Digital Occultism as Red-String Method

Abstract

The corkboard strung with red yarn has become the folk-emblem of a mind that connects everything: the detective's wall, the QAnon conspiracist, the mapping of technocratic network influence. This paper takes that emblem seriously as a research method. "Digital Occultism," the framework developed across our work, reads the contemporary internet as a working occulture – a milieu co-populated by egregores, meme-sigils, and psyops, where fictions labor to make themselves real. A study conducted at safe analytic distance forfeits access to that milieu's operative logic. The red-string method adopts the occult's core epistemic gesture, the tracing of correspondence, and disciplines it into a reflexive practice of scholarship. Correspondence-work moves laterally, by resonance and linkage, along the same channels that carry contemporary conspiracy – the proximity that is at once the method's value and its hazard. Following paranoiac reading and the axiom of “everything is connected”, the paper accepts that the scholar of digital occulture already shares an apparatus with the figures under study and asks how that apparatus is operationalized. Two commitments run together: analysis of networks, statements and artifacts that tie each length of red thread to a documented circulation across platforms, and an avowed reckoning with the researcher's own embedding in the material, under which intuition and "vibes" are declared openly and carried as revisable hypotheses. Held to these commitments, the paper traces how deterritorializing occult-technical currents – meme magick, accelerationist hyperstition and technological narratives – are captured and reterritorialized into reactionary conspiracy. What emerges is an occulture-as-method adequate to a moment when technology, ideology, and conspiracy get scrambled: a way of knowing that proceeds by correspondence while remaining answerable for every connection it draws.

Titel der Veranstaltung

Occulture as Method

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