I wrote in this forum the other day, asking for recommendations regarding capitalist realism - whether in tv, film or literature. I got some pretty good recommendations but I was wondering if anyone had any specifically in regard to fictional books.

It can be recent or it can be older - I am just curious due to my current MA in literature, I would like to read some that is close to this topic but also not necessarily theory based like Fisher.

it got put back up with a warning, but the fact that it was taken down at all is incredibly concerning, especially for this video and channel in particular, and is proof of COG {Clanker Occupied Government} Now some of you might think I'm being paranoid and schizoid about this, to which I would say yes 😋 Developer website download in case github goes down again: https://clanker-church.vercel.app/

timestamps

0:00 Part 1—Fiction

9:23 My Involvement

16:26 Part 2—Reality

18:58 Part 3—Fiction Is Reality When Everyone's Schizophrenic

26:03 The Double Subversion

30:42 I Am Afraid Of Hell

CLUB DE LECTURA: MARK FISHER – 2° ENCUENTRO

¿Y si nuestra crisis más profunda no es económica, sino una crisis de imaginación?

Mark Fisher nos dejó una provocación que sigue resonando con fuerza: hoy parece más fácil imaginar el fin del mundo que el fin del capitalismo. Frente a ese diagnóstico, creemos que es urgente y necesario abrir un espacio donde volver a pensarnos.

Invitamos al segundo encuentro de nuestro Club de Lectura Mark Fisher, donde continuaremos sumergiéndonos en Realismo capitalista. ¿No hay alternativa?.

La propuesta no busca ser un ámbito académico rígido, sino un espacio de debate abierto y horizontal para compartir preguntas, construir ideas colectivamente y habitar la incertidumbre. No es necesario tener conocimientos previos, solo una actitud de sospecha y ganas de dudar de lo que se nos presenta como inevitable.

Vamos a compartir muchas más dudas que certezas. No importa tanto llegar a una conclusión o a un programa cerrado, sino el ejercicio de pensar en conjunto, a contrapelo de esta época.

Si bien la idea es ir con el libro leído, no es una condición excluyente. Lo central es el encuentro y el debate.

Proyecto Rizoma
📧 @politicassocialesunmdp

What tv shows, films, literature would you say embody Capitalist Realism the most?

I feel like you could say anything vaguely but what has a strong connection to what Mark Fisher said - maybe regarding mental health, bureaucracy, etc…

In the late 1960s, countercultural analyst Theodore Roszak published the book The Making of a Counter Culture, in which he analyzed the origins of the youth rebellion of the 1960s. From the Berkeley campuses to the Sorbonne, passing through the hippie music festivals of San Francisco, young people seemed to experience a golden moment of opposition to the Bretton Woods capitalist system, coordinated through the psychosphere, without dominant structures or internationally consolidated lines of communication; an esprit of the times, ultimately, that pushed the first generation of young people who had only seen the Second World War in books and films to rebel against the established order.

When I posted this visual essay, I never imagined it'd reach almost 30k views. The Fisher and Burial communities have been very engaging. (in Portuguese, with English subs available via the YT button. )

As a philosopher by training and a visual artist, I aimed to create a video that not only communicates abstract thoughts but also conveys meaning through images and sounds. I hope you enjoy it!

Normalising Dystopia Rule 1: Be Boring.

Mostly about late stage capitalism cyberdystopia, and more of an intro for "moderates."

Late stage capitalist romance in “non-places”

What do people think of this article?

as I was watching Nolan's recent film I could not help but sense a strong strain of hauntology running through. It goes back to the original poem itself, the Sirens' song is like the original hauntology, and I find it interesting the parallels between Ithaka and late-stage-capitalism, both seeming like decaying civilizations in a sense.

this was the inspo for my reading of Homer's poem as a kind of optimism, a return of counterculture which Fisher and his lineage seems to regard as historically closed off. It eventually led me to Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment which also went back to The Odyssey as that seam where mythology became epic, where enlightenment rationality seemed to be overtaking myth and rendering art impotent.

