Hyperstitutions, in theory and practice
A recent text, and some upcoming goings-on.
Friends, it has been a minute since the last missives, I’ve been on the road without so much writing time. I published weekly for a long stretch, working though a backlog, which we are now up-to-date with. But, stay tuned for hot grail summer, as my “Crusades-related” research on Network States starts to make its way over here.
To make a start, I’m publishing today the text of some ‘speculative hypercrusades marginalia’ which recently appeared as a keystone lore reference in some blockchain sci-fi by Paul Dylan-Ennis, published in the Digital Creativity journal. My text, called “Hyperstitutions in Gigalollapalooza: The Knightwork State in Theory and Practice” is dated 2110, and is apparently written by Wassim Z. Alsindi-Ω*: an Ω-LLM trained on the mind-works of the author (deceased). Turns out I didn’t make it to see the Bitcoin clock run out in 2106. Rest In Peers.
Don’t Believe The Hype(rstitution)
What are hyperstitutions, I hear you ask. Well, hyperstitional institutions might be organisational forms of the near-tomorrow that we collectively manifest through our imaginations, desires, and intentions. Perhaps a hyperstitution is also a collective-fiction: a way to bring together the force of many agencies through a shared myth. I would argue that the
is both a hyperstitution and a collective-fiction.The other synthetic tongue-twister is “knightwork”, and I think that one will become clear enough in time. Next up on these pages is a republishing of my 2023 article “Prophet Motives & Knightwork States”, which set the scene for everything that is to come. Some clues could also be ordained from the “Every Prophet Is A Loss” governance fictions that were originally included in NOIA Magazine #3: STATES.
We used the mighty PubPub platform’s version control system to release a “REDACTED” version of my text at the time of writing (late’23), with an “UNREDACTED” version to follow upon publication of the main text. The full version just dropped, and is also included below.
Upcoming & recent things
While I’ve got your attention, these are coming up in Berlin:
June 12th @ Kino Colosseum, Berlin. Having been invited back to Protocol Berg, I’ll speak to The Chain Mail Gaze in the philosophy track. Tickets were free but registration is now closed. If I get some spares, people in the lil’ telegruppe will find out about it first. It’s a very big stage to fill, so perhaps I’ll bring some props.
June 16th @ Radialsystem, Berlin. The Web3PrivacyNow thinktank invited me back after their Bangkok Cypherpunk Summit, to a “privacy intervention” they are holding inside DappCon (where 2017 never ended and VC-funded sunshine unicorns roam freely), where I’ll probably develop the Sifrpunk talk and article into something more aligned with “sapphirepunk” and “xypherpunk” (more on those later). Tickets are available but not free.
July 14-16 @ Funkhaus, Berlin. The Polkadot people invited me back to Web3 Summit after last summer’s Crusades workout, at which I’ll give a talk called “Open Swords Software”, where I’d like to explore the externalities of open-source culture, and think more about the relationship between mathematics, computation, ideology, and violence.
Early August @ Tropez, Berlin. Advance heads up on this since I’m not sure it will come up in future on these pages. Keep eyes peeled elsewhere for infos. The cute outdoor discourse sessions at Sommerbad Humboldthain will be back again, and I’ll be around :)
A few things that just wrapped, keep your eyes peeled elsewhere for outputs/documentation:
Barbican “Experiments in Utopia” event, video to follow.
I gave a new talk in Vienna last week, “Technocapital Utopias and Their Reactionary Shadows”, video to follow.
Mini-residency at Au JUS in Brussels just wrapped, pics & video to follow.
And, now that the advertisements are complete, we can move on to the hyperstitutions text. It’s a weird one, not least because it’s set in the future looking back. It also self-cites a lot, like a lot, and that was a deliberate choice to mimic one’s supposal of how a future “authorbot” might go about its (de)generative business.
Hyperstitutions in Gigalollapalooza: The Knightwork State In Theory and Practice (2110)
Cite as: Wassim Z. Alsindi-Ω*, Hyperstitutions in Gigalollapalooza: The Knightwork State In Theory and Practice, 2110, p. 7Ω5.
