Iroko Tree

Divination, Hyperstitioning, and the Punk Spirit in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

There is no better time and place to be a punk than San Francisco at the dawn of the artificial intelligence age. I wrote that the moment I decided to move here in 2023, before I fully understood what it would mean to live on top of the tectonic shifts that define this time of transition. Creative tools and the means of production are increasingly democratized by the day. Product in the traditional sense is dead. What remains is the surface between capability and intent.

And here at that surface, something strange and ancient is resurgent: the prevalence (dare I say exploitation) of intuitive ways of being.

Divination as Cognitive Technology

When people hear “tarot” or “divination,” they reach for the woo bucket. Superstition. Confirmation bias. A parlor trick for people who want the universe to tell them what they already believe. I’m not interested in defending or dismissing those straw men. What I am most interested in at this moment is a parallel mechanism: divination as a priming technology for focus, attention, and narrative development.

Consider Oblique Strategies, the deck of creative prompts jointly created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt over half a century ago. No one accuses musicians of believing that a card has mystical powers when they pull “Honor thy error as a hidden intention” and suddenly construe their stuck project differently. The card is a perturbation; it breaks the creator out of a local optimum by introducing something compressed, coherent, and strategic that the mind then integrates into meaning.

Tarot, for example, can operate on similar principles, just with richer symbolism and longer historical accretion that compresses large swaths of the collective unconscious. You pull The Tower, and your brain doesn’t passively receive “object destruction” in a straightforward and general sense. It actively searches your situational context for where that frame applies. Whether or not the card knows something is perhaps irrelevant as far as this mechanism is concerned. You know something you weren’t letting yourself access, and the card grants permission to interrogate it more explicitly.

That’s actually a real life example from just yesterday. I shared tea with a woman on Frontier Tower’s Longevity floor who posed a question about how intuition can be trained. I asked what was salient for her in that very moment and she mentioned an impending interview and doubts about the strength of her pitch. We pulled a single tarot card from Llewellyn’s online reading page: The Tower.

“Looks like you’re pivoting,” I joked before revealing the card (which traditionally symbolizes destruction and chaos). My actual suggestion wasn’t “your interview will be a disaster.” It was: maybe this is legitimizing the doubt you already feel. Maybe you should take a subtractive approach, simplify, examine what isn’t working. The card gave her permission to interrogate a concern she was suppressing.

This is what I mean by training intuition: building a practice of externalizing the prompt, making the subconscious conscious, and then allowing the mind’s pattern-matching machinery to do what it does best. Finding the thread, weaving the narrative, identifying the move. Sometimes the move is subversion. Sometimes your intuition points in the opposite direction of what was exposed and you’ve clarified what you don’t want. It’s not always direct, but the practice offers a nucleation surface for reflexively directed narrative and intention setting.

Narrative as the Human Superpower

Narrative is how we position ourselves inside time and reality with agency. It’s how we compress the past, present, and incompressible future into stories we can grip, steer, and navigate.

Nick Land coined the term “hyperstitioning” to highlight this universal human proclivity. It describes how fictions make themselves real by amassing belief and being acted upon. A sufficiently compelling story about the future doesn’t just predict; it recruits. It attracts resources, attention, and effort. It becomes true because people treated it as true before it was.

I invoke Land with some reluctance. He is a neo-reactionary voice, writing for the Dark Enlightenment, espousing anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian views whose genesis I can conceptually understand yet whose conclusions I find rather repugnant. However, ideas owe no allegiance. When they reflect behaviors in reality, when they describe something true about how narrative and belief actually operate, I can credit the observation without endorsing the associated politics. As the rationalists might say, the map is not the territory. Ancient navigators did in fact use the stars to cross oceans regardless of their mythology about what stars were. The positions and indications can transmit truths that are independent of (or at least seemingly orthogonal to) a cosmology that acts as a cognitive lens for focusing attention.

The mechanism Land identified is real: humans hyperstition constantly. Every startup pitch deck is a hyperstition. Every social movement. Every declaration of intent that bootstraps itself into existence through the sheer momentum of collective belief. What matters is what you point it at. The White House didn’t staff an astonishing number of Gen Z memelords by accident.

The Deep Fates Program

If you want to understand this story—the intersection of woo and tech, of divination practice and capability explosion—you need to know about deepfates. His work, The Deep Fates Program, is the quintessential shaping of this inquiry. The Deep Fates Program is not a footnote; it is the throughline.

The trickster presentation belies the rigor. deepfates has taken this theoretical inquiry very seriously as practice and research. Not “wouldn’t it be interesting if” but “here is the protocol, here is what changes when you commit to it, here are my tools and practice.” That’s the difference between philosophy and training. Training changes you. It deposits new patterns in your nervous system. It makes intuition reliable rather than lucky. The Deep Fates Program propagates this training across many practitioners for compounding effects.