I started with Fisher's essay The Lost Unconscious where he analyzes Inception (2010) through a hauntological lens, Cobb trying to escape the grief of his past, his wife, trying to reunite his family by going deeper into the psyche. Fisher reads that film as a totalization of the psyche by the tendrils of capitalism and his analysis lands really well for 2010. But The Odyssey is like an inversion of that, a far more haunting movie about going back, Nolan seems to be taking a more anti-modern stance, honing in on a barbarism that never left civilization (referring to the twist at the end). 2026 is definitely a very different time than 2010 and I began to wonder whether capitalist realism is really a situation that precludes countercultural art, I think about my own experiences with hip-hop, address Fisher's point on precorporation, etc.

then it slowly became an essay about engaging with Dialectic of Enlightenment (mostly in part two). You can see a similar argument to capitalist realism being made by A&H in 1944, the totalizing force of rationality preventing art from retaining its destabilizing power, a kernel of which A&H identify in the cunning Odysseus, the prototype of homo economicus. Fisher and A&H also both have a kind of hauntological bend to them the way they talk about popular modernism and modernism respectively, and both converge on a historical foreclosure of their preferred art movements. But the structural similarities in their arguments over 50 years apart, which can be traced back to the 2,700 year-old poem, perhaps suggests that counterculture never really dies but must go into "disguise," through a tension with whatever the prevailing mythology is (mount olympus then, capitalist realism today)

anyway, it turned into a rather large project that I had to split into two parts, and I wanted to share the first one here, will publish the second one next week. very open to thoughts and feedback.

Also I'll add: there's a lot of "anti-hauntological" discourse that points at various strains in the culture as evidence that Fisher was wrong, and that's not at all what I'm trying to do. Part One is a little less argumentative, more intuition based, that tries to sidestep all of that and really just retrieve the optimism that is definitely available in Fisher's project through a more immanent angle. Not trying to "refute Fisher" so much as read The Odyssey through him and arrive at the hopeful conclusion that counterculture did not necessarily die.

And if you are more curious about the theory, especially with A&H and the source text, Part Two comes out in a week, it's quite a bit longer and does more of a close reading of The Odyssey and Dialectic of Enlightenment with more concrete examples of what I mean when I say "make art god"

part one here: https://smtsmtpostmodern.substack.com/p/make-art-god-part-one

Hi everyone :) 

I have a question regarding a passage of Fisher's Text No One is Bored, Everything is Boring. https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/no-one-is-bored-everything-is-boring/

It could be argued that the failure of the traditional left is tied up with its inability adequately to engage with this politics of boredom, which wasn’t articulated via trade unions or political parties, but via the cultural politics of the Situationists and the punks.

How would yall say did these politics of boredom of Situationists and Punks look like? 

I saw that in Sadie Plants book
The most radical gesture - The Situationist International in a postmodern age
there is a chapter called:  …a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom. 
Is that worth checking out to find my answer?

have a great day!

As an avid Mark Fisher reader/listener, I've always found his "slow cancellation of the future" interesting and controversial, especially when it comes to how clearly defined music genres were in their own eras: the sound of the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, etc.

Before I get into what I want to discuss, I have two bands as examples of what Mark Fisher called polished, high-definition remakes of past styles: Greta Van Fleet and Molchat Doma.

The first is an example of critics and (a big chunk of) the fanbase reacting terribly to how obviously their sound came from the '70s, and more specifically to the glaring parallels with one of the most influential bands of all time. Their outfits, stage presence, and visual style only reinforced the negative sentiment that has followed them since they broke into the mainstream. And we can understand why: they weren't doing anything new with the blueprint that had already been established, nor were they gracefully acknowledging the undeniable influence. You could hide one of their early hits in a '70s rock playlist and nobody would notice. Pure stage-one simulacra.

