Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (British cultural theorist collective) Add a review

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU, sometimes typeset Ccru) was an experimental cultural theorist collective formed in late 1995 at Warwick University, England which gradually separated from academia until it dissolved in the early 2000s. It garnered reputation for its idiosyncratic and surreal "theory-fiction" which incorporated philosophy, cyberpunk, and occultism, and its work has since had an online cult following related to the rise in popularity of accelerationism. The CCRU are strongly associated with their former leading members, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher and Nick Land.

Established at the University of Warwick philosophy department, the group listed their interests as "cinema, complexity, currencies, dance music, e-cash, encryption, feminism, fiction, images, inorganic life, jungle, markets, matrices, microbiotics, multimedia, networks, numbers, perception, replication, sex, simulation, sound, telecommunications, textiles, texts, trade, video, virtuality, war". Iain Hamilton Grant notes Neuromancer as particularly influential to the group's formation. Jungle music was a crucial part of the CCRU, with Fisher stating the "CCRU was trying to do with writing what Jungle, with its samples from such as [sic] Predator, Terminator and Blade Runner, was doing in sound: 'text at sample velocity', as Kodwo Eshun put it."

In addition to drawing inspiration from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, to which references can be found in the CCRU's writings, the collective drew inspiration from writers including H. P. Lovecraft, William Gibson, J. G. Ballard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Octavia Butler, William S. Burroughs, Carl Jung. Fisher described the CCRU's work as "a kind of exuberant anti-politics, a ‘technihilo' celebration of the irrelevance of human agency, partly inspired by the pro-markets, anti-capitalism line developed by Manuel DeLanda out of Braudel, and from the section of Anti-Oedipus that talks about marketization as the 'revolutionary path.'" The CCRU's work is considered to be a precursor to sinofuturism due to their interest in China as an ideal society for accelerationism, with Scottish electronic musician and CCRU member Kode9 having coined the term "sinofuturism". Their later work drew upon occultism, esotericism, numerology, and the work of Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley. Roc Jiménez de Cisneros considers the CCRU's work to be influential on the development of speculative realism, while Fisher considered speculative realism to be returning to the CCRU's areas of interest in 2010.

One of the CCRU's predominant ideas is hyperstition, which Nick Land referred to as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies" where, by means of esoteric cybernetic principles, certain ideas and beliefs that are initially incomprehensible (akin to superstitions) can covertly circulate through reality and establish cultural feedback loops that then drastically meld society, which they also referred to in total as "cultural production". The CCRU's esoteric numerological cybernetic system for comprehending hyperstition, the Numogram, often appears in their writings alongside its circulatory zones and their respective demons.