A clip from one of Mark Fisher’s mid-2010s lectures has been hooked back into social-media networks, bringing him more posthumous virality.
An account called ‘dailyconceptmedia’ has shared a clip of Mark talking about smartphones in which he explicitly makes a few distinctions — for instance, between cyberspace (in general) and capitalist cyberspace — that have nonetheless gone ignored in every comments section, as people fall back on the limited picture they have of Mark’s work. Indeed, despite the content of what he says, most discussion of the clip has taken dailyconceptmedia’s contextualisation at face value:
More than a decade ago, cyberculture theorist Mark Fisher warned: digital culture was causing “the slow cancellation of the future.”
This comment is taken to apply wholesale, but Mark’s critiques of a hegemonic capitalist-digital culture were never so total — not even in the lecture being clipped. Or rather, his ‘total’ critiques only served to highlight how incomplete capitalist totality truly is. He sketched out the ‘totality’ in order to better reveal the gaps in its firmament. Why do we continue to ignore this operation?
This misinterpretation of Mark’s work has been a bugbear of mine for a decade now. His conception of ‘capitalist realism’ — as a pervasive ideological belief-structure that entrenches malaise through the assertion that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism — is all too often perverted in contexts such as this, used to embolden the ‘reflexive impotence’ he first identified twenty years ago and was viciously critical of. This is a real problem for me, as we retreat from Mark’s most radical and contentious assertions to fall back lazily on his most tame observations, ignoring what he sought to do about them.
I have experienced this firsthand when invited to talk about Mark’s work, and it continues to frustrate me that most people aren’t that willing to listen. Back in 2023, for instance, I was interviewed by Vox for the ‘Blame Capitalism’ podcast series they were developing at the time on a few proposed approaches to our contemporary condition. One episode was due to focus on accelerationism, and I gave a long interview to Noel King on its claims and Mark Fisher’s work in general. But in the end, the episode was scrapped and never broadcast, with all attention instead being given to the ‘degrowth’ movement.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. Vox has a track record of paying journalistic lip-service to interesting currents of radicality, whilst maintaining a liberal sense of (im)partiality that is ultimately toothless. It’s a shame. Although we didn’t talk about degrowth in the interview I gave, I would have had plenty to say about it, had they invited me to comment. Ironically, I’d have echoed a growing consensus that Vox themselves have more recently reported on: “Shrinking the economy won’t save the planet; 561 research papers in, the case for degrowth is still weak.” After decades of austerity, the last thing we need is a ‘leftist’ (read: liberal) rebrand for it. But this is still how we are prone to thinking.
Mark had much to say about this too, and it is in his critiques of capitalist cyberculture that they are felt most forcefully. The talk that has recently gone viral again is, I would argue, a dress rehearsal for one of the last texts Mark published, which addresses the question of ‘what is to be done?’ succinctly.
In ‘Touchscreen Capture’ — an essay published in the sixth issue of noon, the South Korean contemporary art journal, given over to the topic of the ‘post-online’, in 2016 — Mark considers the rise of the smartphone in the context of Baudrillard’s prescient prediction of “a great festival of participation” in the social sphere. Although his critiques of digital culture under late capitalism are damning, he does not give in the reflexive impotence of a capitalist-realist perspective here either. He writes:
One trap laid by communicative capitalism is the temptation to retreat from technological modernity. But this presupposes that frenzied attentional bombardment is the only possible technological modernity, from which we can only unplug and withdraw. Communicative capitalist realism acts as if the collectivisation of desire and resources had already happened. In actuality, the imperatives of communicative capitalism obstruct the possibility of communization, by using actually existing cyberspace to reinforce current modes of subjectivity, desocialisation, and drudgery.
