The Story Goes Like This...
LIVING ROOM — TeddyBear83 is sitting on a cushion on the floor. xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx is on the couch.
TeddyBear83: What do you want to know?
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: The whole thing, I guess.
TeddyBear83: I can just do the full download.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Go on then.
TeddyBear83: So it was like the history of the Ccru.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Which stands for?
TeddyBear83: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. So it started initially with Sadie Plant.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Did you get the monitor?
TeddyBear83: Yeah she’s out. Face down on her bed.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: N’awww.
TeddyBear83: So Sadie Plant had in like 1989 finished her PhD on the Situationist International, which was a kind of left-wing performance group I guess. They came up a bit when I was reading David Graeber last year.
A disembodied cry emanates from beyond the conversation space.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Oh no, there she goes again.
TeddyBear83: Poor thing.
Patient, hopeful silence. The cries do not continue.
TeddyBear83: I think what they did was stage fairly abstract performance artworks. Spectacles. And it was almost meant to be like an absurdist circuit breaker to get people out of the capitalist consumption machine, right? I think that was the idea — hey, we’re in the world and we can bring in a new reality if we just sort of act differently and think differently about how to behave and be in the world. I think that was the concept. So she studied them and then she was a cyberfeminist — talking about the new realities of cybernetic cultures and internet cultures and digital technologies and how it’s changing society. But this is the early 90s, right?
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Right.
TeddyBear83: So a bit about the failure of the Situationists to change the world. It’s neoliberalism and Maggie Thatcher. And Francis Fukuyama saying look, it’s the end of history basically — that the neoliberal, capital, social democratic liberal world order is just so malleable and so powerful that it’s going to become the standard for everything and it’s unbeatable, right? That’s the claim. End of history. We’re there. We’ve finished it. This is how humanity just goes on.
Crinkling of a chocolate wrapper.
TeddyBear83: So the Ccru comes out of the University of Warwick and all these other figures kind of join. And what they were trying to do — instead of doing what universities normally do, which is talk about people from a distance — they were trying to immerse themselves in digital culture, internet culture, and sort of be with it and emerge out of there. So there’s a lot of techno music and experimental digital poetry and there’s this sort of multimedia idea — audio, visual, all bundling together at once. They used to do these binge writing and creation sessions where the idea was that nobody could tell who wrote any single part of it. It was a collective effort. And that was the concept they were trying to bring together. You think about things like open source software — big groups making things kind of anonymously — and that’s sort of what the internet is. They were trying to bring that energy to academic study in the 90s.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Okay.
TeddyBear83: The problem was — especially because of Nick Land, who ended up being a bit of the leader of it—
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Land? Like the ground?
TeddyBear83: Land. Yeah.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Oh okay. Not like the kids’ book author, Nick Bland.
TeddyBear83: No, but every time I see The Very Cranky Bear I do think it’s kind of funny. So anyway they did some weird stuff. It was borderline culty but they had a real big following. And you can see where the Situationist stuff comes in — they would host these conferences and there was some story about Nick Land presenting a talk on a certain type of music and he’s just writhing on the floor growling into a microphone. It wasn’t academic in any normal sense. So eventually there was a conflict and the uni was like — you’ve got to do papers and lectures. And he was not doing that.
The cries begin again, more emphatically than before. It becomes a scream.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Oh no.
The recording stops.
…
Time passes.
BEDROOM - TeddyBear83 and xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx are in bed. A bedside lamp is on.
TeddyBear83: So they’re looking at internet cultures and cybernetic-type cultures from within, not from without, and doing a bunch of funky stuff. And there are some key ideas within it. One is called theory-fiction — the idea that you’re trying to extend some theory about where society is going and you do so in the form of fiction. And it tended to be a lot of dystopian sci-fi.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Right.
TeddyBear83: And then that combines with this idea of hyperstition, which I think is this concept of kind of memeing reality into existence. That ideas about what’s real, if reinforced enough and mentioned enough, become kind of real — especially in the cybernetic context when you’ve got enough people saying the same thing.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Hm.
TeddyBear83: I think Trump is almost an example? Him becoming president — it was almost memed up. If you think about 2016, the mainstream news tried to cover him or whatever but it was just the repetition of his name over and over and over again, especially on social media. They were able to game the network just by saying it enough. It kind of builds momentum. I almost want to say that’s an example of hyperstition.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Okay yeah I think I get that.
TeddyBear83: And where we end up now — and I think this is the point of the lecturer, Vincent Lê, who’s just done a book on Nick Land — his sort of endpoint is that these guys, the right-wing accelerationists, stem from this and kind of running the US at the moment. It’s sort of the dominant ideology. But anyway that’s not quite where we are yet in the course because there is this interesting part where at some point they’re living in the birthplace of occultist—
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Who?
TeddyBear83: I don’t remember his name. And they get into this numerology type thing and they come up with some numerograph or some structure based on the way numbers work. I don’t know — he’s going to try and build it out for us over the coming weeks. And some of these folks ended up doing rituals to summon like — time demons.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Time demons?
TeddyBear83: I think so. I don’t know, really. Something really weird, either way. I don’t know what that part is. Apparently during one of the classes we’re going to do one of these rituals.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: And like summon a demon?
TeddyBear83: Yeah.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: No thank you.
TeddyBear83: It’ll be fun.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Nuh uh, no way.
TeddyBear83: I mean, I’m not going to be physically present for it.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: But what if you accidentally summon one of these demons?
TeddyBear83: Guess we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
Casey is studying The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) as part of the MSCP Evening School Semester 1 2026, taught by Vincent Lê. The course runs Wednesdays 6:30–8:30pm, March–June.