The Gardener Hyperstition

So, my last post veered slightly from my usual positive, wholesome, easily digestible content to discuss some current events. The tone I selected ended on a decided down-note. I showed you the evidence that the American state has been hijacked by a billionaire immortalist cult that is building a surveillance fortress to live forever while the world burns. It was not my intention to frighten or demoralize you, but rather to share information I see as possibly an important part of the puzzle you have been working on. Some of you may be confused about what I am talking about; please read “The Katechon Strategy” which I posted recently. Hopefully, this article will leave readers more empowered and reassured of the brightness of our world’s future.

It is admittedly hard to imagine a bright future when the news is a relentless bombardment of crisis updates on the White House’s deliberate campaign to bully the people of Minneapolis as the media puts Trump in every headline. If it all makes you feel a sense of fear and anxiety, that is because it was meant to. But fear not. For within the strategy of billionaire industrialists like Peter Thiel and their network of New Right Accelerationists are the elements of their undoing. We are going to use the power of human ingenuity and autonomy combined with the magic of the Lord of the Rings, as well as use Thiel’s own perverted system based on mimetic theory of his professor René Girard, to hack the Mirror Virus and save the world from the AI apocalypse, together.

To do that, we are first going to have to answer the question: why did George Washington and other “bigwigs” of British colonialism wear those weird white, curly, powdered wigs?

I know that it seems random, but indulge me for a moment. Grab some snacks. Settle in once more. This is going to take a minute.

The Periwig Phenomenon

Our concept of Mimesis comes from the Greek mimeisthai, "to imitate," and is a foundational concept in aesthetics and philosophy that refers to the act of imitation, or mimicry. Plato was wary of mimesis, believing it was a copy of a copy, of a copy. Aristotle saw it more positively, arguing that mimesis is a natural human instinct that helps us learn and achieve catharsis. For him, it wasn't just copying reality, but representing universal truths about human nature. In anthropology, mimesis forms the basis of social mimicry: how we imitate each other to signal status, belonging, or power. Enter George Washington.

Fashion is perhaps the easiest way to understand mimesis, and the periwig that has now become iconic of the American colonial elite is a perfect example of mimesis in action. In the 17th and 18th centuries, fashion radiated downward from the ultimate center of power in the West: the French court. King Louis XIII (bald) and Louis XIV (also bald) popularized the wig to hide their imperfections. The British aristocracy, their age-old mimetic rivals, copied the French court to signal their own refinement. The American colonists, feeling a deep insecurity about being on the periphery of the empire, copied the British aristocracy. By wearing wigs in the humid heat of Virginia or Boston, they were miming the authority and civilization of London. It was a desperate visual plea: "We are not rustic backwoodsmen; we are civilized gentlemen."

Mimesis is rarely a perfect copy; it often aims to improve upon reality, at which point hilarity ensues. It’s important to note here that the powdered wig did not imitate actual hair; it imitated ideal hair. In the 1700s, hair was often dirty, infested with lice, or thinning due to disease or age. Powdered wigs had a specific aesthetic. They were white (signaling age and wisdom without the frailty), perfectly curled (signaling order and control), and voluminous (signaling health and virility). The wig became a form of "constructive mimesis." It replaced the messy biological reality of the human body with a curated, sculpted projection of dignity. During and after the American Revolution, imitating British lords became political poison. Figures like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson began to abandon the wig in favor of natural hair.

Some of you may have noticed the similarity of “mimesis” and the word “meme.” Richard Dawkins explicitly created the word "meme" as a derivative of "mimesis." Mimesis is like the evolution of culture; the Meme is like the gene of culture. Mimesis is the urge to imitate powerful people; the wig is the meme that expresses the urge. The Wig Meme successfully replicated itself from Paris to London to Boston because humans are “mimetic animals." Although powdered wigs are no longer the current fashion, we are always miming something - a higher class, a moral ideal, or a desired identity. Which brings us to Mimetic Theory.

The Mirror Virus

Mimetic Theory is the philosophical "operating system" running Peter Thiel’s “Katechon Strategy.” It is a psychological and anthropological framework developed by the French philosopher René Girard. Essentially, it argues that human beings do not have autonomous desires. We don't know what we want, so we look at what other people want to decide what is valuable.

