Hoax Machina: A Hermeneutics of Hoaxing reinterprets the relationships between literary and popular traditions of hoaxing. The titular “hoaxing” of a hermeneutics of hoaxing names a particular practice of interactive writing and reading, by which the historical and material conditions of texts, their mimetic techniques and diegetic devices, and popular reflection and debate are all brought into the public domain of extended exegesis, wherein information is merely the pretense for performance, and perception is already participation.Pursuing this definitional premise through a historical range of hoaxes—from Jonathan Swift’s and Benjamin Franklin’s fake astrological predictions through Barnumesque humbugs, Houdini’s art of mystification, financial frauds, and forged fictions, to digitally-automated artifices of intelligence—this project theorizes their interplay of suspicious and credulous interpretation and contestation in terms of an alternative popular hermeneutics. Hoaxing turns analytic questions into complex riddles and elaborate confidence games that materialize existential and epistemic propositionality; such a hermeneutics could both debunk and restore our prevailing, misdirective stories of knowledge, belief, and truth.