One of the most important obituaries of the last decade or so, at least from the point of view of the Barghest Wyrd, was that of Art Bell. A true giant of the industry with as many fans as detractors, his Coast to Coast AM radio show was instrumental in bringing the paranormal to the masses during the height of Millennial angst. Ghosts, monsters, Men in Black and the Hatman. Subtle Satanic Panic transmitted across state lines, aliens and time travellers on speed dial just waiting to have their say. Every night was Halloween, albeit through a distinctly B-Movie, Kolchak: The Night Stalker flavoured lens.

As a result copies of Bell’s run on the program from the mid 1990’s to the early 2000’s are easy enough to find online, even if Premiere Networks like to swing the ban-hammer against those who share those episodes for free. Considering that these were originally broadcast around the time I first became interested in the work of John Keel I know that the information held within would have been invaluable to my younger self. But without an affiliate here in the UK to pick up the segment all those tantalising titbits remained an ocean away, at least until I found an archive in my early twenties and ripped the lot overnight.

Soon I had built an impressive collection, meticulously ordered by date, topic and guest. The perfect accompaniment to a mind numbingly long commute. But more so than just convenience, such an episodic gathering grants a type of clarity that is lacking while shows are airing piecemeal. One which allows the listener to create a cross-section of sorts. This serves as a temporal lens, granting a view of an extremely worrying truth for those who are willing to face it. For while my eldritch black dog sees much within its swirling flash bang eye, stagnation will only ever draw seething ire in line with that gaze.

     The processes of collective memory reflect on themselves. The performance of customs and the retelling of stories are not simply the ‘artefacts’ of a society. The customs and the stories also shape the society. The repetition of customs, the retelling of stories, and similar performances are in themselves a substantial part of the society.
     Marshall Sahlins long ago showed to anthropologists and historians that cultural artefacts - and that includes customs as well as physical objects - are not inert 'containers of meaning' but actively implicated in historical change. Folklore draws upon and simultaneously recreates the underlying assumptions and preconceptions of a society. [1]

So the issue is one of post-digital standardisation fuelled by the dissolution of cultural borders, then. The once wild territory of the unusual has become home to a handful of prominent ideas, stretching along the ley lines of the imagination like franchise coffee shops on some autumnal high-street. Yes, your favourite internet bogeyman is still out there, unknowable and brooding as always. Just tasting a little more like pumpkin spice than he used to. Researchers across multiple platforms have forgotten that they are supposed to make connections. Grow the meme. Not cheapen the subject through endless recycling.

We have reached a point in the anomalous where most tackle the Wyrd as historians and not journalists, folklorists instead of detectives. They seem all too eager to repackage and republish the past research of others under their own name while actually making any fresh connections among the data points. Of course we all have to eat, and there is nothing wrong with creating collected works on obscure topics. The trick, however, is to either bring something new to the table when you do, or just admit that the narrative is derivative from the outset and roll the dice on the usual algorithm farmed engagement spikes.

Cursed and abused, Accelerationism may at first seem to have little to offer the Fortean discourse, though it is actually something of a cryptid stalking the shadowed fringes of the zeitgeist itself. Openly hated by both the mainstream and alternative media, it is held to be the cause of many of the world’s ills in the ever techno-fascistic 21st Century, alongside Effective Altruism and good old fashioned corrupt generational oligarchy. And despite being little more than a set of open source tools that hold no inherent political polarity, everyone who claims such thinking in their day to day life is automatically seen as suspect.

I am open about my own position as a defiantly Left-Wing Accelerationist however, and a firm believer that the only way for the strange and unusual to stay safe against the ever tightening noose of grey face authoritarianism is by pushing on through to whatever freedom still remains beyond its boundaries, acquiring as many bruises as needed along the way. On a theoretical level, those who try to dig deeper into its history will find a fascinating connection to the wider Wyrd, especially as the group which gave it life is hinted to have had closer ties to the bizarre during those formative years that many outsiders realise.

The writings of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or Ccru, were not particularly Right-Wing at the start. Dystopian perhaps. Nihilistic. Steeped in thinly veiled occultism and a dash of chaos magick via both Crowley and the consumption of a truck load of questionable chemicals. A punk-grunge-dance reinterpretation of Marxist and Capitalist theory, all put through a Burroughsian blender before being poured into Lovecraftian muffin trays to fling at their fellow Warwick University alumni. Such ideas are inherently dangerous, true. But not neccesarily the apocalyptic level threat most media outlets describe.