We like to think desire is a straight line: You → The Object. "I want that car because it is fast." This is a lie.

Desire is actually a triangle: You → The Model → The Object. "I want that car because James Bond drives it."

You didn't want a Stanley Cup until you saw everyone else fighting for one. Your child did not want a Labubu until the other kids in their grade started getting them. I did not want to own a boat until I spent a summer serving BBQ to privileged assholes at the marina. I did not want to own a big, black truck until I got it in my head that my rivals would hate it if I did.

The model is the person you admire or envy. Mimesis makes you copy their desire. As you copy the model’s desires, you inevitably reach for the same objects they have. This turns your Model into your Mimetic Rival. This is where things get really dark. Because everyone is copying everyone else, everyone ends up chasing the exact same things. We think people fight because they are different. The truth is people fight because they are the same. As rivals compete, they become obsessed with each other. They lose sight of the object entirely and just want to destroy the rival. They become identical "doubles" of one another. Sameness leads to violence. You can think of this as “The Mirror Virus” that has infected all of us and is now being used to direct the American zeitgeist using rage-bait tik-tok clips and bot-farm YouTube commentary. It’s the virus that has your boomer parents beefing with internet strangers on Facebook.

You think you’re angry because you have your own strong opinions, but you’re actually angry because you caught the anger from your phone, like the flu.

The Scapegoat Mechanism

When a society gets consumed by mimetic rivalry, the tension becomes unbearable. It threatens to tear the group apart. To save itself, the group unconsciously triggers the Scapegoat Mechanism. The mob spontaneously aligns against a single victim, The Scapegoat. This person is usually an outsider or someone with a distinct “mark” making them easily identifiable, like a physical deformity, extreme height or beauty, or merely an undefined “strangeness.” The mob inevitably unites to expel or kill the scapegoat. The act of collective violence grants the participants catharsis and drains the tension. Suddenly, the rivals are friends again because they shared a common enemy. Peace within the group is temporarily restored.

Girard argued that Christianity broke the machine. In all ancient myths, the scapegoat is guilty. Oedipus really did kill his dad. The mob is right. In the Gospels, the Scapegoat, Jesus, is innocent. The mob is wrong. Thiel believes that because Christianity exposed the Scapegoat Mechanism, we can no longer use it to create peace effectively. We all know the victim is innocent, so the "magic" of mimesis doesn't work in our age. Without the Scapegoat valve to release tension, the Mirror Virus of mimetic rivalry will escalate until it destroys the world in a nuclear apocalypse. Since we can't use the Scapegoat mechanism anymore, we need a Katechon, a “Restrainer,” a sovereign power so terrifying that it forces everyone to stop fighting. Thiel believes people are sheep, and that he is the wolf who will herd them. We are going to show him otherwise.

Minneapolis and The Siege of Gondor

Thiel uses Mimetic Theory as a political weapon. It was not randomly determined that Minnesota would become the front lines for the political battle of our generation. In Minneapolis, the median White household income is roughly $94,000, while the median Black household income is just under $40,000. That is a gap of over 2:1. Black residents are incarcerated at a rate 9.1 times higher than White residents. Infer what you like from these statistics, and don’t take my word for anything, but do your own research on these topics. The New Right would have you see the unrest and conclude: “See? The world is chaotic; we need a dictator.”

This New Right supposes we have to choose from a false dichotomy. Either The Antichrist or The Katechon. Chinese bureaucrats or supply-side Jesus. This choice is a lie concealing that they are both forms of the same thing: “The Machine.” Tolkien defined "The Machine" as using power to force your will on the world quickly. Thiel builds his philosophy on the Saruman Error: the belief that The Machine can be used to force a good outcome, provided the user has a strong enough will. In his letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien makes a crucial distinction that destroys Thiel’s entire justification for companies like Palantir. He argues that "Magic" and "The Machine" are actually the same thing. Tolkien defines this as the use of external devices to "make the will more quickly effective." Its goal is Domination: bulldozing the real world to force it to match your internal vision. This is the method of Sauron and Saruman.