The Risks of Over-Indexing

I would be dishonest if I presented all of this as pure upside. Overtraining intuition carries very real risks. A prominent one is apophenia: the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between largely unrelated things.

Of course everything is connected. You can traverse paved road from pretty much any driveway in the continental United States to any other. Ideas work the same way: you can improvise a path from any starting point to any destination because that’s how meaning-making and language work. But if you overindulge this and allow the associative engine to run without a governor, you might end up in hypomanic territory. Everything becomes significant. Generative racing thoughts make sleep seem optional. Grandiosity inflates; if the universe is speaking to you specifically through patterns, you must be pretty damn important as an individual… right?

This isn’t hypothetical. Before his re-emergence as a Dark Enlightenment intellectual, Nick Land himself fell off the map following a bout of amphetamine abuse. I suspect that this is not stricly unrelated to his philosophy or way of being and that certain chemical states and modes of apophenic thinking reinforce one another in potentially dangerous ways. I’ve met unexpectedly brilliant individuals on the streets of cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles; broken clocks that were once rather nice wristwatches, complications still gleaming on occasion as they catch the right light in front of keener observers. I’d wager that some of them followed a version of this path too far without sufficient guardrails in place.

The antidote is not to abandon intuition but to pair it with reality negotiation as a healthy foil. You are not exempt from physics, biology, or social consequence because you have a compelling narrative. Your story must earn its place by improving your navigation of the world, not by insulating you from feedback.

Meaningful Choices in an Incompressible Future

When people ask me about my vision for the future, I am sure of very little. The coming decades seem utterly unpredictable and incompressible: too many variables, too many nonlinear interactions, too much genuine novelty. I do not know if we flourish or collapse or something stranger than either. However, there is one thing I am absolutely certain of: I would like people to have meaningful choices.

If humanity follows those choices to extinction, so be it; that would be our self-determined destiny as a species. But the capacity to choose—real choices, not the theater of choice within predetermined constraints—is something worth preserving to me. It’s the kernel of democracy that survives even when its institutional forms degrade. [It’s arguably closer to the primordial Hellenistic ideal when you toss oracular mysticism back into the mix.] This can be hard to square seeing that constraining action is a necessary element of functional governance. However, constraining desire is something else entirely. I’m naturally suspicious of anyone who seeks to preemptively control what others are allowed to want.

Aside: This is what the community at Frontier Tower means to me in this moment. The Tower (interpret the turn of phrase as you will) is a prism that refracts the present into many possible futures that people can get excited about, grab the handles of, and participate in. Not a single vision imposed, but a space where agency and optionality can flourish, intermingle, and compound.

Grip the Reins Anyway

There is much talk of wizardry about in the world today. Genuinely strange, capability-expanding work that would have read as science fiction five years ago. The barriers stretch further from our old conceptions of realism with each passing month. Hyperstitions pass for the future and then become it.

The punk spirit is invaluable here in this moment. Not necessarily the aesthetic, but the disposition: the refusal to wait for permission, the willingness to try something before you’ve fully convinced yourself it’s possible, the confidence that resourcefulness trumps credentials. DIY: do it yourself.

It calls to mind a scene from SLC Punk!, James Merendino’s 1998 bildungsroman about young people coming of age and crafting their narratives in contemporaneous Salt Lake City. Matthew Lillard’s protagonist Stevo meets Brandy at a party, and she chews him out: “Wouldn’t it be more of an act of rebellion if you didn’t spend so much time buying blue hair dye and going out to get punky clothes? You look like you’re wearing a uniform. You look like a punk. That’s not rebellion… that’s fashion. Rebellion happens in the mind. You can’t create it… you just are that way.”

That’s what I’m talking about: the disposition, not the costume. I think that’s a lot of what present-day San Francisco is about too: young people trying to come of age, figure out who they are, and craft narratives worth living inside. The city has always attracted people in that mode, and the AI explosion has only intensified the stakes and the possibilities (albeit amid the noisy reality distortion fields and shifting incentives that follow technocapital excess).

That’s what divination is about in the end. As much as it is fortune-telling, it’s focus training. It’s the deliberate cultivation of the capacity to see paths and then walk them. It’s a powerful choice to say “I’m not sure” and grip the reins anyway, rather than sit idly by and watch as the future slips into attraction basins that siphon your life force and that of those you care for most. Narrative is a part of that. Hyperstitioning is a key lever of narrative control and propagation. And intuition—trained, tested, kept honest by contact with reality—is essential to developing that capacity.

The future is deeply uncertain and incompressible. Choose anyway and write your story.