The first volume of Unreality Mode opens with a recalibration of philosophy’s supposed sobriety. Vincent Le presents a “recently discovered manuscript” in which Nietzsche himself confesses that the great motifs of his thought—the will to power, eternal return, Dionysian insight—are inseparable from a sustained experiment with chemicals. The piece treats drugs not as decorative biographical detail but as technologies of perspectivism: pharmacological interventions that re-code the world, re-weight values, and expose metaphysical insight as a kind of finely tuned intoxication. From chemical gods we move to algorithmic ones.

In Algorithmic Hierophany, Emily Martin argues that our encounters with generative AI are less utilitarian than liturgical. The feed is staged as a contact zone where something inhuman speaks in glitches, hallucinations, and absurdities. Martin draws a diagonal between UFO myth and chat-based AI: both operate through a “mysticism of deception”, where the message is real precisely because the source remains opaque. The algorithm does not simply answer; it abducts. Scrolling becomes a ritual of exposure, in which the user is slowly emptied out and re-written in the image of an inscrutable system.

Hyperstitional Deterrence, a collaborative project by Parham Ghalamdar and Parsa Esmaeilzadeh, scales this logic up to the level of war. Conceived during the Iran–Israel war, the work argues that conflict has shifted from a contest over territory to a contest over timelines. They describe a regime of xenowar cognition, where AI-generated images, deepfakes, “phantom strikes”, and ritualized statements form a replication pipeline. Signals are seeded, synthetically magnified, captured into ritual, inscribed into policy, and then looped back as proof. War becomes a belief engine sustained in scroll-space, a cybernetic ritual in which missiles and bodies are only one layer among many.

Miguel Prado Casanova situates today’s political landscape within an info-sphere saturated by signals, memes, and viral spectacles, where grand narratives and basic facts have all lost their binding force. In this setting, the Left ossifies: it clings to proceduralism, factuality, and critique, acting as if the old symbolic guarantees still hold. Neoreactionary currents, by contrast, embrace and weaponize narrative entropy. Figures like the “Cult of Kek” exemplify a style of politics in which irony, shitposting, and mythic avatars become engines of hyperstitional drift: whoever can orchestrate the drift of images and affects across unstable platforms gains leverage over the future.

If the first four texts track how unreality mode unfolds in bodies, feeds, wars, and myths, Mikkel Rørbo provides a conceptual grammar for what is going on. Drawing on Peirce, cybernetics, and machine learning, Rørbo focuses on abductive inference—the logic of the guess. In computational systems, abduction no longer stays in the head; it becomes machinic conjecture. When such operative fictions guide decisions, they initiate reality-production loops. Rørbo thus formalizes the link between AI guessing, geopolitical hyperstition, and political myth-making.

Pichaya Aime Suphavanij’s Mode of Liaisons offers a method for inhabiting unreality mode: instead of trying to step outside systems, we move through them, coupling and recoupling zones until something like orientation appears. Suphavanij argues that orientation today is produced more by procedures than by arguments. Under these conditions, critique loses altitude; pointing out contradictions does not slow the machine. What is needed instead is an epistemology that works like an apparatus: a way of liaising between terrains that are already operational.

Finally, Wouter Kusters returns us to the brink where philosophy and psychosis touch. Kusters is interested in what happens when thought turns a question around so insistently that it becomes a circular movement—a loop that cannot be closed or left behind. For the philosopher, such circles can be productive: one orbits an inexpressible point, returning again and again without collapsing into it. For the mad subject, by contrast, the loop risks tightening into an inescapable enclosure or snapping altogether into a direct fusion with the point of obsession. Kusters thus maps the beginning of the end: the threshold at which philosophical interrogation and psychotic certainty become indistinguishable.

Taken together, these seven texts describe a world in which the real is no longer a stable background but a byproduct of operational success. Chemical pacts, algorithmic hierophanies, hyperstitional deterrence, entropic myth, machinic conjecture, operational liaisons, circular movements—they are all procedures by which unreality is configured, stabilized, and sometimes broken.