"hyperstition" meaning in English

See hyperstition in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: hyperstitions [plural]
Etymology: Modelled on superstition (“belief, not based on reason, that one's behaviour can magically influence events”) Head templates: {{en-noun}} hyperstition (plural hyperstitions)
  1. (uncommon) A cultural belief (especially a work of fiction) that makes itself real; a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy where some cultural idea or hype truly brings about the thing it describes. Tags: uncommon Related terms: hyperstitious
    Sense id: en-hyperstition-en-noun-khd00AsD Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries

Inflected forms

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  "etymology_text": "Modelled on superstition (“belief, not based on reason, that one's behaviour can magically influence events”)",
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          "text": "A hyperstition can be loosely defined as a fictional work or belief system that somehow gradually takes on the appearance of reality. Obviously based on the concept of superstition, hyperstition is distinguished by being predominantly digitally spawned and proliferated.",
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          "text": "The lingering presence of a sensation long passed lies also at the core of the concept of hyperstition—a concept so commonly used by Nick Land and more recently by Steve Goodman that some might even consider it outworn. In an interview request to define hyperstition Nick Land replied in 2009 with this explication: Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies.",
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          "ref": "2021 December 6, Richard Seymour, “Jack Dorsey’s ditched Twitter for bitcoin. Has the social media bubble burst?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:",
          "text": "Currently, one bitcoin will trade for £42,973. But it wouldn’t be worth a dime if enough investors hadn’t decided to treat it as though it were gold. It is a “hyperstition”: a fiction that makes itself true because enough people believe in it.",
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          "text": "In an interview with Estselle^([sic – meaning Estelle]) Gervais, Emily Segal, a member of noted art and trend-forecasting collective K-HOLE, says that “Hyperstition is a term coined in the 1990s to describe fictions that make themselves true. […]”",
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        "(uncommon) A cultural belief (especially a work of fiction) that makes itself real; a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy where some cultural idea or hype truly brings about the thing it describes."
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        "(uncommon) A cultural belief (especially a work of fiction) that makes itself real; a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy where some cultural idea or hype truly brings about the thing it describes."
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-07-25 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-07-06 using wiktextract (d9fa233 and 9e92f4b). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

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