These past couple days led me to find an inspiration and guidance for navigating the whatever neo-late-post condition we currently live in—through the brilliant vigor and unobstructed flow of thought presnt in perhaps, the greatest blog that ever came into existence. It Mark Fisher’s k-punk blog that yields this inspiration. Where else can one find the level of brilliancy in the way Fisher contextualizes the singer Dido?

‘White Flag’ forms a neat contrast with ‘Life for Rent’ (2003), the title track of the LP, which sings of the opposite condition: a dissolute inability to commit. It’s like Jean Paul Sartre meets Sex and the City. Wandering aimlessly through the hypermarket of the postmodern, fingering all the options but never settling on any one of them, Dido castigates herself for her failure to really engage, to stick at or believe in anything for very long, to make meaningful choices. She concludes that, if this is the case, she ‘deserves’ nothing, because nothing is really hers.

In his k-punk blog, Fisher extensively expresses his thoughts on modern pop and film culture, while extensively corresponding with his fellow bloggers, while his correspondence with his readers is no less intriguing than the posts themselves, such as when he suggested one of his readers to lay off Dido while offering David Gray as an alternative. All this, constitutes Fisher’s respectful and funny polemic towards 00’s culture.

And here I would like to turn to Charlie Brooker. Fisher’s interpretation of culture is filled with brilliancy and vigor which makes, what I claim, Charlie Brooker a mere instantiation of him. Is not Brooker’s Black Mirror TV series—posited within the premise that we are living in a postmodern, Thatcheraian ‘no alternative’, Fukuyamian1 end-of-history stage, where, as Fisher calls it, ‘postmodern hypercapitalist’ ontology is already taken for granted and therefore lies outside Brooker’s critique?2 Black Mirror is a perfect example of how popular culture grounds its nihilistic fatalism in advancement of dystopian technologies as they eat up the fabric of society, down to every molecule of what we romanticize to be inherently ‘human’. All this, while failing to critique the underlying entities in power (like Google and Facebook; Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk; etc.) that employ various post-capital, hyper-technocratic-utilitarian methods of guiding society and applying technocratic advancements to it.

In all fairness, Brooker is a brilliant screenwriter and cultural critic, perhaps one of the greatest currency alive. He also shares similar paranoia as did Fisher while he fought his depression, but despite that, Black Mirror still desperately needs a Fisherian twist, especially considering the fact the season 3-4 saw tremendous drop in pessimistic outcomes, and a proportional increase in the number of happy ends within the narratives of each series. Some attribute this to the fact that Charlie Brooker became a father and that was the leading factor that flipped out the pessimism and paranoia that had driven the narratives of his first two seasons of Black Mirror. Does not this demonstrate how Brooker eventually succumbed to the normalizing forces of postmodern subjectivity (and becoming a parent) that instigated a rupture between the early-revolting-Brooker and the late-passivized-Brooker that we see in season 3 and 4 of Black Mirror? Fisher on the other hand, stayed true to his inner drive which consisted of his depression that was instigated and perpetuated by the alienating forces of ‘postmodern hypercapitalism’; he payed it with a price, of course—by taking his own life. But in a way, he was existentialist until the last moment, living in mental anguish under postmodernity; ending it with a leap.

  1. If not Apple’s iOS auto-correct feature that probably knows my vocabulary in-and-out, I would have left this as ‘Fuckyamian’. Isn’t this a Freudian-Marxian slip-typo that demonstrates the presence of a revolting proletarian subjectivity within me striving to move history through struggle? Fisher also has a short post on text prediction. ↩

  2. See Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: (2009) where he brilliantly applies the concept of Socialist Realism, where art is valueless unless it is used for the cause of socialist values—to modern capitalism, where art has value insofar as it is related to the modes of exchange of the post-70’s global market, and whose political meaning and artistic have been homogenized, transforming it into a commodified artifact. ↩