Mark Fisher
Based on Wikipedia: Mark Fisher
In 2009, a slim book appeared from a small press with a title that sounded more like an accusation than an academic work: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? It asked a question that many people felt but couldn't articulate—why does it feel impossible to imagine any other way of organizing society? Why, even after banks collapsed and governments scrambled to prevent economic catastrophe, did nothing fundamentally change? The author was Mark Fisher, a blogger-turned-philosopher who would become one of the most influential cultural theorists of the early twenty-first century, and whose work continues to shape how we understand the strange malaise of contemporary life.
Fisher's central insight was deceptively simple. He argued that capitalism has become so total, so all-encompassing, that it no longer needs to defend itself through arguments. It simply appears as reality itself—as inevitable as gravity, as natural as weather. You might not love it. You might see its failures everywhere. But imagining something genuinely different? That feels impossible, even absurd. As Fisher put it, borrowing a phrase often attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek: "It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism."
From Working-Class Leicester to the Cybernetic Underground
Fisher was born in 1968 in Leicester, England, and grew up in the nearby town of Loughborough. His parents were working-class conservatives—his father an engineering technician, his mother a cleaner. He attended the local comprehensive school, the British equivalent of a public high school. Nothing in this background suggested he would become a philosopher of capitalism's stranglehold on the imagination.
But Fisher was formed by forces more powerful than geography or class background. The first was music journalism.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, British music papers like the New Musical Express (known as the NME) were doing something unusual. They weren't just reviewing records. They were treating pop music as a doorway into philosophy, politics, film theory, and radical thought. A teenager reading about post-punk bands might suddenly encounter references to French theorists, situationist politics, or experimental cinema. This was Fisher's intellectual awakening—the discovery that popular culture could be a vehicle for serious ideas.
The second formative experience was darker. In 1989, Fisher was present at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield when a crowd crush killed ninety-seven people during an FA Cup semi-final football match. It was one of the worst disasters in British sporting history, and the official response—police and media initially blamed the fans rather than the failures of crowd management—became a decades-long scandal of institutional lying and cover-up. For Fisher, this was an early lesson in how power distorts truth and how working-class people are treated as disposable.
Fisher studied English and Philosophy at Hull University, graduating in 1989. But his real education happened at the University of Warwick in the 1990s, where he completed a PhD and became a founding member of something called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or CCRU.
The CCRU was strange even by academic standards. Founded in 1995, it was less a research unit than a collision zone where philosophy, electronic music, horror fiction, and what might be called "theory-fiction" merged into something new and unsettling. Key figures included the philosopher Nick Land, who would later become notorious for his association with accelerationism and the far-right, and Sadie Plant, a theorist of cyberfeminism and digital culture.
The CCRU's style was deliberately disorienting—dense with neologisms, obsessed with science fiction and horror, and politically ambiguous in ways that ranged from provocative to troubling. Fisher's later work would retain some of this DNA—the interest in popular culture as a site of philosophical importance, the taste for concepts that make reality feel strange—while shedding the CCRU's more abrasive rhetoric and its flirtation with right-wing ideas.
During this period, Fisher also made music. He was part of a breakbeat hardcore group called D-Generation, releasing EPs with titles like Entropy in the UK and Concrete Island. He later recorded as The Lower Depths. None of this made him famous, but it kept him connected to the dance music underground at a time when genres like jungle and drum and bass were mutating at extraordinary speed.
K-Punk: The Blog That Changed Everything
After leaving Warwick, Fisher taught philosophy at a further education college—what Americans might call community college. It was unglamorous work, far from the cutting-edge theory of his graduate years. But in 2003, he started something that would eventually make his reputation: a blog called k-punk.
The name was characteristically cryptic. The "k" might have referred to "kode" (as in Kode9, the producer and DJ who was a close friend and collaborator), or to the German word for culture, or to something more obscure. Fisher never definitively explained it.
What mattered was what he did with it. K-punk became, in the words of music critic Simon Reynolds, "a one-man magazine superior to most magazines in Britain." It was the hub of what Reynolds called a "constellation of blogs" where popular culture, music, film, politics, and critical theory were discussed together by journalists, academics, and enthusiasts. In an era before social media fragmented online discourse into warring camps, k-punk represented a kind of serious but accessible intellectual conversation that felt genuinely new.
Fisher wrote about everything. Television programs like Doctor Who and The Thick of It. Horror films and science fiction. Post-punk bands and dubstep producers. The novels of J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick. His own struggles with depression. And always, underneath everything, the political question: why does life under capitalism feel so exhausting, so hopeless, so devoid of possibility?
