Matrix' looser than your mum, to the point where the term is meaningless and literally anything can be attributed to 'the Matrix', there's an opportunity to infiltrate and experiment with that community's collective psychology. His followers aren't exactly the smartest bunch, so they're hardly likely to notice.
Has anybody ever tried injecting techno-temporal deamonology into an idiot cult before? They could make fascinating lab rats.
The CCRU writings start to take on an increasingly esoteric bent, the further into the book you go, and this concept of the Numogram starts to become a central pillar around which other aspects of the writing revolve.
It's interesting to have a grimoire stuck in the middle of this messy mass of pseudo-cyberpunk theory fiction. I wonder if guys like Phil Hine ever looked into this? It seems like it'd be right up their alley.
The whole thing culminates with 'The Book of Paths', which is basically a bunch of poetry. I'm sure it's relevant to the broader CCRU lore or whatever, but, much like Tolkien, every time an author starts throwing random verse around my eyes start to glaze over. I know, I'm a philistine. Sue me.
I get the impression that deep diving into any one aspect of this book could provide fodder for thousands of words. If I understood half the allusions and connections it might make more sense to me, or I might stop every other page to freak out over some new interpretation of some other text, which is a genuinely appealing notion. But I think it's worth a gander if you're into any of the bizarre intersections that this collection of essays represent. There are certainly a lot of bookmarks in my copy.
September 3, 2025
Incredible work of philosophical fiction, through which, in its irrelevance towards physical reality shines the incredible optimism of the time period in which it was written, even more so highlighting the special period in which digital technology had progressed enough to create mythologies, but not yet so far as to facilitate its own horrors; they yet had to be invented.
An important work for understanding the creation of belief systems and how they retroactively provide foundations for themselves.
An important work for understanding the creation of belief systems and how they retroactively provide foundations for themselves.
October 15, 2025
Ich kann keine 4 sterne geben weil ich dieses buch nur verstanden hab wenn ich betrunken war. Keiner muss das lesen. Man hat aber teilweise echt extremen spass dabei wenn es einem spass macht seine realitäten auf den kopf zu stellen und seitlich in sie einzufahren