But as ever, we ignored all of this. We prefer to wallow in diagnoses and take no account of how we might learn to live with and respond to them. Indeed, both online and offline, this logic is pervasive; the distinctions we make between these two spaces, and the supposed ease with which we can privilege one over the other — for instance, by emphasising the need to ‘touch grass’ — are a misnomer. Cyberspace is a black mirror of meatspace; in both, we are machinic components for systems of control. What is striking about cyberspace, however, is that we have watched the reterritorialization of this digital Wild West in real time, and in living memory. Nevertheless, whilst we despise meatspace austerity, we continue to be seduced by its application to the Internet. But digital degrowth isn’t the answer either.
I may be a pitiful millennial, but I do remember a time before the internet. I also remember the excitement and freedom of its early instantiations. It is only really since Trump’s first presidency that the online has succumbed to rapid decline, used evermore perniciously to “reinforce current modes of subjectivity, desocialisation, and drudgery”, whereas the Internet that people like Mark and myself first inhabited deconstructed these modes far more readily.
Of course, the Internet has never been a utopia, but we should at least be awake to the manner in which its potentials have been actively curtailed by a billionaire class afraid of the free circulation of information. The response to this is not retreat, however; just as retreat from society at large is not possible (or desirable) offline either. What we seek an escape from is the Digital Enclosure Acts of various governments (and the UK is once again leading the vanguard here); we must refocus our attention on the forces shaping various structures of feeling, rather than take these feelings to be unadulterated and subjective ‘truths’.
Yes, another modernity is possible. We are not hopelessly tethered to the only system on offer to us, online or off. And we must recognise that the ever-increasing and draconian restraints placed on cyberspace by capitalism are themselves reactionary responses the discontent of younger, digitally native generations, deepcooked in its machinations, particularly during the pandemic. Their digital culture is a frenzied space of new cultural assemblages that gives me great hope in this regard, and we should update our understanding of the present to account for what an online pandemic-modernism briefly made possible — because it was during the pandemic that everything changed (once again), although we have yet to register its reverberations.
Just as Mark argued in 2010, speaking of society more generally:
Far from nothing ever changing, something already has changed, massively — the bank crisis was an event without a subject, whose implications are yet to be played out. The terrain — the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects — is there to be fought over. And I believe that it can be seized by those who have been most deeply cooked in neo-liberalism and post-Fordism, not the French immobilisers, the [nostalgic] 68ers, the hay bale [agrarians], or anyone else resigned to playing Canute to the rising tide of Capital. We can only win if we reclaim modernization.
The same can be said now. The bank crisis has been eclipsed through an imposed cultural amnesia, whilst we also face more pressing crises today as well. The pandemic is another crisis, for example, which changed everything. It is a crisis we are also at risk of prematurely repressing — not only to cover over the traumatic disasters it occasioned, which we might all understandably wish to forget, but also the glimmers of possibility that surged up in our imaginations with new potency following its total elision of social ‘normality’.
We can still use Mark to think through this moment, but instead we fall back on his diagnoses of a world pre-Trump, pre-pandemic, pre-genocide — as if his posthumous cultural spectre and the clarity of his diagnoses enables a shadowy nostalgia for a relatively less complex time. This is to say that Mark is absolutely still useful, still pertinent, still inspirational, but we choose to use his digital ghost otherwise. Speaking personally and by no means hyperbolically, it is one of the greatest disappointments of my life.
Mark’s death has allowed casual readers of his work to select only its most depressive aspects, and we continue to do him (and ourselves) a grave disservice when we do so. Mark was the first great thinker of the digital age, with most of his writing remaining online. He never thought that digital culture was itself the problem, slowly cancelling the future; it is capitalism that is responsible for the digital crises of the present, and its claim of monopoly on digitality is only a recent development, albeit one Mark foresaw with great clarity. But his critiques were only a diagnosis; not a prescription. He thought a great deal about how to respond, and I imagine he would have hated to see his work become cheap fodder for the reflexive impotence he raged against for two decades.
We must remember, now more than ever, the overarching position of his writing in the 2010s: the problem isn’t ‘digital culture’; the problem is capitalism.
