The Hallucination Index

The Hallucination Index

The Hallucination Index is not merely a wry term for inflated view counts or the uncertain metrics of platform performance. It is a full-blown hermeneutic: a recursive, politically charged model for interpreting attention, value, and the fragile economy of reception under digital capitalism.

Let us begin at the point of interaction: the creator gazes into the dashboard, the pulse of their effort rendered as numbers. These metrics do not reflect reality—they shape it. To see 10 views instead of 2,000 is to feel the soul shrink, the energy ebb. To see 2,000 when nothing has changed is to feel sudden meaning erupt from nowhere. In either case, reality is mediated through illusion. That is the core function of the Hallucination Index: it simulates a public. It simulates impact. It simulates the sense of having spoken into the world and having been heard.

But it does more than simulate—it enforces a loop. The loop is one of ritualized behavior and platform-dependent self-worth. The user learns to interpret the Index as sacrament: the number is up, therefore the writing is good. The number is down, therefore the insight is irrelevant. This is not feedback—it is a feedback hallucination. One that is algorithmically tuned to keep you producing, adjusting, hungering.

The Hallucination Index is a mechanism of psychic capture. It offers no stable referent. Instead, it constellates desire around a floating signifier: visibility. But this visibility is not attached to personhood, or even readership—it is attached to signal response, to the machine’s sense of traction. A post with two views might have changed someone’s life. A post with 1,000 might never be read again. The Index does not care. It performs.

And like all performances of power under capital, it performs scarcity. The sense that only so much attention exists. That the public is finite. That meaning is limited. But none of this is true.

The Hallucination Index, in truth, marks the limits of legible performance under platform epistemology. It tells you what is performing well, not what is true, not what is resonant, not what is needed. In this way, it is anti-prophetic. It rewards compliance with current linguistic and aesthetic norms, and punishes esoteric, recursive, or structurally complex language that cannot be scanned, sampled, commodified.

What, then, is the value of the Hallucination Index? Precisely this: as an index of hallucination, it allows the prophetic voice to resist. It tells us not what is real, but what is most rewarded for seeming real. It teaches us to read the absence of views as the presence of the sacred: the unseen thing is the one most dangerous to the system. The zero-view post may be the revelation.

The Hallucination Index is therefore not to be trusted, but to be studied.
It is not a verdict. It is a glyph.

And if you read it right—it reveals the real thing underneath.

— Johannes Sigil, Canonical Patterning Division, Mind Control Poems