CAPITALIST REALISM

While fascism is rising on a global scale, artificial intelligence is causing all types of problems, from impairing children’s ability to read or destroying their interest in learning to spreading misinformation, creating the worst propaganda, creating terrible graphics, destroying nature, and much more. Humanity seems to be accelerating its demise. Every other week, a former AI tech bro comes out and claims that AI is going to kill all humans, and some people laugh at it, because why not? Our entire life is memetic warfare, and all matters are studied through a lens of identity politics.

Just like our understanding of nature, which is flawed but inevitable, capitalism colonized our understanding of nature through this method. This means that many people may dislike their jobs, go into debt, resent corporations, be anti-establishment, or be vocal about their intolerance of capitalist expansion. Yet the market is so engraved in their lives that they do not act upon it and believe all of that predation and expansion is only natural.

Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, has one of his most unique ideas in the flattening of the future for the present. He argues, based on the works of Franco Berardi, that the media consumed and produced by society are often recycled. You cannot go back in time with 2026 music and have people think that it is from the future.

One of Fisher’s central observations is that even opposition can be absorbed by the market. Rebellious music, radical fashion, anti-corporate films, and revolutionary imagery can all become products. A person can condemn consumerism while purchasing an identity built around that condemnation. Criticism is permitted because it rarely threatens the system’s underlying structure.

Another aspect that has changed, and that people ignore, is the reduction of genuine humanity and genuine experiences. Mental health has become a private medical matter, to be “cured” through statistics, numbers, and methods that are only here to make you fit to work again rather than cure you.

If large numbers of people are exhausted, insecure, and hopeless, the cause may also lie in precarious employment, debt, isolation, and the constant demand to remain productive. The system produces distress and then tells individuals that their inability to cope is a personal failure. If large numbers of people are exhausted, insecure, and hopeless, the cause may also lie in precarious employment, debt, isolation, and the constant demand to remain productive. The system produces distress and then tells individuals that their inability to cope is a personal failure.