The writing was what Vice magazine later called "lucid and revelatory"—Fisher had a gift for taking cultural artifacts that seemed familiar and revealing their hidden meanings. He could make you see a movie differently, hear a song differently, understand your own dissatisfaction differently. And he did this without the obscurantism that often makes academic writing unreadable to anyone outside the seminar room.
What Is Capitalist Realism?
Fisher didn't invent the phrase "capitalist realism." It had been used before, sometimes to describe art that depicted capitalism critically, sometimes as an analog to "socialist realism," the official aesthetic doctrine of Soviet-era art. But Fisher gave the term new meaning.
For Fisher, capitalist realism wasn't just an artistic style. It was something closer to a mood, an atmosphere, a limit on what feels thinkable. He described it as:
a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.
This is a subtle point, and worth unpacking. Fisher wasn't saying that capitalism is good, or that everyone loves it. He was saying something more insidious: that capitalism has become the default setting of reality itself. Even people who hate it, who see its failures clearly, struggle to imagine what could replace it. The system persists not because people believe in it but because they can't conceive of anything else.
Think of it this way: in the Soviet Union during the 1980s, almost nobody actually believed in communism. The ideology was dead, a hollow ritual. But the system continued because nobody could imagine how to change it. Fisher argued that something similar had happened to capitalism, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, capitalism lost its enemy, its opposite. And without an opposite, it stopped being one option among others and became simply "how things are."
The concept draws on the idea of cultural hegemony developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci argued that ruling classes maintain power not just through force but by making their worldview seem like common sense—the natural way of seeing things. Fisher extended this: under capitalist realism, capitalism isn't even defended anymore. It just is. Asking whether there's an alternative feels like asking whether there's an alternative to having weather.
The 2008 Crisis That Changed Nothing
The 2008 financial crisis should have broken the spell. Here was capitalism spectacularly failing—major banks collapsing, governments scrambling to prevent economic apocalypse, millions losing homes and jobs. If ever there was a moment to question the system, this was it.
But that's not what happened. Instead, the response to the crisis was to save capitalism from itself. Governments bailed out banks. Austerity programs cut public services to pay for the bailouts. And the fundamental logic of the system—that markets must be served, that there is no alternative—remained intact.
Fisher saw this as capitalist realism in action. Even a crisis that exposed the system's irrationality didn't produce alternatives. Instead, people doubled down on what they knew. The imagination remained captive.
Interestingly, Fisher also suggested that the crisis changed things in one small but significant way. Before 2008, people believed capitalism was stable and eternal. After 2008, they knew it was unstable but still couldn't imagine anything else. This was, Fisher thought, actually an improvement—because now the system's failures were visible, even if the exits remained blocked. Knowing that your prison is unstable is the first step toward looking for a way out.
Business Ontology and the Invasion of Every Space
One of Fisher's key arguments was that capitalism had invaded spaces that once operated according to different logics. He called this "business ontology"—the belief that everything should be run like a business. Schools, hospitals, museums, governments—all were being restructured according to market principles, with targets, metrics, audits, and efficiency drives.
Fisher knew this world intimately. He had worked in further education during the Blair years, when British public services were subjected to what was called "modernization"—endless performance reviews, management jargon, and bureaucratic processes designed to simulate market competition within institutions that weren't actually markets.
This was supposed to reduce bureaucracy. It did the opposite. The auditing, the form-filling, the constant measurement of things that couldn't really be measured—all of this created new layers of administrative work that had nothing to do with the actual job of teaching, healing, or serving the public. Teachers spent more time documenting their teaching than actually teaching. Nurses spent more time on paperwork than with patients.
Fisher saw a cruel irony here. Free-market advocates claimed to hate bureaucracy. But the neoliberal reforms they championed—privatization, marketization, constant assessment—created more bureaucracy than the old public sector ever had. The difference was that this new bureaucracy served no purpose except to demonstrate that market logic was being applied. It was bureaucracy as ideology.
Hauntology: The Ghosts of Lost Futures
If capitalist realism describes how we got trapped in an eternal present, hauntology—another concept Fisher popularized—describes what we lost along the way.
The term comes from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who coined it in a 1993 book about the persistence of Marx's ideas after the supposed "end of history." Derrida was punning on "ontology" (the study of what exists) and "haunting" (the presence of what shouldn't exist anymore). Fisher and the music critic Simon Reynolds adapted the concept to describe something different: a cultural condition in which contemporary art is haunted by the futures that were promised but never arrived.
