#43: This Is a Hypersigil
This week: The Invisibles as the meta-text for our unstable present // Generative hyperstition engines // What we’re tracking: AI-run novels and living architecture
Continuing a Trilogy
Welcome back, to the second part of a trilogy of newsletters about how new technologies of storytelling, sensing and simulation are opening ancient doors. This is a sequence about ritual, transmission, and time.
Last week we started with James Merrill’s epic poemThe Changing Light at Sandover and used it as a jump off point into emerging behaviours of computational mysticism - the intentional use of new tech to create new forms of spirituality.
This week we move onto The Invisibles – Grant Morrison’s psychedelic, anarcho-magickal, time-travelling comics epic. And next week: David Cronenberg, William Burroughs, and Ornette Coleman, colliding in Naked Lunch.
Like I said, all three essays note the same thing: that the technologies we build are not just systems of logic or economics. They are rituals – of power, of transmission and of ghostly memory.
LET’S GO!
ART! // The Invisibles — Ritual Engines for a Disintegrating World
I’ve been circling Grant Morrison’s 1990s comic book series The Invisibles for years.
There’s something about it that resists easy capture, which is ironic for a comic about conspiracies, secret orders, hyperdimensions, and the fragility of reality itself. The Invisibles is not so much a narrative as an initiatory text — a transmission from within the chaos of late 20th century culture that now feels closer to prophetic encoding than simple science fiction.
Grant Morrison’s long-form comic series (1994–2000) arrived just before The Matrix hit theaters, but it’s no stretch to say that most of The Matrix’s metaphysics — and much of its leather — were already inside The Invisibles. Morrison’s world was populated by secret rebel cells, hidden orders, occult forces battling interdimensional archons. But where The Matrix simplifies — red pill, blue pill — The Invisibles leans into multiplicity, contradiction, and instability.
It is not an accident that Morrison has referred to The Invisibles as a magical act, even going so far as to describe its production as a working intended to transform both creator and reader. The comic doesn’t simply depict conspiracy or hyperstition — it functions like one. Its existence is part of the feedback loop it describes: art as a self-fulfilling cultural virus, language as a contagion that writes new futures into being.
What makes The Invisibles so resonant now — why it’s worth reading as a precondition for contemporary creative R&D — is that Morrison anticipated several of the problems we are only beginning to confront as technology mutates our narrative spaces.
Rituals of Generation
At its heart, The Invisibles is not about secret societies. It’s about how stories generate worlds.
You can see this echoed now in the emergent rise of generative narrative systems: LLM-powered lore engines, AI-fueled worldbuilders, neural network-generated characters who carry on the plot whether you’re watching or not. Projects like AI Dungeon, Hidden Door, and a swarm of generative design experiments are testing the idea of fiction as an emergent system rather than a fixed text. The creative act becomes less a script and more a ritual invocation — something closer to magic than authorship.
Morrison’s own approach reflects this: The Invisibles was written under the influence of chaos magic, with characters and plotlines shaped by sigils, invocations, and the deliberate collapse of authorial control. He even claimed that events from the comic — including his own near-death experience — leaked into his life as feedback from the text itself.
This recursive bleed between fiction and reality lies at the heart of hyperstition — a term developed by Nick Land and the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), a para-academic collective at Warwick that was active in the 1990s. Hyperstition describes fictional ideas that propagate themselves into reality by generating cultural, technological, or social momentum. The Invisibles functions as a hyperstitional object: an aesthetic model for how generative storytelling engines might function as future myth-making systems.
Ritual Engines and the Coming Feedback Loop
This makes The Invisibles strangely aligned with emerging trends we’ve been tracking: ritualised narrative architectures, AI-assisted collaborative fiction, procedural worldbuilding. Instead of linear storytelling, these systems produce feedback structures where the user, the algorithm, and the narrative co-generate new states.
It’s a return to ritual in the Deleuzian sense: not simply repeating the same, but performing variations through difference and repetition. Like the ritual masks worn by characters in The Invisibles, identity itself becomes mutable — a temporary vessel for narrative forces that operate at scales larger than individual authorship.
Much of today’s bleeding-edge creative practice — whether in generative art, lorecraft AI, or recursive world models — is, knowingly or not, reaching for the same ritual structures Morrison was playing with. What The Invisibles still offers us is not just a story but a template: how to build narrative spaces that are less about coherence and more about immersion in multiplicity.
Now Fully Out of Step
The irony, of course, is that The Invisibles remains stubbornly unadapted. In an era where almost every comic property has been strip-mined for IP, The Invisibles remains commercially unpalatable. Its tangled conspiracies, anti-structural plotlines, and unapologetically bizarre metaphysics defy neat packaging.
