Cybergothic Hyperstition (Fast-Forward to the Old Ones)

Iris Carver (1998)

Think of Cyberspace as a black-mirror. It is where time flips over: collide with it and you travel backwards. As telecommerce accelerates us into the net, it seems that things of ever deeper antiquity awaken, and begin their return.

So say the Cybergoths.

Cybergothic exists as a web of sinister rumour, haunting a subterranean soft-labyrinth which it calls the ‘Crypt’. Buried deep within the primal sediment of the infoplex, and shrouded in a crawling-fog of digital camouflage, it isn't easy to find, but there are clues.

Initiates of the late 90s Darkside Catajungle scene will remember Crypt (“we're not a band, but a pack”) as the lesbovampire mix-down sound-machine based around Gill Slitz and Jean Trafix. Their 1997 Unlife CD – a necrotic-rush of vortical tick-drifts and abysmal bass – set the tone for a wave of ‘post-musical’ electro-thanatoid polyrhythm production, punk-nihilism updated into a technodesolated Nanofuture.

“It’s a Wintermutant thing” Slitz declared. “Basically, we're a nightmare ...”

Hyperstitions are not representations, neither disinformation nor mythology.

Hype, hyping, hyperpropagation belongs to a strain of time-warp cybernetic fiction that cannot be judged true or false because it makes itself real. Trawl through the nether-regions of Cyberspace and the Crypt-influence is vivid.

Unlife is spreading, and with it the ominous themes of time-rupture, social heat-death, synthetic culture-plague, artificial-drug addictions, immersion-coma and cryo-tomb scavenging, ameiotic or bacteriosexual retroversion, ghoul-oriented behavior, spinal-catastrophism, and aquapocalyptic neoicthyoid body-shifting ... multiplicitous connections to “all those horrible, slimy, tentacular abominations from the Outside …”

Cybergothic Cargo-Culture patches itself together out of things that fall from the future, cannibalizing them for ancient intensities, which are propagated as hyperstitions. It believes nothing, “but that’s Uttunul, which underlies everything, and lies are fictional quantities ...”

Take Yettuk, for example. It’s obviously made-up. Yet it proves effectively ineradicable, lurking in the most ancient substrata of programmable and embedded systems: soft-relics from the punch-card epoch, replicated mindlessly, and encrypted in forgotten polyglot-codes

Something is about to occur, and we know exactly when.

Whether the looming ‘entity’ is called Y2K, Yet-Tick, You-Took, K-Yeti, Yettuk, or Yatka, the cybergoths interact with it as a chronsensitive electrophantom – a binomic cloud – coincident with the double-zero time-fault that quakes the millennium.

Cybergothic is preparing itself for the coming time-war, intertrafficking amongst various xenochronic mystics, countergregorian agitators, and calendric-guerrillas that populate the datacombs.

Out beyond the Yettuk-rift, fierce K-dating subcultures spread across drowned continents of webspace.

Demonic multitudes are condensing in the Crypt.