June 22, 2019
An intellectual gymnastics of theoretical fiction and fictional theory. Remains impenetrable yet engaging. Hilarious to read anything about Sumatran sorcery. Need a more deep analysis of the Lemurian time war!
September 18, 2022
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⣿⣿⡄⠀⠀⠀⣴⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣼⣿⣿⣼⣦⣽⣬⣷⣭⣭⣿⣼⣿⣼⣿⣼⢨⣭⣼⣧⣽⣦⣭⣽⣷⣭⣥⣿⣿⣿⣬⣷⣭⣵⣿⣿⣷⣭⣵⣷⣭⣥⣾⣮⣭⣼⣧⣿⣮⣿⣿⡇⣭⣵⣷⣭⣥⣾⢨⣭⣼⣷⣭⣽⣷⣭⣥⣿⣼⣿⣼⣿⣼⣿⣿⣼⣧⣿⣧⣿⣿⣿⣬⣧⣿⣧⣿⣬⣭⣿⣿⣿⣭⣭⣿⣼⣷⣽⣼⣧⣿⣼⣦⣭⣽⣿⣭⣿
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⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢰⣿⢸⡇⣛⣃⣿⢼⡷⣿⢰⣿⢰⣿⢸⣧⣛⢺⡇⣿⣜⡓⢿⣿⣿⣿⣗⣛⡅⣿⣿⡇⣾⡇⣿⢘⣓⣸⣗⣛⡄⣿⢸⣿⣿⡇⣿⢸⣿⢸⡳⣿⢾⡇⣑⢿⡇⣚⣃⣏⢾⣷⢸⣿⣿⢸⣷⢿⢰⣿⢸⡗⣛⡅⣟⢼⣷⢸⣤⣛⢺⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣾⣿⣾⣷⣶⣶⣿⣶⣶⣿⣾⣿⣷⣶⣾⣷⣶⣾⣷⣿⣶⣶⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣶⣶⣿⣿⣷⣿⣷⣿⣶⣶⣾⣷⣶⣶⣿⣾⣿⣿⣷⣿⣶⣷⣾⣷⣶⣾⣷⣿⣾⣷⣶⣶⣿⣶⣶⣾⣿⣿⣶⣶⣿⣾⣿⣾⣷⣶⣶⣿⣶⣶⣾⣷⣶⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⡟⣨⣈⣤⣠⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣶⣶⣷⣷⣿⣾⣾⣾⣾⣾⣷⣷⣷⣷⣿⣾⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⠛⣱⠿⠻⣿⡿⠿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢛⢿⣿⠟⣿⢻⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡟⣿⣿⣿⢻⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡟⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢻⡟⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢻⣿⣿⣻⡟⣿⢻⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠶⣶⣿⣿⣿⣿⠏⣚⡈⣿⠀⣶⢰⡏⣒⣊⣻⢸⣶⢹⣦⢹⢨⣶⣽⡇⣾⢋⣲⣚⡏⣶⡆⣿⣿⣷⢰⡏⣶⡎⣿⣿⡏⣶⣮⡏⣴⣮⢻⢱⣶⣽⡇⡋⣾⣿⣿⡇⣶⡎⡏⣴⣮⢹⢨⣶⡼⡏⣶⣼⡏⣶⡎⢿⢰⣾⢸⣶⢹⣿⣿⢹⡇⣷⡎⣿⣿⣷⢰⡇⣷⡎⡿⢑⣒⣹⣿⣿⣐⠦⣿⢘⢱⣿⢸⡇⣿⢸⠉⣲⣋⣷⣶⣿
⣿⣿⡄⠀⠀⠀⣴⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣼⣿⣿⣼⣦⣽⣬⣷⣭⣭⣿⣼⣿⣼⣿⣼⢨⣭⣼⣧⣽⣦⣭⣽⣷⣭⣥⣿⣿⣿⣬⣷⣭⣵⣿⣿⣷⣭⣵⣷⣭⣥⣾⣮⣭⣼⣧⣿⣮⣿⣿⡇⣭⣵⣷⣭⣥⣾⢨⣭⣼⣷⣭⣽⣷⣭⣥⣿⣼⣿⣼⣿⣼⣿⣿⣼⣧⣿⣧⣿⣿⣿⣬⣧⣿⣧⣿⣬⣭⣿⣿⣿⣭⣭⣿⣼⣷⣽⣼⣧⣿⣼⣦⣭⣽⣿⣭⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠿⠿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡁⣻⢛⣛⢿⠛⣻⣿⣟⢘⣿⢛⡛⣿⢟⣛⣻⣿⣿⢟⣛⢻⡇⣛⡻⣿⢻⣿⡟⣛⡃⣿⢛⣻⢟⣛⢻⡟⣛⡻⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⢱⡼⣿⣿⣿⢛⣛⢻⣟⣛⡛⣟⢘⡇⢛⡛⣿⢟⣛⢿⡃⣻⣻⡟⣛⡻⣿⣿⡟⣛⠻⣛⢻⡟⣛⡻⡿⣛⣛⣿⢛⣛⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇⠿⠗⣼⡇⣿⣛⣛⢿⠟⣛⢿⡇⠿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣇⣷⡻⠟⣸⣸⣿⣿⣿⡸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣐⠶⣲⣿⣿⣜⠿⣻⡇⣿⡇⣟⣸⣿⣇⠿⡇⣿⢸⣿⡰⠶⣺⡇⣿⡇⣿⢿⣿⣿⢣⣶⣶⣹⣿⣿⢘⠿⣻⣇⠶⡂⣿⡸⡇⣿⡇⣿⡰⠶⣺⣇⢿⣸⣇⠿⣻⣿⣿⣇⣿⣸⣿⢸⣇⠶⢖⣿⠲⢎⣿⡲⢆⣿⢿⣿⣿⡇⠿⠿⣸⡇⣿⠰⢖⢸⣜⠿⣻⡇⣦⢻⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣼⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢿⣿⣿⢿⣿⣯⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⡏⣿⣿⣿⣿⢿⣿⣿⡿⣿⡿⢻⣿⣿⠏⢽⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡏⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢹⣿⣿⣿⢿⣿⢹⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⢿⣿⣿⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢰⣿⢸⡇⣛⣃⣿⢼⡷⣿⢰⣿⢰⣿⢸⣧⣛⢺⡇⣿⣜⡓⢿⣿⣿⣿⣗⣛⡅⣿⣿⡇⣾⡇⣿⢘⣓⣸⣗⣛⡄⣿⢸⣿⣿⡇⣿⢸⣿⢸⡳⣿⢾⡇⣑⢿⡇⣚⣃⣏⢾⣷⢸⣿⣿⢸⣷⢿⢰⣿⢸⡗⣛⡅⣟⢼⣷⢸⣤⣛⢺⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣾⣿⣾⣷⣶⣶⣿⣶⣶⣿⣾⣿⣷⣶⣾⣷⣶⣾⣷⣿⣶⣶⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣶⣶⣿⣿⣷⣿⣷⣿⣶⣶⣾⣷⣶⣶⣿⣾⣿⣿⣷⣿⣶⣷⣾⣷⣶⣾⣷⣿⣾⣷⣶⣶⣿⣶⣶⣾⣿⣿⣶⣶⣿⣾⣿⣾⣷⣶⣶⣿⣶⣶⣾⣷⣶⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