Anyone who has read these earlier essays, most of which have been republished after their inevitable dissolution decades ago, will quickly realise that it was never just about politics. Yet the entire ideology has been forever marred by the later work of Nick Land, hailed by some as Accelerationism’s absentee father but in actuality just one face among the scholars and students experimenting together at the time. To say I dislike him as a person is an understatement, and I doubt there is anything to be gained by trying to metabolise his current Alt-Right screed anyway. Dark enlightenment be damned.

Alongside what would later be recognised as hauntology, the concept of hyperstition that Land and his co-conspirators in the Ccru championed has found solid footing in the wider Fortean discussion recently, after successfully burying its controversial roots under a gloss of pop culture critique. But bleeding edge memetic systems such as these will only ever be championed by a dogged few. They are seen as in some way unapproachable. Deliberately vague, couched in bruised, folded language which makes it almost impossible to define, the bar for entry here is perceived to be way higher than it actually is.

     Digital hyperstition is already widespread, hiding within popular numerical cultures (calendars, currency systems, sorcerous numbo-jumbo, etc.). It uses number-systems for transcultural communication and cosmic exploration, exploiting their intrinsic tendency to explode centralized, unified, and logically overcoded 'master narratives' and reality models, to generate sorcerous coincidences, and to draw cosmic maps. 
     The Lemurian biomechanical hyperculture propagates itself through decimal notation, whose latent interconnections are demonstrated in the Numogram: an occult diagram of time and practical guide to the ethics of unbelief. An initial attempt to clarify this topic has been made in the most recent issue of our journal Abstract Culture. 
     According to the tenets of Hyperstition, there is no difference in principle between a universe, a religion, and a hoax. All involve an engineering of manifestation, or practical fiction, that is ultimately unworthy of belief. Nothing is true, because everything is under production. Because the future is a fiction it has a more intense reality than either the present or the past. [2]

Best described as a vector for self actualising ideas injected into the cultural conversation before becoming actively empowered by the ever accelerating discourse, a deeper exploration of their role as hype cycle aggregators quickly reveals them to be more nuanced than most claim. Structural load bearers for the zeitgeist, these non-sentient concepts flow like unseen viruses through the night side of culture. And when said bundles of memetic muscles are dragged into the light we realise that the weight they are carrying was always objectively real. Basically the hyperstition wants us to want, and we want it in return.

Language is key here. Since our first ancestor tied a given meaning to a grunt or whine before showing others in their loose social group what it meant we have all been adrift in a sea of ideas. Humans exist within two realms simultaneously, one based on sensation and the other steeped in definition. That latter dimension, a language space in all but name, transcends individual dialects or borders, especially in the era of the internet. And due to the violent push for empire by the British Crown in the preceding centuries English is now the default language of intercultural communication around the world.

So much of our social cohesion is built upon the stories we tell ourselves. Tribal identity has long been recognised as the driving force in the lives of the otherwise sleeping masses. But what actually happens to those ignorant minds when that release valve becomes blocked by recurring imagery made sterile and inconsequential through repetition is up for debate. Some would prefer a world without spectres. Meat machines grinding themselves to slurry within the march of birth-production-death. Both Skeptic and saint seek this dominant and predictable outcome, despite vastly different ideological arguments.

Accelerationism and its associated tools for picking over the corpse of the late 20th Century aside, it is the centralisation of ideas in the digital age which is causing the standardisation of the Fortean as we lurch unsteadily into the current era. Little better than uncritical repeaters, a driving fixation with the concept of clout and influence has infested the paranormal discourse, creating an environment where those who discuss the strange are reduced to algorithms themselves. Because when the most recognisable haints draw the highest attention the inevitable outcome is a feedback loop of stagnant ghosts.

This is anti-hyperstition at work. An overwriting of the usual cultural flow of the bizarre and uncomfortable, the struggling veins of language space so clogged with the gristle of cyclic ideas that there is no room left for the needle carrying fresh monsters to inject them into the zeitgeist. Homogenisation. Enshittification. A whole phantasmagoria of stolen fairytales which have seemingly taken root in the Western mind in the post internet era. Perhaps they are the most attractive stories, then. Easy to remember, fun to tell. But more likely they are just safe. Free of the cultural baggage that once made nightmares painful to remember.

