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Mark Fisher’s “K-punk” and the futures that have never arrived (2018)
- adamgordonbell 5y agoThanks for sharing this. Now I want to read the book, although I still don't understand what's it's perspective is.
- awild 5y agoI would recommend you to read capitalist realism first. It's about 120 pages and not the most complicated essay. The main idea of fisher is how we seem to have lost the ability to envision futures that are not basically less evil versions of capitalism. Which manifests in depression and odd melancholy of futures of the past.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Coolerbythelake 5y agoA key point "just because something is current does not make it new." Worthy of consideration more often.
- robertlagrant 5y agoFascinating. There is excitement in revolution, even if by objective measures it's worse than what came before, and people will get caught up in it, and even in some cases kill for it. And perhaps for a few people the lack of that excitement is equally fatal.
- youngventier 5y agoI enjoy thinking about the hauntologies in our time. I found it very funny that so many lo-fi videos on youtube are made to imitate a 90s anime style. Something about the videos and style is comforting to me and others despite us having never lived through that time. Synth-wave and other genres on youtube also try to imitate a past that never was. Modern hyper-pop of the 2020s does the same to the early 2000s. The concept of Hauntologies was first introduced by Jacues Derrida[0]. I think it goes hand-in-hand deconstruction. As an aside, poolside.fm, in addition to being a cool project, also imitates a past that never was[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida [1] https://poolsuite.net/ https://poolsuite.net/
- keiferski 5y agoThe poolsuite site is awesome. Thanks for sharing.
- nkurz 5y agoI glanced at the history and noticed you also submitted this same article 3 years ago. That time it got no upvotes. Why did you decide to submit it again now? And any guesses as to why it "caught" this time?
- keiferski 5y agoHeh, that's funny. I didn't realize that I had submitted this before. Not sure why it took off this time; could just be random chance. I do think that Fisher's ideas are a bit more relevant post-COVID, though. To a lot of people, the future just seems like a slowly decaying, scary, unpredictable version of the present. > Why did you decide to submit it again now? I actually just launched a project that is attempting to "solve" the issue of contemporary society having no positive visions of the future: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30781126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30781126 So I've been researching some different thinkers, like Fisher, that have talked about this idea.
- tablespoon 5y ago> As an aside, poolside.fm, in addition to being a cool project, also imitates a past that never was[1]. Very much so. It even looks like a 90s movie OS (e.g. like the mash-ups on the computers in Office Space, familiar but from nowhere).
- gg2222 5y agoWow .. poolsuite site made smile. Opening it on my 4K monitor reminds me of when I first used Solaris on a Sun Microsystems Workstation. The monitors felt super high res (compared with normal PCs at that time).
- KMag 5y ago
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y agoHmm, I ended up buying it based on the fragments cited by the article. I do need a fun read and this looks enticing. This is probably one of the few advertising types I actually accept: reviews.
- nopenopenopeno 5y agoMark Fisher was the most important intellectual voice of our time. Capitalist Realism is a must-read: https://files.libcom.org/files/%5BMark_Fisher%5D_Capitalist_Realism_Is_There_no_Alte(BookZZ.org).pdf https://files.libcom.org/files/%5BMark_Fisher%5D_Capitalist_...
- throw_away2 5y agoSome fave quotes: “There are certainly conspiracies in capitalism, but the problem is that they are themselves only possible because of deeper level structures that allow them to function. Does anyone really think, for instance, that things would improve if we replaced the whole managerial and banking class with a whole new set of ('better') people? Surely, on the contrary, it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure, and that while the structure remains, the vices will reproduce themselves.” “The delusion that many who enter into management with high hopes is precisely that they, the individual, can change things, that they will not repeat what their managers had done, that things will be different this time; but watch someone step up to management and it’s usually not long before the grey petrification of power starts to subsume them. It is here that the structure is palpable — you can practically see it taking people over, hear its deadened/deadening judgments speaking through them.”
- quazar 5y agoMark Fisher is not even the most important intellectual voice from Warwick.
- grafelic 5y agoI had never heard of Mark Fisher, so thanks for sharing. The fact that he admired Burial has certainly piqued my interest and Mark Fishers focus on futures never-to-be really aligns perfectly with my tendency to wallow in SehnSucht often brought on by Boards of Canada or paintings by Simon Stålenhag: https://www.simonstalenhag.se/ https://www.simonstalenhag.se/
- beepbooptheory 5y agoI might be wrong, but I am pretty sure that he is the only person to ever interview Burial [1]. Another person he was very interested in, and was certainly right about in terms of their artistic merit is Leyland Kirby aka The Caretaker, who in a very different way manifests Fisher's ideas about hauntology [2]. 1. https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/burial_unedited-transcript https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/burial_unedi... 2. https://archive.org/details/wire-304-caretaker https://archive.org/details/wire-304-caretaker
- wahnfrieden 5y agoSeveral interviews exist
- futureproofd 5y agoThere's also this common obsession around Burial with music geeks that he (Burial) was so mysterious that no one ever knew who he was, or that he never gave interviews (except to M.F.), which is obviously wrong. There's lots of info on him, similarly to Aphex Twin. I think the lack of media presence is more about intentionally avoiding crap that comes with it.