That’s exactly why it matters.
The Invisibles was — and remains — an anti-mainstream cultural artifact: a dispatch from the paranoid margins at the very moment when the mass media dream machine was ramping up its smooth surfaces. It is saturated with the fragments of 20th century countercultures: Burroughs, Situationism, PKD, esoteric ritual, anarchist theory, continental philosophy, British punk, rave culture, and late Cold War surveillance paranoia. Its DNA has now scattered and recombined across online conspiracy subcultures, vaporwave hauntologies, and memetic warfare ecosystems, long after the comic itself faded from view.
To understand how today’s ritual narrative systems emerge — to map the strange attractors that pull AI lore engines, hyperstitional memes, and emergent world-simulations together — we have to start here, with a work that modeled not the content but the logic of generative narrative.
Morrison was ahead of his time. The rest of us are only now catching up.
IDEAS! // Generative Hyperstitions
Morrison’s “hypersigil” is now operationalized. If The Invisibles was a metaphysical device in comic form, generative AI has made it machinic.
The intersection of AI and emergent narrative has birthed a domain that’s maybe best described as hyperstitional engines: generative systems that don’t just simulate fiction, but begin to shape emerging belief systems, aesthetics, and culture itself.
Experimental platforms like AI Dungeon and NovelAI allow infinitely branching narrative construction, where world models and language models co-evolve to sustain emergent fiction.
Hyperstitional communities have formed around projects like Latent Space Exploration and Dream Machine, where generated imagery and language co-produce speculative mythologies.
Entire Discord servers now operate as collaborative narrative worlds, where LLM-powered NPCs interact in endless fractal conversation trees — part role-play, part creative machine. GREAT paper on this from Cornell researchers here.
In this generative domain, the old distinctions between author, reader, and character blur. Narrative becomes less a finished product than an ongoing recursive feedback loop. The Invisibles was a fiction designed to infect reality. Now, generative engines can do something similar: seeding unstable storylines into discourse spaces, where human and machine agency co-mutate.
The outcome? Something not unlike what CCRU described as “fictional quantities entering the field of real causal efficacy.”
Signal Returns
Selected highlights from Issues 1-42
Generative art communities — Issue 31 on Aesthetics Wiki as a chaotic map of online visual microgenres
Backrooms horror & procedural spaces — Issue 24 tracing the viral aesthetic of liminal urban exploration
Deleuze’s time-image — Issue 40’s reading of Mad Max: Fury Road and the ritualized recursion of action cinema
James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover — Issue 42’s deep dive on spectral authorship and computational mysticism
What We’re Tracking Next
Hyperstitious AI communities — Latent Space Explorers, a Discord collective generating evolving collaborative worlds. Real-world hyperstitional engines at play.
Generative role-play worlds — The forthcoming project Hidden Door blending GPT-powered storytelling with collaborative game structures.
Marjorie Perloff’s book Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics explores the idea of minimal differences—echoing hypertextual approaches to language and poetics
Endnote. A quick poll.
Thanks to those of you who made it to the end.
At the end of this trilogy, I want to start developing a longer-form project out of the newsletter - the initial stages of something that might turn into a book. I have two (highly interrelated) ideas i’d like to build out.
But which one would you like to see?
Project one is called Kinetic: How Action Movies, Anime, and eSports Show Us How to Live in a Procedural World.
It’s big idea is: Over the last sixty years, digital technologies, platforms, algorithms, and artificial intelligence have not only transformed how we live — they have transformed how we tell stories, stage conflict, and create art. Certain genres of culture have not merely portrayed this change — they have evolved into laboratories that show us how life operates inside systems of rules. Think: 1960s action movies like Point Blank and Le Samourai, tactical squad board games like Panzer Blitz and Warhammer, Street Fighter, Paranoia Agent, John Wick, The Villainness and Fortnite.
Project two is called Exit Strategies: An Alternative History of Avant-Pop. Exit Strategies would look at how avant-garde, experimental, and world-building approaches have shaped popular music — not from outside the system, but from inside it. This book tells the story of artists who entered the commercial music system, pushed its boundaries, and then found ways to exit: retreating into highly personal, fragile creative worlds while remaining connected to popular culture. Think: Joe Meek, Brian Eno, Scott Walker, Talk Talk, Kate Bush, Bjork, Frank Ocean and Dean Blunt.
Which one would you like to see develop in public here on the newsletter?
Love to you all.
To next week, where things get rilly freeky.