Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental cultural theorist collective formed in late 1995 at Warwick University, England and gradually separated from academia until it dissolved in 2003. It garnered reputation for its idiosyncratic and surreal "theory-fiction" which incorporated cyberpunk and Gothic horror, and its work has since had an online cult following related to the rise in popularity of accelerationism. Warwick University maintains that the CCRU was never a sanctioned academic project, with some faculty going so far as to assert that the CCRU "has never existed". The CCRU are strongly associated with their former leading members, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher and Nick Land.
The CCRU's work is characterized by loose, abstract theoretical writing combining elements of cyberpunk and Gothic horror with critical theory, esotericism, numerology and demonology, which often interplay in their deployment of occult systems and surreal narratives. 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.
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, Octavia Butler, William S. Burroughs, Carl Jung and various other sources related to critical theory, science fiction, anthropology and nanotechnology.
Ccru Writings 1997-2003
— From the Urbanomic webpage:
"From before the beginning (which was also, according to them, already the end), the adepts of the Architectonic Order of the Eschaton have worked tirelessly to secure the past, present, and future against the incursions of Neolemurian time-sorcery, eliminating all polytemporal activity, stitching up the future, sealing every breach and covering every track. According to the AOE, the Ccru ‘does not, has not, and will never exist’. And yet...
"The texts collected here document the Ccru’s perilous efforts to catalogue the traces of Lemurian occulture, bringing together the scattered accounts of those who had stumbled upon lagooned relics of nonhuman intelligence—a project that led ultimately to the recovery of the Numogram and the reconstruction of the principles of Lemurian time-sorcery—before disintegrating into collective schizophrenia and two decades of absolute obscurity.
"Meshing together fiction, number theory, voodoo, philosophy, anthropology, palate tectonics, information science, semiotics, geotraumatics, occultism, and other nameless knowledges, in these pages the incomplete evidence gathered by explorers including Burroughs, Blavatsky, Lovecraft, Jung, Barker, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler, but also the testimony of more obscure luminaries such as Echidna Stillwell, Oskar Sarkon, and Madame Centauri, are clarified and subjected to systematic investigation, comparison, and assessment so as to gauge the real stakes of the Time-War still raging behind the collapsing façade of reality.
"One of the most compelling and unnerving collective research enterprises to have surfaced in the twentieth century, the real pertinence of the Ccru’s work is only now beginning to reveal itself to an unbelieving world. To plunge into the tangled mesh of these conspiracies, weird tales, numerical plagues, and suggestive coincidences is to test your sense of reality beyond the limits of reasonable tolerance—to enter the sphere of unbelief, where demonic currents prowl, where fictions make themselves real. Hyperstition."
Alphanumeric Qabbala
According to the text "Qabbala 101", Alphanumeric Qabbala ("AQ") is...
(...) a continuous nonredundant system, supplementing the numerals 0-9 with numerized letters from A (= 10) to Z (= 35), treating the 0-Z alphanumeric sequence as a numeral succession, corresponding to the numerals of a modulus 36 notation.
In other words, AQ derives from an expansion of Hexadecimal notation, thus being perfectly adapted to the English Alphabet, encoding the letters as digits in a continuous, nonredundant, alphanumeric sequence from 0 to Z.
0=0 1=1 2=2 3=3 4=4 5=5 6=6 7=7 8=8 9=9 A=10 B=11 C=12 D=13 E=14 F=15 G=16 H=17 I=18 J=19 K=20 L=21 M=22 N=23 O=24 P=25 Q=26 R=27 S=28 T=29 U=30 V=31 W=32 X=33 Y=34 Z=35
AQ & the CCRU Writings
The idea of this specific calculator came to me when I noticed that many things in the "CCRU Writings" seemed to have been willingfully encoded with Gematria. For example, in "The Templeton Episode" (Ccru Writings, pp. 53-54), there are hints towards a connection between R. E. Templeton, Immanuel Kant, and Yog-Sothoth (Lovecraft's "Lurker at the Threshold"), and when we apply the AQ cipher to those names, we will notice that they share exactly the same value, which is 242.
It was in order to make this search for numerical connections an easier process that the idea came to me. Would there be any better idea than use the whole text of the "Ccru Writings" as a Gematria database? =)
How to Use This Tool
Type a word or phrase into the search bar. The AQ cipher value will automatically be calculated and a list of letters, words and phrases from the Ccru Writings of equal value will be shown.
How you interpret this data is up to you. We have found insight stringing together multiple phrases or words with the same value that fit grammatically into something resembling cut-up method poetry, as well as picking out phrases that resonated with the name or phrase we were analyzing. Results are open to interpretation and a bit of psychic intuition plays part. Use your imagination.
Do not read deeply into the order of the results displayed. Individual matches are not neccessarily meant to be interpreted as one string of text; indeed, results will often make little grammatical sense, though occasional happy accidents occur.
Notes on Changes to the Text
In order to generate the substrings from the Ccru Writings for the database, several changes needed to be made to the source text to facilitate analysis.
The following alterations were made to process the text for analysis:
- Removed most punctuation and non-alphanumeric characters (,;.:?!, etc).
- Preserved any hyphenated words so that they are summed as one word.
- Tried to keep the number of characters to a minimum, in order to speed up calculations. All words, letters, numbers and numerals were kept intact, as they are the fundamental pieces of Alphanumeric Qabbala.
It's possible that some of the text was malformatted and some results may be confusing. As time goes by and I notice these little mistakes, I will keep improving the calculator and its database.
Who is Responsible
The original tool on which this calculator is based was created by Vanessa Kindell. It was forked and expanded from the original "naeq" tool, built by Wren Collier and Alynne Keith, and made available for review on GitHub.
This specific calculator that you're now using was changed by Luís Gonçalves, and adapted to AQ ("Alphanumeric Qabbala"). Obviously, the old database was discarded for this calculator, using instead the whole text from the Ccru Writings as its native database.
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