Tolkein hid the secrets to fighting and winning against the poison he referred to as “The Machine” in plain sight, but in order use them we must take a little detour to understand “The Machine” as it exists today: Accelerationism.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was a rogue, semi-academic collective at Warwick University in the UK. It is the primordial soup from which almost all modern accelerationism crawled. At its core, accelerationism is the idea that the only way out of capitalism is through it. You cannot resist it, slow it down, or return to a simpler time; you must accelerate its processes (technological, social, economic) until you either crash the system or it mutates into something entirely new. The CCRU was not a normal philosophy department. They operated in a fog of jungle music, amphetamine-fueled occultism, and cyberpunk fiction. They believed that writing about the future actually summoned it in a concept they called "Hyperstition." The CCRU coined this term to describe fictions that make themselves real by being believed. Fiction makes Reality.

Long story short, the literature of hyperstition spawned distinct strains of Accelerationism in the 2010’s in the form of two hostile variants: Left-Accelerationism and Right-Accelerationism.

The goal of Left-Accelerationism is essentially Automated Luxury Space Communism. They argue that the Left should stop being nostalgic for localism and folk politics. Instead, they should seize the means of production and accelerate technology to liberate humanity from work, and maybe even abolish gender through biohacking.

The goal of Right-Accelerationism is Corporate Feudalism, Immortality, and Singularity. They argue Democracy is a brake on progress. Freedom and Equality are incompatible. We should let capitalism rip the world apart, fragmenting nations into corporate city-states run by CEOs. Unleash the full power of AI. If humanity can't keep up with AI, humanity deserves to be left behind. Whoever survives will surely become gods.

Back to Tolkein and synthesizing our antidote to the poison of “The Machine” infecting our timeline.

To the billionaire immortalist cult that has seized control of our country, death is a "problem to be solved." The acceptance of death is a moral failure. Thiel fundamentally misunderstands the metaphysics of Middle-earth. He envies the Elves for their immortality, but in Tolkien’s lore, the Elves envy us. Elves are bound to the circles of the world. As the world ages and becomes stagnant, the Elves are trapped within it. They suffer from a "long defeat," the accumulation of memory and sorrow that they cannot escape. The precise thing that they fear. Tolkien viewed death not as a defect, but as the Gift of Ilúvatar. It is the mechanism of Freedom. The Gift of Men. The “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth.” Because humans die, we are not bound to the "music" of the world. We eventually leave. We have true agency because we are not trapped in the system. The downfall of Numenor happened precisely because they listened to Sauron’s lie that death is the enemy. They built a massive empire and armed it with technology to conquer the Undying Lands to seize immortality by force. Right-Accelerationists are re-enacting the Fall of Numenor. They believe they are escaping stagnation, but by seeking physical immortality within the world, they are actually volunteering for the Elvish trap: to be frozen in a world that never ends, accumulating power but losing their soul.

Amdir & Estel

Tolkien had two words for "Hope," and the difference between them is the difference between a Hero and a Tech Bro.

Amdir, meaning “Optimism,” or literally "looking up." This is hope based on data, evidence, and probability.

Estel, meaning “Trust.” This is hope that is not based on the odds. It is the belief that history has a moral author. Estel is Frodo marching into Mordor with a 0% chance of success. He does not do it because he thinks he will win; he does it because it is the right thing to do, and he trusts that if he does his part, the "Author" will do the rest.

“The Katechon Strategy" is a structure built by men who have lost Estel. They are terrified of the odds, so they try to rig the game. Tolkien argues that rigging the game, using the Ring, guarantees the disaster you are trying to prevent.