This requires some explanation. In the mid-twentieth century, the future felt real. People genuinely believed that tomorrow would be radically different from today—flying cars, moon colonies, automation that would free humanity from drudgery, social transformations that would make the present unrecognizable. Whether you were a capitalist techno-optimist or a communist revolutionary, you believed in progress, in change, in the new.
That sense of futurity has largely disappeared. The twenty-first century, Fisher argued, doesn't feel like the future. It feels like an endless recycling of the twentieth century—the same styles, the same sounds, the same political arguments, endlessly remixed but never transcended. We're stuck.
Hauntological art, for Fisher, was work that made this stuckness visible—that conjured the lost futures we were promised and mourned their non-arrival. The electronic musician Burial, with his spectral samples of 1990s rave music filtered through crackle and melancholy, was a key example. So was the Ghost Box record label, which created eerie soundscapes that evoked a Britain of the 1970s—of public broadcasting, educational films, and a welfare state—that had been dismantled by Thatcher and never rebuilt.
This wasn't nostalgia in the usual sense. Nostalgia wants to go back. Hauntology mourns what never happened. It's the difference between missing your childhood home and mourning the life you were supposed to have but didn't.
At a time of political reaction and restoration, when cultural innovation has stalled and even gone backwards... one function of hauntology is to keep insisting that there are futures beyond postmodernity's terminal time. When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.
The Weird and the Eerie
Fisher's final completed book, published just after his death in 2017, was called The Weird and the Eerie. It was a study of two aesthetic modes that Fisher found in works ranging from H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror to the ambient music of Brian Eno.
The weird, in Fisher's definition, involves the presence of something that doesn't belong. A tentacled monster in a New England town. A glitch in reality that shouldn't be there. The weird disturbs because it brings together things that should be kept apart.
The eerie is different. It involves the failure of presence or absence. An abandoned building where something should be but isn't. A landscape that feels inexplicably charged with meaning. The eerie asks: why is there nothing here when there should be something? Or: why is there something here when there should be nothing?
As critic Yohann Koshy summarized: "weirdness abounds at the edge between worlds; eeriness radiates from the ruins of lost ones."
Fisher analyzed films like Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin and David Lynch's Inland Empire. He wrote about the novels of Joan Lindsay and Philip K. Dick. He discussed the music of The Fall and Brian Eno. Throughout, he argued that weird and eerie art performs a kind of philosophical work—it de-centers human experience, exposing the arbitrary forces that shape reality and that we normally take for granted.
Depression as Political Condition
Fisher struggled with depression for much of his adult life. He wrote about it openly, most extensively in his 2014 book Ghosts of My Life. But Fisher didn't treat his depression as merely personal. He argued that the epidemic of mental illness in contemporary society was inseparable from the conditions of life under capitalism.
This might sound like he was making excuses or being reductive. He wasn't. Fisher was careful to acknowledge that depression has biological and personal dimensions. But he insisted that we couldn't understand why so many people were depressed—why anxiety, depression, and burnout had reached epidemic proportions—without looking at social conditions.
The demands of contemporary work, he argued—the insecurity, the constant performance, the erosion of boundaries between work and life, the feeling that nothing you do is ever enough—were not incidental to mental illness. They were causes. Treating depression purely as an individual medical problem, to be solved with pills and therapy, was itself a form of capitalist realism: it privatized what was actually a social crisis.
As Fisher put it: "the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals."
This is a political argument with therapeutic implications. If your depression is partly caused by living in an insane system, then healing requires not just adjusting to that system but recognizing its insanity. You're not broken because you can't cope. The conditions themselves are broken.
Exiting the Vampire Castle
In 2013, Fisher published a controversial essay titled "Exiting the Vampire Castle." It was an early critique of what would later be called call-out culture—the tendency, especially on social media, to respond to political disagreements by attacking individuals rather than addressing systemic issues.
Fisher argued that this form of politics was corrosive to solidarity. It created spaces "where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent." Instead of building collective movements capable of challenging power, call-out culture reduced every issue to policing individual behavior. It was, in his view, a dead end—a politics that felt radical but actually changed nothing because it never threatened the structures that mattered.
The essay was controversial when it appeared and remains so. Some saw it as a valuable critique of a political style that was indeed often more about performance than transformation. Others saw it as a defensive reaction by a white man uncomfortable with challenges from marginalized voices. Fisher was accused of everything from misogyny to being a class reductionist who ignored race and gender.