June 2, 2023
comprehensive, if not comprehensible.
November 23, 2024
Life-changing. It ruined my life and now may it ruin yours.
October 18, 2025
Has your life become a "foaming black tidal-wave of Mesopotamian megamonstrosities and sludge-sucking abominations”?
Does your mind wander with anxious thoughts about tech sentience, Lemurian time sorcery, adept orders of decadence, abstract-machinic vectors, metastructure, namshubs, calendric secessionism of millennial time-wars, cybernetic conflict, neuronic triggers, Turing cops, Goldilocks diagonals, the sonic machine weapons of the aquassassins of Hyper-C, mediascapes, illicit pirate communications, the contagious subcultural phenomena of the digital underground, Yettuk cults, and meme-plagues?
Do you wake up with dreams of Tiamat, "that old hag that sitteth upon many waters"?
If so, this may be just the book for you. A weird brew of continental philosophy and technocapitalist theory.
A fun beach read for the apocalypse.
The black snow is coming.
Does your mind wander with anxious thoughts about tech sentience, Lemurian time sorcery, adept orders of decadence, abstract-machinic vectors, metastructure, namshubs, calendric secessionism of millennial time-wars, cybernetic conflict, neuronic triggers, Turing cops, Goldilocks diagonals, the sonic machine weapons of the aquassassins of Hyper-C, mediascapes, illicit pirate communications, the contagious subcultural phenomena of the digital underground, Yettuk cults, and meme-plagues?
Do you wake up with dreams of Tiamat, "that old hag that sitteth upon many waters"?
If so, this may be just the book for you. A weird brew of continental philosophy and technocapitalist theory.
A fun beach read for the apocalypse.
The black snow is coming.
June 25, 2019
amazing. if you liked it, supplement it further with the hyperstition blog.
April 20, 2020
never judge a book by its cover? look at that cover though. come on, founding crewdem of the Ccrudem, absolutely essential reading to any budding edgelord of theory.
February 28, 2022
This book is singlehandedly responsible for my descent into madness.
February 16, 2023
Most totally fucking insane schizo shit I’ve ever read. 10/10
February 18, 2023
Some of the weirdest writing I've read in a long time. Hyperstition, hard sci fi.
