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.

The claim I want to make is straightforward. Intuition is a trainable faculty. The practices that look superstitious from outside—tarot, sigil work, hyperstition—are disciplined ways of training it. That training matters now, because the future has become visibly incompressible and you still have to choose.

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. Set those aside. The mechanism underneath is more interesting: 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: maybe this is legitimizing a doubt she already felt. Maybe the pitch wants 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. Either way, the practice offers a nucleation surface for directed narrative and intention setting.

Hyperstition

Narrative is how we position ourselves inside time with agency—how we compress past, present, and an incompressible future into stories we can grip and steer. The next scale up has a name.

Hyperstition was coined by Nick Land in the 1990s and developed with Mark Fisher on their shared blog of the same name. (A piece of entertaining lore: its webmaster was Abe Burmeister, who later founded Outlier.) Land’s canonical formulation characterizes hyperstitions as elements of effective culture that make themselves real, fictional quantities functional as time-travelling devices, and coincidence intensifiers. Fictions that, by being believed and acted upon, recruit the conditions of their own reality.

Land’s later turn toward neo-reactionary thought is well-documented. I don’t defend it, and I don’t need to—Fisher’s politics were on the left, the blog itself hosted a politically heterogeneous crowd, and the concept has circulated widely in leftist thought since. The mechanism is the mechanism.

What hyperstition actually is—and what gets lost when people reduce it to “startup pitch deck”—is ritual technology. The paradigm cases are sigil work, prophecy, tarot. Pitch decks are a thin instance: a fiction pointed at a future, intended to recruit belief. The thick version is a practice. You commit to the frame, attention rearranges, behavior rearranges, collaborators appear, and the frame becomes true in increments.

Which is to say: tarot and hyperstition are the same mechanism at different scales. Tarot perturbs one person’s internal narrative; hyperstition perturbs a collective one. Both externalize a prompt, demand commitment to it, and let pattern-matching and behavior do the rest. Every social movement that stuck, stuck this way. So does every startup that got past its first credible moment. The White House didn’t staff an astonishing number of Gen Z memelords by accident.

People are practicing this seriously right now. deepfates runs the most rigorous protocol I’ve seen in this territory—a real training curriculum with a defined arc, propagating across practitioners for compounding effect. Philosophy describes. Training changes you.

The Risks of Over-Indexing

None of this comes free. Overtraining intuition has a failure mode with a name: 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. Let the associative engine run without a governor and you 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. Nick Land himself fell off the map in the early 2000s following a bout of amphetamine abuse, before his later re-emergence as a Dark Enlightenment intellectual. I suspect the two are related—that certain chemical states and certain modes of apophenic thinking reinforce each other in 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.

Keep the training. Pair it with reality negotiation as a foil. A compelling narrative does not exempt you from physics, biology, or social consequence. Your story must earn its place by improving how you navigate the world. If it insulates you from feedback instead, it has failed.

Meaningful Choices in an Incompressible Future

So what is well-trained intuition for, if the failure mode is delusion and the goal isn’t prophecy? Meaningful choice under incompressibility.

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. 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, free of predetermined constraints—is worth preserving to me. It’s the kernel of democracy that survives even when its institutional forms degrade. (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. Constraining desire is something else entirely, and 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—it refracts the present into many possible futures people can get excited about, grab the handles of, and participate in. Many visions held in parallel, not one imposed.

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 useful here—the disposition, not the aesthetic: refusal to wait for permission, willingness to try something before you’ve fully convinced yourself it’s possible, 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 gets chewed out by Brandy at a party for treating punk as costume. “You look like you’re wearing a uniform,” she tells him. “That’s not rebellion… that’s fashion. Rebellion happens in the mind. You can’t create it… you just are that way.”

The disposition, not the costume. 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 intensified both the stakes and possibilities (albeit amid the noisy reality distortion fields and shifting incentives that follow technocapital excess).

This is what it’s about in the end. Divination is focus training as much as fortune-telling—the deliberate cultivation of the capacity to see paths and then walk them. The same goes for hyperstition: commit to a frame, let it shape attention and action, and earn the right to the future you’re pointing at. Trained intuition—tested, kept honest by contact with reality—is what makes any of this more than wishful thinking. It’s a 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.

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

Special thanks to Toby Shorin for insights and feedback.