God he's so intelligent and so able to express what we all sense, the anxiety and the disappointment we all feel somewhere deep inside in terms that are both highly relatable and accessible and also deeply cerebral and engaging. Such a shame he's not here anymore to keep sharing insight to us and hold up a mirror to the world.

i find solace in the idea that my anxieties have a universal element to them - "Nobody is bored but everything is boring". Fisher's critique of social media and wider technology is not merely platitudinal nostalgia (in fact he speaks against it). His insight is that our unfreedom to feel boredom via constant distraction is today's malaise.

I think the reason why we haven't evolved beyond the 90's is that the 90's achieved the optimal profitability for the culture industry, therefore it seeks to keep cycling it's audience back in to replicate it. In the same way we create monocultures to produce and harvest crops.

I was never fortunate enough to meet Mr Fisher, but I miss him dearly.

this lecture's hitting me hard, once again I'm drifting through social media-cyberspace at 3 o'clock on a Thursday night. Not so much to be entertained or to relax, just looking for something interesting to fill the void of aimless non-sleeping. Rest in peace Mark Fisher. Would recommend anyone reading this comment to check out his collection of essays K-Punk, for evermore in-depth popculture-analysis

As an architect, I can almost seamlessly replace the mentions of music with architecture.

That Amy Winehouse anecdote really is the best example of hyperrealism in action. Winehouse was, to most people today, more real and authentic than actual soul singers from the 60’s. We live in a world where our ability to recreate authentic experience is BETTER than the authentic experience itself. As Rick Roderick once said “you wouldn’t want to see a T-rex for real. You’d be disappointed after seeing what Spielberg put on the screen.”

RIP Mark Fisher. Although I was only ten when he passed he is one of my greatest influences ever. I’m going to keep fighting to create a world he would be proud of.

This lecture has given me one of those rare moments where I have found someone explain a concept I have had lingering in my mind for quite some time without any certainty or methodological lens. I am now starting Ghosts of My Life

3:21 "The dimension of the #future has disappeared. We're trapped in the 20th century… What it means to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on hi-res screens/ distributed by high-speed Internet, actually."

Rest in Peace, Fisher. The world lost one of its most brilliant minds with you. I hope that you're in a better place now.

To all the people in the comments opining that Mark Fisher was out of touch, he'd never heard of Burial, Sleaford Mods, Wiley.. etc It might benefit you to take a brief dip into his blog and you'd see that those were just the artists he championed, he was not unaware or completely scathing of contemporary music culture (he wrote for Wire), it's just that here he was commenting on what distinguished it from older musical culture in a certain negative way.

It was both refreshing and sad to see this pop up in my recommendations so many years later. One of the nice things about a full lecture, as opposed to the more digestible anti-capitalist media we so often see on KZfaq today, is the almost complete lack of loud but vacant opposition. No one whose ideas are molded by the neoliberal hegemony has the attention span required to argue with it. Small mercy.

The slow cancellation is accelerating mid 2020 ....

God, a person with such insight into the current state of affairs has to have it tough. The thing he said about being bored even when we are curious is spot on.

Fisher has been a real eye opener. Since he uses music as an example: when I was a teen in the 80s we disparaged any music that wasn't new. We had no time for classic rock, for example. All of it was dead to us (in fact, it wasn't that old.) Today, not only do I (and it seems, my peers) wax nostalgic for the 80s but the "classic" rock that we so hated back then. As Fisher says, we have an excessive tolerance for regurgitating and recycling culture. Think about how so called "alternative rock" is now almost 30 years old.

I disagree with him on the lack of specificity of time in music. It's still there. The problem is most people are not living with the cutting edge of music. Most people don't follow scenes and labels close enough. We see the history of music through it's hits, and a recontextualizing through film and other media. Stranger Things does capture some of the 80's, it probably captures 90's nostalgia for the 80's even more so, and 2010's revival of the 80's more still. How many people were clued into all of those aesthetics at the time? A slim margin that were the creators and aficionados. With the internet more people added to the mythos and context of an overall theme that wasn't as universal at the time as some believe. At most it was a veneer of branding targeted at teenage youth that was as fleeting and given little introspection. Even look at Black Mirror San Junipero for the same thing, memories of the past that never really were. Adult life takes people away from the edge of progress, and puts people at the edge of old problems. People with kids attest to reliving that part of life through their kids, because at some point that is the only way to really get a sense of this specificity. When we look on the now in 20 years, there will be a lot revived that for most was under the radar. Retro 2020 won't really seem like real 2020 at all, and it will be delivered in a more concentrated aesthetic than thought possible. God, just look at every WW2 film after Saving Private Ryan. Same deal. We chase aesthetics and impressions more than the real thing. Today, people simply track progress in a select few industries and loose touch with others. You can't keep up with everything anymore. Almost like there are parallel worlds at any given time on top of each other. Things either move so fast week to week, or are endeavors like infrastructure that stretch for years and meant to last centuries. This is why it feels we are in a zombie amusement park, while at the same time innovation has never been faster. It's simply lost to market fracture.