So, if Thiel is Saruman, obsessed with machinery, industry, and the "Great Eye," then we need to talk about the only guy who actually beat him. We need to talk about Gandalf. Gandalf was a Maia, an angelic being of immense power, but he didn't act like one. While Saruman was busy industrializing Isengard and breeding super-soldiers in a mimetic rivalry with Sauron, Gandalf was doing something that looked, quite frankly, stupid. He was hanging out in the Shire, smoking pipe-weed with forest midgets who ate like six meals a day. Saruman mocked him for it. He called Gandalf’s interest in the halflings a waste of time. And that was his fatal error. Gandalf understood the Mirror Virus better than anyone. He knew that if you try to fight the Dark Lord with the Dark Lord’s weapons (Power, Surveillance, Armies), you just become another Dark Lord. You enter the mimetic trap. Gandalf bet on the Illegible. He invested his time in things that were too small, too boring, and too "inefficient" for the Enemy to notice. Sauron’s Eye was trained to look for great captains and mighty kings. It literally could not see the Hobbits because it had no concept of a creature that didn’t crave power.

This is the counter-strategy to the “Katechon”. Thiel’s Palantir is designed to track threats, radicals, and "nodes of influence." It scrapes data on people trying to be "Important." The hack? Be unimportant. Build a life that is so analog, so local, and so deeply uncool that the algorithm assigns you a value of zero.

And this brings us to the MVP of the Apocalypse: Samwise Gamgee. The groundskeeper. The gardener. The embodiment if Estel. When Sam puts on the Ring, the ultimate technology of power, the Ring tries to seduce him. It shows him a vision of "Samwise the Strong," a hero who could turn the entire world into a giant garden. And Sam says no. Why? Because, as Tolkien writes, “The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.” Right-Accelerationists want to live forever and conquer Mars because they have a hole in their soul the size of ours and the Tolkien universes, combined. Samwise is immune to the Ring because he is full. He loves Rosie Cotton. HE LOVES TATERS! He loves the soil. His desires are "thick"—they are real, physical, and grounded. This is the key to hacking the Mirror Virus and taking back the future.

It’s getting late. Time to bring this full circle and wrap this up.

The Machine relies on two things to function: your Data and your Participation. It needs to see you and it needs you to react to it. This activates the algorithm, and sends you the content meant to trigger you and accelerate your journey down the radicalization pipeline. The Gardener Hyperstition is the strategic refusal of both. It is the art of becoming "small"—not weak, but illegible.

The Elven Cloak

States are obsessed with making populations "legible." That means standardizing names, land, and language so they can be taxed and conscripted. In the 21st century, Legibility is Data. If you are online, you are legible. If you use a credit card, you are legible. If you are legible, you can be predicted, targeted, and controlled. Samwise and Frodo survived Mordor not because they were stronger than Sauron, but because they were too small to be seen. They wore the "Cloaks of Lorien" that blended them into the rock. Cash is the ultimate Elven Cloak. It is an untraceable, peer-to-peer transaction that leaves Palantir blind. Use it for everything local. The Eye sees data. So, remove the data. Have dinner parties where phones are banned. Build networks of trust that exist only in face-to-face conversations. If it isn't written down, Palantir can't read it.

Rebuild the Shire

Grow something, like Samwise. I mean this literally. A garden is the ultimate anti-mimetic device. It doesn't care about the news. It doesn't care about Trump. It obeys the laws of the seasons, not the laws of the algorithm. When you put your hands in the dirt, you are reconnecting with the "Gift of Men." Respect the tater. We mock the Amish and Mennonites as Luddites, but they are the ultimate Breakaway Civilization. They don't reject technology because they are stupid; they reject it if it breaks their community. They realized 100 years ago what the Machine ignores: Efficiency is the enemy of the Bond. The Machine shows you what you should want: clout, status, outrage. This makes you predictable and easy to manipulate. So, instead cultivate desires that cannot be scaled. You can’t scale a relationship with your child. You can’t scale the taste of a tomato you grew yourself. You can’t scale your woodworking hobby.

The Gardener Hyperstition is about becoming Ungovernable by becoming Self-Governing. Thiel and Trump and their minions want a population of terrified, isolated data-points who need a Sovereign to protect them. You will become a connected, analog, self-sufficient node that needs nothing from them.

The final mental image I want to leave you with is a dual picture. On one side of the picture is Peter Thiel, in his Palace-Crypt on Mars, hooked up to blood boys keeping him alive, still terrified of death, watching his screens prophesize doom. On the other side is a counter-image. Picture yourself, sitting in the sun, on a reclaimed and rejuvenated planet earth, feasting and laughing with friends and family, unafraid of the end.