Of course, Coast to Coast AM is not the problem here, nor should the work that it did to legitimise the anomalous on a cross-cultural scale be underestimated. Yet In most cases the shows dealt with the very same phenomena that we are still picking over today and worse, we actually know very little more now than we did back then. Gone is the era of John Keel’s cosmic joker and the phenomena that would occur once in a given form before never being witnessed in either that shape or location again. Standardisation of the conversation has killed the strange mental space that the Barghest hunts within, and it is far from happy.

Art Bell was sticking map pins in many of those hyperstitional muscles with his radio show. Same as Fort, Keel and Lovecraft, Crowley, Applewhite and LaVey did. None of these much discussed figures likely foresaw the mass duplication, amplification and twisting of their ideas for the sake of a curated and ultimately bland paranormal space. Of course their desire to push into unknown realms was never a choice. People are little better than machines. Input, output, programmed experience and agency superseded by a driving need to know. One formed by the inevitable outcome of the memes which made them who they were.

     In the beginning of this book we said that someone within two hundred miles of your home, no matter where you live on this planet, had had a direct personal confrontation with an Unbelievable. We think we have proved that point, at least. Perhaps you are still skeptical. Perhaps you think that some perfectly mundane answer will be found for all these events at some time in the future. We are not trying to turn you into a believer or disbeliever. We have only tried to lay out the facts before you. Belief - or disbelief - will come to you from another direction. Next week, next month, or next year you may be driving along a deserted country road late at night and as you round a bend you will suddenly see ... [3]

Regardless, the fact remains that many of the topics which we consider to be at the very heart of Fortean movement have gone stale. Something remains fundamentally broken when the nursery for new monsters is left to unfiction ARGs on websites such as Reddit or 4chan while convention hopping authors rehash the same tired old stories year after year. At this point it is impossible to ignore the jarring revelation that the entire paranormal field is lost in stagnation, mired in history, and sleepwalking towards a humbling future which will require more than the rehashing of old campfire tales to accelerate away from.

Seeking truth requires riding the blast waves of chaos in real time. The social hysterias, mass panics, unverified sightings and campus rumours remain key to this, while the old hook handed killers, Shadow People, Black Eyed Kids and Jersey Devils are no longer important. Even Slenderman and his cavalcade of strangely emo and worryingly underage Proxies are now done, rerendered as recurring creature features as the entire Fortean field circles the drain. Gristle blocking the arteries of the bizarre just like the Wyverns, Blemmyes, Krakens and Draugr of the late medieval age. Myths of marketing and nothing more.

Most people shrink from the molten paw prints of the Barghest Wyrd, turn around and shuffle back into the coffee shop for another pumpkin spice latte in an attempt to drown the revelation before it takes hold. Write off the whispers on the other side of the graveyard bars as just the wind. Ignore the dark, top hatted figure in the alleyway. Avoid petting the hunched canine dogging their tracks as they journey home. A sanitisation of the strange through a forced repetition of the more palatable morality tales murders paranormal innovation, and offers delusions of safety to the unwary which may well get them hurt.

The great hyperstitional waiting room somewhere at the borderlands of culture is not real. Much quoted memetic accretions such as Cthulhu are not immanent, nor are they actively seeking a way to break into our consensus reality for nefarious means. What is being seen when a concept accelerates its own birth is artificial action misconstrued as intelligence, large language models of culture acting like tar soaked rocks which stick together over time to become an ever quickening landslide. Lovecraft’s Old Ones are fictional. Sad but true. But that does not rob them of their agency in the language space underlying the world.

Fairytales used to be bloody affairs. Witches cooked alive in their own monstrous ovens. Mermaids turned to sea foam for the sake of unrequited love. The big bad wolf wins in the absence of the woodcutter. But few worry about an evil old hag offering poisoned apples at their door or the faerie stealing their firstborn over a riddle now, and that absence of fear is far from healthy. The friend of a friend narratives used to mean something. Have memetic value. Allow people to speak ill of the unseen. Once, perhaps. But now we just cycle through the same handful of tall tales in a thousand numbing voices instead.

[1] Bob Trubshaw, Discover Folklore, Explore Books, 2002, Pages 43 - 44.
[2] Ccru, CCRU WRITINGS 1997 - 2003, Time Spiral Press, 2023, Page 12.
[3] John Keel, Strange Creatures From Time And Space, Fawcett Publications, 1970, Page 278.