January 1, 2025
Here are the facts: sometime in the mid 1990s a group of disillusioned refugees from Birmingham University’s once-renowned Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies followed cyberfeminist pioneer Sadie Plant to Warwick University. They enrolled there en-masse in one of the UK’s few graduate programs specialising in continental philosophy and cashiered a small storage-office in which the CCRU was born. By all contemporary accounts it stood then for the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and, by general consensus, was an authentic academic effort. In time, and particularly under the semi-demonic influence of then-young lecturer Nick Plant, it grew into something more strange and, for that, far more enduring. For the briefest of moments, probably only possible in the then deterritorialized space that provincial universities and study grants then offered, the CCRU flirted with academic responsibility while also pushing back hard against established tradition. It was either there, in that crowded Warwick University office, or perhaps later, post their officially-mandated dissolution and relocation into the basement of Aleister Crowley’s childhood home in Leamington Spa, where the first notion of theory-fiction bubbled up from the morass.
Theory-fiction, as the name implies, is an intersection of theory and fiction, and also, at the same time, an attempt at dissolving the line between the two territories. An interzone in which the ‘realness’ of theory is toyed with as just another construct while the enduring power of fiction to seek deeper truths is leveraged to support and contrast and create hybridity — all this within what is probably best described as an attitude towards writing rather than an actual genre in itself. It’s hard to quite lay out what makes theory-fiction so unique, but you know it the moment you see it. It’s quite something to wrap your head around. This collection archives, for the first time as far as I know, the unit’s collectively-written early experimentations in this form that were previously only available in websites that quite charmingly reflected the aesthetics of the time of their composition. The writings can come across as bizarre and ambitious, at times obscure in the extreme. It’s the sort of book you can puzzle over a sentence for an hour, or that you can read to just let the words wash over you. I really, really enjoyed it in parts. Was flummoxed and irritated at others. Laughed to myself. Skipped the odd section. I really don’t know that I would be comfortable recommending it to anyone else.
So I suppose I should get on to what the thing is all about. Well… ha. Let’s say it is framed as a collection of found documents relating to the shady operations of, what else, the CCRU itself. Sometimes anyway. It is at times suggested to be a shadowy conspiracy, or an highly-regimented esoteric order, a Lovecraftian cult, an archive of scholarship into the pseudo-history of Atlantis and Lemuria and other fictitious places, a sort of self-aware, self-replicating capitalist AI. The writings themselves might be tabloid-like confessions, stolen handbooks, inhuman transmissions, internet posts, biographies, demonologies, appendixes to books that themselves aren’t included, and may never have been written. Unlike fiction, the characters as they are, exist in an in/visible sense, behind the lines or mentioned in passing — their reality always in question. Unlike in most Theory, there is no attempt at systematisation of ideas. It often feels like satire, often too a parody of the worst of continental philosophy’s excesses, but there’s no overt hints that it's not all to be taken seriously. Think Borges at his most playful. Think Kierkegaard’s strange sideways approach to philosophy. While I was reading I often found myself imagining a situation where some poor schmo pulled this text off the shelf of a used-bookstore and read it without any prior-knowledge of its circumstances. That got me through a few of the most torturous segments.
Lots of university mates, I’m sure, have mucked around and produced something not dissimilar to this in content, but probably far lacking in quality. It could have been a pure artefact of outsider art. But, various affiliates of the CCRU have since gone on to various degrees of fame and/or infamy so it's hard not to read back into this the cocoon-stage of their creativity. Some, like Sadie Plant, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Mark Fisher, managed to remain at least precariously in academia while remaining popular-ish writers; others, like Robin Mackay or Steve Goodman went into publishing or music; Nick Land, most peculiarly, became more or less professionally an extremely-online reactionary racist and patron-saint of the alt-right. Read into that what you will.
It seems really peculiar to give a work quite as strange as this one a mark out of five. But given the collective authorship's interest in numerology, I suppose they might enjoy reading way too much into it.
