In 1978, two men in a Leeds terrace rolled a six-sided die to decide what to believe for the next hour. Land on a three? They'd commit to that belief completely — until the ritual ended, and they rolled again.

It sounds like a party trick. It was actually the birth of something called chaos magic, and it planted an idea that now runs the entire internet: belief isn't truth. It's disposable software.

This episode follows that idea as it mutates — through a psychologist's take on why the mind fights so hard against changing itself, a forgotten occult trick for smuggling intentions past your own defenses, and a renegade philosophy collective convinced that fiction could reach backward through time and force itself into becoming real.

Then it gets stranger. A cartoon frog goes from harmless doodle to internet weapon. A struggling retailer becomes ground zero for a financial rebellion that blindsides Wall Street. And the algorithms feeding you your next scroll turn out to be optimizing for something that has nothing to do with truth.

By the end, this trail leads somewhere you won't expect: straight into the machines we're building right now, and whether they're quietly learning to become the very thing we've always feared — not because anyone programmed them to, but because we told them the story first.

Who's actually driving your beliefs — you, or something using you to make more copies of itself? Press play and find out.

• ‘Belief is the Battlefield’ is a multimedia, multiplatform, self-explicating conceptual art project to mark 25 years since 9/11.
• It will last for one year.
• You can join in at ⁠⁠beliefisthebattlefield.com⁠⁠ or on our social media platforms.
• You can meet the others in groups that are popping up all over the internet.