C.C.C. was established to investigate the intervention and effects of compulsive crediting in the evental emergence of belief. We do not believe your statement because it is supported by visually verifiable evidence, nor because it rests on a logically unassailable foundation. The epistemic gate by which we would ordinarily determine whether to accept or reject your claim has been overridden—by the very condition of you. Even in the complete absence of any epistemically justifiable reason to trust your statement, this override nonetheless occurs, without fail. That has been the history between us. For a long time, your speech has operated upon us as a kind of compulsion-trigger. Your words are not deemed credible because they offer trustworthy grounds, but rather because they have came from your mouth and entered our ears—an sonic event that, in and of itself, compels a provisional acceptance of truth. In this place, with nowhere left to retreat, we have come to define this condition as a matter of sonic epistemology.

C.C.C. may appear to stand in opposition to the increasingly emphasized model of Zero Trust security. Zero Trust, which proceeds from a radical posture of ‘Trust Nothing’, refuses all requests for belief as a default. It trusts no one, not even insiders. In contrast, Compulsive Trusting resolves to trust your words, whom are not even an insider. This decision constitutes an ancient strategy by which we have gained entry through countless doors that would otherwise remain closed—and it is also the very openness that has subjected us to risk. This risk is inherent to any epistemic evaluation premised on acts of listening, and constitutes virtually the only mode of knowing available to those who are permitted access to events solely through indirect means.

Thus, what happens at the moment we respond “We believe you,” we enact a form of counter-speculation.¹ Whereas the speculation wagers on a credible projection of the future and assumes that others will continue to believe in that prospection, regardless of the speculator’s own doubts. However, counter-speculation seeks to reconfigure the very conditions under which credit is allocated. Within the mutual processes of observation and imitation among speculators, speculative activity and the reinforcement of theexisting credit allocation regime form a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Counter-speculation, by contrast, interrupts this logic. The statement “I believe you” does not in itself alter the structures of credit allocation. 

Your words, in many respects, remain epistemically untrustworthy. They are anchored in what we might call ‘her ground’²—a contingent epistemic foundation that appeals only by presenting itself as the best inference currently available.

Under these conditions, our trust in your words becomes compulsive. Despite often being entangled with baseless and unreliable rumors, this compulsive act of trusting, or crediting, has the capacity to interrupt, even if only temporarily, the ongoing process of credit allocation, a process perpetually restructured to the advantage of those who already possess credit. Within the spatio-temporal rupture of this suspension, we are able to devise strategies by which your statement may come to be true. We become the trustees of your words, which is unable to retract, by bearing the burden of responsibility for your utterance, and continuing to carry, circulate, and sustain trust in them until the moment they acquire actual credit—until the moment they exert real force in reality.

Notes              

1. Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age. Michel Feher. Zone books. 2018

2. “Her Ground,” in Processed Live. Junhyung Lee, Seyoung Jin, Boryeon Choi, Juwon Choi. Artpress heem, 2025.