Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future

i find solace in the idea that my anxieties have a universal element to them - "Nobody is bored but everything is boring". Fisher's critique of social media and wider technology is not merely platitudinal nostalgia (in fact he speaks against it). His insight is that our unfreedom to feel boredom via constant distraction is today's malaise.

I think the reason why we haven't evolved beyond the 90's is that the 90's achieved the optimal profitability for the culture industry, therefore it seeks to keep cycling it's audience back in to replicate it. In the same way we create monocultures to produce and harvest crops.

God he's so intelligent and so able to express what we all sense, the anxiety and the disappointment we all feel somewhere deep inside in terms that are both highly relatable and accessible and also deeply cerebral and engaging. Such a shame he's not here anymore to keep sharing insight to us and hold up a mirror to the world.

As an architect, I can almost seamlessly replace the mentions of music with architecture.

I was never fortunate enough to meet Mr Fisher, but I miss him dearly.

this lecture's hitting me hard, once again I'm drifting through social media-cyberspace at 3 o'clock on a Thursday night. Not so much to be entertained or to relax, just looking for something interesting to fill the void of aimless non-sleeping. Rest in peace Mark Fisher. Would recommend anyone reading this comment to check out his collection of essays K-Punk, for evermore in-depth popculture-analysis

This lecture has given me one of those rare moments where I have found someone explain a concept I have had lingering in my mind for quite some time without any certainty or methodological lens. I am now starting Ghosts of My Life

3:21 "The dimension of the #future has disappeared. We're trapped in the 20th century… What it means to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on hi-res screens/ distributed by high-speed Internet, actually."

Hollywood is another example of the increasing blandness and tight repetition of culture. Another superhero sequel anyone? All safe profits, safe stories, safe....

God, a person with such insight into the current state of affairs has to have it tough. The thing he said about being bored even when we are curious is spot on.

That Amy Winehouse anecdote really is the best example of hyperrealism in action. Winehouse was, to most people today, more real and authentic than actual soul singers from the 60’s. We live in a world where our ability to recreate authentic experience is BETTER than the authentic experience itself. As Rick Roderick once said “you wouldn’t want to see a T-rex for real. You’d be disappointed after seeing what Spielberg put on the screen.”

To all the people in the comments opining that Mark Fisher was out of touch, he'd never heard of Burial, Sleaford Mods, Wiley.. etc It might benefit you to take a brief dip into his blog and you'd see that those were just the artists he championed, he was not unaware or completely scathing of contemporary music culture (he wrote for Wire), it's just that here he was commenting on what distinguished it from older musical culture in a certain negative way.

The slow cancellation is accelerating mid 2020 ....

Rest in Peace, Fisher. The world lost one of its most brilliant minds with you. I hope that you're in a better place now.

It was both refreshing and sad to see this pop up in my recommendations so many years later. One of the nice things about a full lecture, as opposed to the more digestible anti-capitalist media we so often see on Youtube today, is the almost complete lack of loud but vacant opposition. No one whose ideas are molded by the neoliberal hegemony has the attention span required to argue with it. Small mercy.

RIP Mark Fisher. Although I was only ten when he passed he is one of my greatest influences ever. I’m going to keep fighting to create a world he would be proud of.

Fisher has been a real eye opener. Since he uses music as an example: when I was a teen in the 80s we disparaged any music that wasn't new. We had no time for classic rock, for example. All of it was dead to us (in fact, it wasn't that old.) Today, not only do I (and it seems, my peers) wax nostalgic for the 80s but the "classic" rock that we so hated back then. As Fisher says, we have an excessive tolerance for regurgitating and recycling culture. Think about how so called "alternative rock" is now almost 30 years old.

He completely nailed it. Even truer today than when he gave this talk.

shocked to learn he died , i loved capitalist realism and his articles RIP Mark.

I agree with his observation, but to see these cultural developments as inherently negative also indicates we could merely be stuck within a modernist mind paradigm in a post-modern world, and somehow still refuse to let go of this 19th/20th century expectation of something new and groundbreaking every 5 years