Text page
Ccru - Cyberhype 3 Economics does the Shrink Act On Irrational Exuberance (Mute 19)
A Cyberhype text that treats market frenzy, media contagion, and fictive amplification as one runaway process.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central move of theory-fiction is to treat style and concept as inseparable. Fiction is not illustrative garnish placed on top of theory; it is one of the ways theory begins to operate materially.
These texts work by montage, compression, fictional carriers, and unstable voices. They build scenes, entities, markets, or atmospheres that behave like conceptual machines rather than like examples waiting to be decoded.
That matters because a great deal of the archive's originality lies in form. The writing does not merely report on cyberculture and modernity; it engineers new ways of sensing and narrating them.
How to read this text
Read the title, opening burst, and recurring terms before trying to flatten the text into a normal argument. Orientation comes from motifs and relays, not from a single thesis statement.
Track where journalism, fiction, market language, and philosophy contaminate each other. That contamination is the method.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
ARTICLES CYBERHYPE III: ECONOMICS DOES THE SHRINK ACT Featured in Mute Vol 1, No.
Definition · paragraph 2
With his notions of ‘selffulfilling psychology’, the importance of ‘storytelling’, feedback theory bubbles, media immanence to commerce, and the similarity of share speculation to gambling, Shiller seems to come close to what you at CCRU call ‘hyperstition’, but he stops short at pursuing some of his positions through to their logical conclusions. Why? The only theorist who had pursued these was the socalled Professor of Libidinal Economics, Robert Kennington.
Definition · paragraph 2
Like Irrational Exuberance, Rabin’s work appears radical when compared with the absurdly insular fantasies of academic economics, but timorously cautious when set against the realitymutating machine of global Kapital.
Definition · paragraph 2
Rather the real is economic through and through”, making him “the one real economic theorist of any merit.” According to Kennington, Freud dealt with economics in its “most abstract sense – the study of flows and their regulation.” The ‘dedemonisation’ of psychoanalysis by Adlerinfluenced US ‘driving ego’ theory had led, so Kennington insisted, to a “mutual corruption – both moral and intellectual – of economics and psychology. Each finds the other’s (Oedipal) blindspot. Freud shows that there is no irrational.
History · paragraph 1
ARTICLES CYBERHYPE III: ECONOMICS DOES THE SHRINK ACT Featured in Mute Vol 1, No. 19 – Global Systems Meltdown By CCRU , 10 April 2001 The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit examines 'psychological' economic theory, lite.
Appears in sections
Theory-Fiction and Cyberstyle Primary section
How theory-fiction, cyberpunk prose, and anti-academic style became part of the archive's method.