Whatever one thinks of the essay, it anticipated debates that would only intensify in subsequent years about the relationship between personal behavior and political change, between calling out individuals and building movements.
Acid Communism: The Book He Never Finished
At the time of his death, Fisher was working on a new book called Acid Communism. Only an introduction was completed, published posthumously in a 2018 anthology of his work.
The project was ambitious. Fisher wanted to reclaim elements of 1960s counterculture—particularly the psychedelic movement—for left politics. His argument was that the expansion of consciousness promised by that era wasn't a distraction from material politics but potentially central to it. The 1960s had opened up possibilities for imagining radically different ways of living—different relationships to work, to each other, to pleasure, to time itself. Those possibilities were then shut down, not just by political repression but by capitalism's ability to absorb and neutralize dissent.
Fisher saw psychedelia not as a retreat from politics into individual experience but as a challenge to capitalist realism. If capitalist realism constrains what we can imagine, then expanding imagination—making genuinely different futures feel possible again—is itself political work. The acid in "acid communism" was partly literal (Fisher was interested in what psychedelics revealed about consciousness and social conditioning) and partly metaphorical (a reference to the "acid" of corrosive critique that dissolves the apparent naturalness of existing arrangements).
We'll never know where he would have taken it. The fragments that survive suggest something genuinely new—a synthesis of cultural theory, psychedelic philosophy, and socialist politics that might have opened paths out of the impasses Fisher spent his career diagnosing.
Death and Legacy
Mark Fisher died by suicide on January 13, 2017, at his home in Felixstowe, Suffolk. He was forty-eight years old. The Weird and the Eerie was published just days later.
In the weeks before his death, Fisher had sought psychiatric help. His mental health had been deteriorating since May 2016, and he had been hospitalized after a suspected overdose in December. But his general practitioner could only offer phone consultations to discuss a referral—a reminder, perhaps, of the hollowed-out public services Fisher had spent his career analyzing.
His death was felt as a genuine loss across an unusual range of communities—academic philosophy, music criticism, left politics, cultural journalism. Tributes noted not just his intellectual contributions but his generosity with ideas and his willingness to engage with writers and thinkers at all levels.
"A more interesting British writer has not appeared in this century," wrote Rob Doyle in The Irish Times. Roger Luckhurst, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, called him "one of Britain's most trenchant, clear-sighted, and sparky cultural commentators" and his death "a catastrophe."
Since 2018, annual events called "For k-punk" have celebrated Fisher's work. Artists and musicians have created works in dialogue with his ideas. His concepts—capitalist realism, hauntology, the weird and the eerie—have entered common usage among people who've never read his books.
The electronic musician Leyland Kirby, who performs as The Caretaker and had a long creative relationship with Fisher, released an album called Take Care. It's a Desert Out There... in his memory, with proceeds going to the mental health charity Mind.
Why Fisher Matters Now
Fisher's work resonates because it names something that many people feel but can't articulate: the strange exhaustion of contemporary life, the sense of being trapped in a present that goes nowhere, the guilt and anxiety that pervade even relative comfort.
He gave us language for this condition. And language matters. When you can name something—call it capitalist realism, hauntology, business ontology—you can begin to see it as contingent rather than natural. You can begin to ask: if this isn't how things have to be, how might they be different?
Fisher didn't provide easy answers. He was better at diagnosis than prescription, at mapping the prison than designing the escape route. But mapping the prison is necessary work. You can't escape what you can't see.
And Fisher did something else valuable: he took popular culture seriously as a site of political meaning. He showed that television, music, horror films, and science fiction weren't just entertainment but were places where our fears and hopes about the future get expressed—often more honestly than in political discourse itself. For people who felt their cultural obsessions were somehow separate from their politics, Fisher showed that they weren't. The weird unease you feel watching a horror film, the melancholy you feel listening to certain music, the nagging sense that something is wrong—these are political feelings, responses to political conditions, even when they don't look like politics.
Most importantly, perhaps, Fisher refused to give up on the future. His work is often described as pessimistic, and in some ways it is—he diagnosed our stuckness mercilessly. But the whole point of that diagnosis was to make movement possible again. You don't spend your life analyzing why we can't imagine alternatives if you don't believe alternatives are possible. Fisher was haunted by the future precisely because he believed in it.
The question he leaves us with is the one he started with: Is there no alternative? Fisher's answer, implicit in everything he wrote, was that there has to be. The work of finding it continues.