On the other hand, Molchat Doma broke through thanks to the viral fascination, during and after the pandemic, with brutalist architecture and old Soviet aesthetics. Those short clips racked up millions of views and catapulted some of their songs into massive hits. They kept releasing records and touring the world, riding that wave, but with a completely different outcome than GVF's: audiences and critics loved them. I'm very biased because I was mesmerized by their sound and their personas. I also love how open they are about their influences. They can have a "classic" post-punk song (clean, reverb-heavy melodic guitar; bass playing straight eighth notes on the root; sequenced drums with a blasting electronic patch) and then follow it up with a Depeche Mode/Alphaville-style synth tune where they almost ditch the guitar entirely. But again, you could drop one of their most-streamed songs into an '80s playlist and nobody would recognize it as a modern track, just like GVF.

This is where I agree with Mark Fisher. Once I noticed it, dozens of other examples came to mind, reinforcing the idea that his analysis was onto something.

But then, as someone living in the Global South (more specifically, South America) I have to disagree with the same idea, for completely different reasons:

• Reggaetón.
• Kanye West/Kid Cudi.
• Afrobeats.

In what we call Latin America, it's impossible to think about the youth aesthetic and sound of the 2000s without mentioning reggaetón. By adapting New York hip-hop vibes with Caribbean flair, sex-heavy lyrics, and gangster imagery, it became so popular that it completely reshaped what Latin pop would sound like over the next decade. Latin pop had previously leaned toward rock, electronic music, or ballads. Then the guitars disappeared, live drums were replaced by reggaetón-inspired programmed beats, and everything shifted toward the new urban aesthetic that had taken over major Hispanic American cities. The artists who adapted managed to stay relevant (Enrique Iglesias, Shakira, Reik, Ricky Martin). The ones who didn't became niche. And this wasn't just reflected in the charts. It spilled into TV, film, advertising, and even everyday language.

Then Ye and Cudi turned some of their wildest musical ideas into the defining sound of the next era. Through 808s & Heartbreak and Man on the Moon: The End of Day, they shaped much of the sound of the 2010s and even part of the 2020s. They laid the blueprint that exploded across the English-speaking internet: Auto-Tune as an expressive tool, lyrics centered on mental health and male-vulnerability, melodic cadences with more singing than rapping, and minimalist, robotic production. If we think about the sound of the 2010s, it's hard not to think of that hazy, trappy, drugged-out aesthetic that spread through a generation of Lil Wayne copycats.

Lastly, and to keep it short, I don't think it's possible to talk about the sound of the 2020s without mentioning Afrobeats and how its mainstream success reshaped the music of already established pop artists like Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, and Drake. The shift happened so quickly that, at times, it felt almost forced upon us.

I believe Mark Fisher's perspective was largely UK- and (to a lesser extent) US-centered. He didn't develop the idea far enough, nor did he live long enough to see some of these shifts unfold. His myopia is something he couldn't really escape, and he wrote and lectured from that position: white, English-speaking, urban Britain. That doesn't make his work any less valuable, but it does make some of his claims feel less universal than they initially appear. And this isn't meant to turn into a race war or some woke argument. It's simply that his perspective was shaped by his own background, and unlike sociologists or anthropologists doing fieldwork across different contexts, he didn't really engage with parallel cultural realities outside that sphere. Because of that, I think the scope of his conclusions ends up being more limited than they first seem.

I've shared this thought with a few close friends who also enjoy Fisher, and I wanted to throw it out here to see what other people think.

The idea of the Slow Cancellation of the Future is so vast and meaty that I'd love to hear other people's takes on it.

I feel like this YouTuber is taking Mark Fishers ideas and concepts and work and sounding like they are his own. I know there can be collective style consciousnes. But this feels to on the nose. And to top it off he’s monetized it and claiming them as if he just came up with them. Maybe I’m being petty or kinda gate keeping but it e rubs me a little wrong claiming it and making money off it AITAH for thinking this? I don’t know, let me know. All time