- beepbooptheory 5y agoI agree. I mean in that interview he talks about being a kind nervous/asocial guy. I think Richard has said similar things. Do not blame them at all. And when you can music like they can, you can get away with letting the songs speak for themselves.
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- esnowrackley 5y agoI sincerely never thought I'd see Fisher on HN. His work is fantastic, tying together politics, pop culture, and philosophy into a cogent reading of our times. I would recommend reading Capitalist Realism over Ghosts of My Life if you're looking to get a sense of his ideas, or, at least I found the latter to be a harder read to get into. Both are good. Younger folks have more and more trouble imagining a better world. It's crippling.
- teraku 5y agoHard agree (albeit me being "younger folks")
- NoGravitas 5y agoMy favorite of his works is The Weird and the Eerie. Capitalist Realism is good/important for making some of Gramsci's ideas more accessible to a contemporary and non-academic audience, but it's not as original.
- sosull 5y agoSame sentiment here. Seeing the words 'Mark Fisher' at the top of HN is an utter shock. How is this possible? What else might be possible?
- pizza 5y agoI dunno, I have repeatedly seen the Adam Curtis/Mark Fisher/Walter Benjamin/Theodor Adorno contingent on HN come out of the woodwork when necessary :)
- greenie_beans 5y agoSame. I was like “surely this isn’t the mark fisher?”
- randomsilence 5y ago>>What else might be possible? This comes very close to: >Fisher feared that we were losing our ability to conceptualize a tomorrow that was radically different from our present. On the other hand, HN's 'What to Submit' [1]: >anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Has hn become too much a thing that it has become its own information bubble? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pea 5y agoFor anyone interested in a perspective on the current woke/anti-woke zeitgeist from someone on the left, I would highly recommend Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle": https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vam... > The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.
- zozbot234 5y agoWhy should we be interested in an anti-woke perspective from the left, when it's just repeating what the right has been pointing out for a long time now? The basic point that "woke" ideology makes a mockery of genuine efforts to effectively address issues of prejudice based on race, sex or sexual orientation is far from new; indeed it has been raised many times before.
- tablespoon 5y ago> Why should we be interested in an anti-woke perspective from the left, when it's just repeating what the right has been pointing out for a long time now? The obvious reason is ad-hominem thinking is very human and natural, and people will be more receptive to the same message sent by someone otherwise aligned with them than someone otherwise opposed to them. Another possibility is that this article just plain expresses it better, more effectively, or captured an important nuance that your preferred people missed.
- zozbot234 5y ago
- theobeers 5y agoFisher is the best. See also his classic essay on the toxicity of (what passes for) left-wing social media culture, “Exiting the Vampire Castle.” I host a mirror: https://www.theobeers.com/favorites/vampire-castle/ https://www.theobeers.com/favorites/vampire-castle/ I’m increasingly amazed at Fisher’s perceptiveness—he published this in 2013. He was always ahead of the curve.
- zozbot234 5y agoI'm sorry, but 2013 is not 'ahead of the curve' - the problems with what was later called "woke" ideology were obvious to those who were paying attention, already in the late 2000s when that ideological memeplex first spread online via the likes of Tumblr. Still, better late than never I guess.
- tablespoon 5y ago> I'm sorry, but 2013 is not 'ahead of the curve' - the problems with what was later called "woke" ideology were obvious to those who were paying attention, already in the late 2000s when that ideological memeplex first spread online via the likes of Tumblr. Still, better late than never I guess. Talking about it when it was still "very online" is being ahead of the curve. You don't have to be one of the first to be ahead.
- theobeers 5y agoThe seriousness of the problem didn't hit me until more like 2014–15. I've had a lot of conversations about this with like-minded friends, wondering what went wrong, and when it got really bad. One of the factors that I've come to focus on, in retrospect, is smartphone penetration—which crossed 50% in the US in 2012.[0] The wide currency of social media apps did a lot to allow the metastasis of the "libidinal-discursive configurations" that Fisher identifies. Tumblr culture was an earlier harbinger, but I don't see how we can compare it to what subsequently developed on progressive-left Twitter. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/nielsen-smartphones-used-by-50-4-of-u-s-consumers-android-48-5-of-them/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/nielsen-smartphones-used-b...