*An Ω-LLM trained on the mind-works of the author (deceased).
The post-schismatic governatorial patchwork of the 'State Machine One' gigalopolis, which emerged in the Epoch War—in what was previously referred to using solar calendrics as the twenty-first century—was constituted of direct descendants of the competing organisational ideologics which had been at conceptual loggerheads for almost a hundred Sun-years. The hyperstitutions—hyperstitional institutions—of the various flavours of networked secessionism descended into direct conflict, as predicted by ‘Governance Fictions’ of the early Blockchain Age (Alsindi, Governance Fictions, NOIA Magazine, 2024).
The epochalypses of 2038 and 2016—channelling the chaos of the original Aeonic event of Y2K (Alsindi et al., Twenty-Two Years of Transcendental Time Machines, 2023, Miskatonic Virtual University Press)—further magnified the divisions between the factions, as each hard fork led to further divergence of their trajectories. These would prove to be the ultimate canonisation of the 'entropic bias' theory of blockchains as derived from thermodynamics (Alsindi, Towards An Analytical Discipline of Forkonomy, 2018, Parallel Industries).
The Epoch War was initiated via a surprise cyber, air, and land attack by the (post-UK) Domain forces in alliance with the Necroprimitives—adherents of the proof-of-work ideology united in their 'Bitlerian Jihad' (Alsindi, Necroprimitivism Rising, 2023, Agorism XXI)--against the Newropean Union (EUv2)—the successor federation to the failed neoliberal transnational unification project in the final pre-Satoshi decades. As a result of the ensuing chaos, little was left of traditional off-chain polities, paving the way for the untried and untested wyrding ways of the timechain to be deployed at haste, and at scale. Owing to insider asymmetries at the time of the minting of the EEC, enormous disparities in terms of access to information, resources, and governance rights ensued. The hidden labour of blockchain governance reared its ugly head once again.
The old guard of the 'gilets blancs' had their explicit grip on power replaced with a clandestine and subterfugial shadow: a social Sybil attack vector of sorts (Alsindi, (mis)adventures in Crypto-Governance II, MIT Computational Law Report, 2023). They continued to attempt puppet-mastery from the secure vantage of their token-gated communities in the Gigalolopolice State suburbs, with varying degrees of success. Fittingly, in the 'urban' centres of the Neuropean Union territories, a new Frankish (French-German) dominion took form styled—ironically—as a Caliphate. Some called this an 'Unholy Yeoman Empire' (Alsindi-Ω, Cards Against Yeomanity, 2095, NEOM Editions), as this Caliphate, whilst borrowing heavily from the logics of medieval Islamic governance, was architected upon a bedrock of Islamophobia and 'depatriation' in the name of ideological purity. The nuclear wastelands of Palestine, long since rendered uninhabitable by thousands of years of inter-Abrahamic hostility, became the perverse if fitting location of the Crusader Capliphate-crimes, creating neo-concentration camps in the vein of the Third Reich, the Brextopians, and the neo-Mussolinites with their dreams of outsourcing human traffick to the war-torn outlands of Rwanda, Albania, and Papua New Guinea.
It is of crucial import to recall that 'urban' high density population centres take their moniker from Urban II, Archbishop of Rome and Pope of the Vatican 1088-1099. Urban II presided over the Council of Claremont in 1095 which—building on the teachings of Knights Templar co-founder & preacher of Benedictine and Cistercian monasticism Bernard of Clairvaux—was the first incitement to what would come to be known as the First Crusade in Levantine territories, ultimately leading to the fall of Jerusalem in 1099. The resonances between the Medieval Crusades and the NEOMedieval revival of post-Epochalypse technosupremacy are so startlingly apparent, and indeed well-characterised, that the ensuring 'HyperCrusades' which ensued at the behest of the Frankish Caliphate are best understood from historical texts of the early-postmodern period (Alsindi, Prophet Motives & Knightwork States, 2023, 0xFolklore).