Theory-fiction, as the name implies, is an intersection of theory and fiction, and also, at the same time, an attempt at dissolving the line between the two territories. An interzone in which the ‘realness’ of theory is toyed with as just another construct while the enduring power of fiction to seek deeper truths is leveraged to support and contrast and create hybridity — all this within what is probably best described as an attitude towards writing rather than an actual genre in itself. It’s hard to quite lay out what makes theory-fiction so unique, but you know it the moment you see it. It’s quite something to wrap your head around. This collection archives, for the first time as far as I know, the unit’s collectively-written early experimentations in this form that were previously only available in websites that quite charmingly reflected the aesthetics of the time of their composition. The writings can come across as bizarre and ambitious, at times obscure in the extreme. It’s the sort of book you can puzzle over a sentence for an hour, or that you can read to just let the words wash over you. I really, really enjoyed it in parts. Was flummoxed and irritated at others. Laughed to myself. Skipped the odd section. I really don’t know that I would be comfortable recommending it to anyone else.
So I suppose I should get on to what the thing is all about. Well… ha. Let’s say it is framed as a collection of found documents relating to the shady operations of, what else, the CCRU itself. Sometimes anyway. It is at times suggested to be a shadowy conspiracy, or an highly-regimented esoteric order, a Lovecraftian cult, an archive of scholarship into the pseudo-history of Atlantis and Lemuria and other fictitious places, a sort of self-aware, self-replicating capitalist AI. The writings themselves might be tabloid-like confessions, stolen handbooks, inhuman transmissions, internet posts, biographies, demonologies, appendixes to books that themselves aren’t included, and may never have been written. Unlike fiction, the characters as they are, exist in an in/visible sense, behind the lines or mentioned in passing — their reality always in question. Unlike in most Theory, there is no attempt at systematisation of ideas. It often feels like satire, often too a parody of the worst of continental philosophy’s excesses, but there’s no overt hints that it's not all to be taken seriously. Think Borges at his most playful. Think Kierkegaard’s strange sideways approach to philosophy. While I was reading I often found myself imagining a situation where some poor schmo pulled this text off the shelf of a used-bookstore and read it without any prior-knowledge of its circumstances. That got me through a few of the most torturous segments.
Lots of university mates, I’m sure, have mucked around and produced something not dissimilar to this in content, but probably far lacking in quality. It could have been a pure artefact of outsider art. But, various affiliates of the CCRU have since gone on to various degrees of fame and/or infamy so it's hard not to read back into this the cocoon-stage of their creativity. Some, like Sadie Plant, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Mark Fisher, managed to remain at least precariously in academia while remaining popular-ish writers; others, like Robin Mackay or Steve Goodman went into publishing or music; Nick Land, most peculiarly, became more or less professionally an extremely-online reactionary racist and patron-saint of the alt-right. Read into that what you will.
It seems really peculiar to give a work quite as strange as this one a mark out of five. But given the collective authorship's interest in numerology, I suppose they might enjoy reading way too much into it.
Read
July 29, 2021A truly wild ride. A lot to wrap my head around. I have no real response yet other than that I glossed over a lot of stuff about the numogram in the final section and finished the book feeling a little disappointed as a result. And yet I also had the feeling of intense sadness as I was finishing the book *just because* I was finishing the book, which meant leaving the strange, magical and meaningful world that the book conjured. Which meant that, taken as a sort of non-linear fictional journey, I really loved it. But it felt like there was so much more to develop. And this is true of much of this fiction - Jest and Savage Detectives both also come to mind, as products of the BS 90's, as fiction trying to deal with the glimpsed, rather than the understood. But here it felt like some system was being laid out that was left massively incomplete. I haven't checked out the hyperstition blog or anything and I'm guarded about going further into anything Land did (because of the turn he'd take later on). Am I going to seriously explore the numogram and take the many lemurs into consideration when making my own decisions? Almost definitely not. Is considering basically all anti-imperial action to be a resistant act as part of an occult time-war cool? Sure. It also sheds light on some music I'm very interested in, which was probably my primary reason for reading the book.
I have no idea how to interpret the book of paths. I want to know more about how to interpret the book of paths.
I have no idea how to interpret the book of paths. I want to know more about how to interpret the book of paths.
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