sum24
Hyperstitional Deterrence (ŠUM #24)
Co-authored with Parsa Esmaeilzadeh, Hyperstitional Deterrence: When Victory Is Manufactured in Scroll-Space is a theory-fiction essay and visual dossier published in ŠUM #24 (within the double issue #24–25, Unreality mode). Written against the backdrop of the July 2025 Iran–Israel escalation, the piece treats contemporary conflict as a replication engine where deterrence is produced through circulation, cadence, and affect as much as through kinetic force. Victory, here, is not simply declared; it is manufactured as a condition of belief.
Across five linked movements, the essay develops a model of replication-driven warfare: ambiguous signals are seeded, algorithmically magnified into image-fields, captured as ritual and gesture, condensed into bureaucratic artifacts, then recirculated as proof in a closed loop. It draws on hyperreality, libidinal economy, and cybernetic feedback, moving between systemic analysis and first-person phenomenology, where the subject is reconfigured as a relay inside an attention economy under stress. Alongside the writing, an annotated appendix operates as counter-archive: time-stamped captures of AI propaganda and platform-native artifacts, many later removed, placed in dialogue with a historical reference point in Persian miniature painting to trace longer genealogies of script-image authority.
ŠUM is a Ljubljana-based journal for contemporary art and theory-fiction, founded in 2013 by a self-organized group of artists and theorists, publishing online and in print, free of charge. The Unreality mode double issue asks what kinds of philosophy and art are possible when reality becomes precarious, and when fictions become operational systems that move and remake the real. In that context, Hyperstitional Deterrence reads propaganda not as representation, but as an operational layer that actively engineers what counts as “the event.”