- kobebeef 5y agoFisher really clarified for me what I’ve always sensed in the back of my mind. That time has in a sense stopped. I was always into futuristic things as a kid, and I still am. But today I’m left with a feeling that “the future”, or how we imagined the future, was more futuristic back then than it is now. As someone working in the tech industry, I’m eager to work on something exciting and futuristic. But what I find is that any project is constrained by the logic of neoliberal capitalism. Social media sites have to be designed to be addictive and pull people’s attentions away from real family and friends, otherwise you can’t earn profit and compete. The future doesn’t excite us anymore because all technology has given us is a boring, robotic, and atomized life.
- sharkjacobs 5y agoIt was easy to be optimistic about the future when it felt like each decade things were becoming better than the decade before.
- CyanBird 5y ago> Fisher really clarified for me what I’ve always sensed in the back of my mind. That time has in a sense stopped. I was always into futuristic things as a kid, and I still am. But today I’m left with a feeling that “the future”, or how we imagined the future, was more futuristic back then than it is now Yeah, that's the general take of End Of History, that the zeitgeist of what's to come has collapsed onto mere different hues of Liberalism in all its expressions, but we will see, specially with Trumpism might be showing its head again globally soon enough, but ofc it ought be noted that Trumpism, is itself yet another branch of liberalism
- jonjacky 5y agoSomewhere, Mark Fisher wrote, "Nobody is bored, everything is boring." I think he meant people are always busy fiddling with their phones or whatever, but the content they are consuming and producing is uniform and absent any surprises.
- futureproofd 5y agoIt's good to see the occasional Mark Fisher thread here. On the topic of Hauntology and lost futures, I think this guy does a great job of explaining it through the analogy of the Fallout videogame series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSvUqhZcbVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSvUqhZcbVg Analogies through pop-culture is something Mark Fisher also did very well to get his point across, and appeal to a broader audience.
- witherk 5y agoAfter reading a little bit of his work, I couldn't really make my mind up about Fisher. Some passages feel pretty clear headed a satisfying to read. “There are certainly conspiracies in capitalism, but the problem is that they are themselves only possible because of deeper level structures that allow them to function. Does anyone really think, for instance, that things would improve if we replaced the whole managerial and banking class with a whole new set of ('better') people? Surely, on the contrary, it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure, and that while the structure remains, the vices will reproduce themselves.” But then at other times, he seems fall into the same traps that makes me hate a lot of postmodern(or whatever this is) writing. -Constant references to other writers, only to use their polysyllabic neologisms 2-3 times without any explanation. I wouldn't mind this so much but this book usually sold as a good starting point. -Defining things with grandiose, nearly contradictory analogies. -A deep pessimism, sometimes I feel I'm reading some kind of anti-Pangloss. "This makes capitalism very much like the Thing in John Carpenter's film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact. Capital, Deleuze and Guattari says, is a 'motley painting of everything that ever was'; a strange hybrid of the ultra-modern and the archaic. In the years since Deleuze and Guattari wrote the two volumes of their Capitalism And Schizophrenia, it has seemed as if the deterritorializing impulses of capitalism have been confined to finance, leaving culture presided over by the forces of reterritorialization." It makes me frustrated, because I feel like Fisher really does have a lot of interesting things to say. But the only time I can bring myself to hate the state of world this much is if I spend too much time on twitter or in mandatory HR trainings.
- Animats 5y agoIn 2009, Fisher published “Capitalist Realism,” a slim, powerful book about “the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism.” That was useful, although 2009 was a bit late to notice. I've made the point for years that a big problem with capitalism is that it has become a monopoly ideology. When communism was taken seriously, capitalism had to deliver better results. That period ended some time in the 1980s, when even communists stopped taking communism seriously. A decade later, running on empty ideology, the Soviet Union collapsed, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Back when communism looked like a serious alternative, there was more self-restraint by capitalists, out of fear that voters would vote in more controls over business. Once communism ran down, we got a system where "greed is good, greed works" was taken seriously as an organizing principle. Now, that's barely questioned. It is no longer seen as an obligation of society to provide a good standard of living. That's just viewed as a trickle-down side effect of markets. This is a big problem. Useful propaganda films for capitalism vs. communism, to show how far back this goes: - "Meet King Joe" (1949) [1] "Joe is the king because he can buy more with his wages than any other worker on the globe" - Challenge of Ideas (1961) [2] Capitalism vs communism, a propaganda film with all the big names - John Wayne, Edward R. Murrow, and others. "Man is a responsible being" - John Wayne. There's far more in that genre. [1] https://archive.org/details/4050_Meet_King_Joe_01_19_26_08 https://archive.org/details/4050_Meet_King_Joe_01_19_26_08 [2] https://archive.org/details/Challeng1961 https://archive.org/details/Challeng1961
- erzapp 5y agoI don't know if it's a mirror, but you can find all the original k-punk blog posts here: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/ http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/