He completely nailed it. Even truer today than when he gave this talk.

This is probably the most important lecture on 21st century aesthetics and cultural studies

I agree with his observation, but to see these cultural developments as inherently negative also indicates we could merely be stuck within a modernist mind paradigm in a post-modern world, and somehow still refuse to let go of this 19th/20th century expectation of something new and groundbreaking every 5 years

This man changed my life, Rest In Peace

"The past was dead, the future was unimaginable." George Orwell - 1984

Hollywood is another example of the increasing blandness and tight repetition of culture. Another superhero sequel anyone? All safe profits, safe stories, safe....

He never delves into that but you could almost listen to this speech as if the subject was "what is vaporwave and how did it emerge?".

scrolling through tiktok while listening to this. theres never a break from consuming information. this is the most advance form of totalitarianism ever

shocked to learn he died , i loved capitalist realism and his articles RIP Mark.

RIP. What a burden to be such a brilliant man in these times.

i think that the second half of the 2010s really saw an emboldened form of what fisher postulates here. in terms of music, we have seen - the fetishistion of the 70s genre, such as in Dua Lipa's 'future nostalgia' or St Vincent's new album. - the popularusation of artists openly, shamelessly emulating musicians that have come before them, for example Declan McKenna's similitude to David Bowie - the continued pervasiveness of britpop groups, such as Oasis or Blur, in the youth culture of today, which contradicts the notion of a distinct cultural heterogeneity as time progresses - the paradoxical main-streaming of a rejection of 'main-stream' music in favour of indie bands from the 1980s and 1990s. i dont think that thus cultural hauntology is just present in music though. it can also be seen in - the universal prevalence of 'vintage' clothing, such as Nike sweatshirts from the 1980s or Adidas Originals attire from the 1990s - the longevity of architectural movements (i.e. modernism) which linger far longer than previous movements - the non-progression of cinema culture, which now exclusively focusses on established properties (i.e. marvel, star wars etc.) - the commodification of 'retro' technologies, such as record players and old radio sets Mark Fisher truly was a prophetic voice

It's the McDonaldsization of art and culture...

I was a kid when he died, I just read his book capitalism realism, I pictured his voice to be much deeper, its my first time hearing him

"We don't have the freedom to be bored anymore".

No one loved Jungle music more than Mark Fisher.

If we look at history it becomes evident that every cultural shift was closely assosiated with a shift in the power structure of society. Culture is impotent by itself. The Renaissance was closely associated with a revolution in medieval warfare, but in contrast today every change is confined to the field of high tech, which is profoundly asocial and very distant from the masses. The bourgeoisie completely solidified its power in WW2 and with the defeat of the labor and civil rights movements modern society has been been at a complete standstill since the 80's. And lets be honest, contemporary pop culture garbage is produced through statistical methods and computer algorithms. Even the aesthetic design of cars and planes is completely done with AI these days. So why is anyone surprised that everything is the same?

The future is better protected than the past. -Chris Marker, La Jetée

That epic remark of his "the future has been cancelled" can be understood or even applied in so many ways. In terms of electronic music culture, which had a great run for 20 odd years, is now mostly cancelled, run dry, finished. Yet, even Mark Fisher's suicide cancelled his own future...

curious, the way he repetitively, unconsciously, compulsively lifts and sets down his water glass and water bottle, without ever taking a sip, serves as a kind of visual metaphor for everything he is saying. brilliant.

I was 15 when thsi man died and blissfully unaware of how important amd accurate his decsriptions of an impending sense of melancholic existential dread that seems to settle in everyday life. As time has gone on it seems people have only become more accepting of commodification of all apsects of life, climate change has become ironically openly accepted but this has also seemed to come with a back ended embrace that we will simply have to live with its condequences. Like capitalist realism a sense of fatility in the societal psyche has put us collectively in a trance we need to desperately snap out of. Rip Mark Fisher and I hope people use his works to peoductive ends and look for solutions to a world with a quickly fading if not already departed future.

It's a beautifully intuitive idea. Future has disappeared because reality has become cyclical. This is clearly reflected in the way of economical structures. By means of eternal inflation, the capitalistic machinery will never come to an end. Reality becomes a snapshot of the same scene that has been seen before except it "feels" different. The young, the middle-aged, the elderly lead the same lives as they lead decades ago. And somehow we still believe that things have changed. The future is clearly suppressed.

Great to hear someone giving such a broad and articulate insight on something felt by many - not too many, of course.

Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote in 1978. We can only guess her reaction to the relentless, Twitter-fuelled politics of 2019. No wonder wicked problems like climate change or inequality feel so hard to tackle right now.

RIP Mr. Fisher you would've loved Hyperpop

he really explains things so complex in such understanding words. RIP Mark Fisher

I dunno. When it comes to music, a big part of rapid changes in sound was due to technology. Nowadays we can basically get any sound or effect we could possibly want from any computer. The overall sea of sonic possibilities will continue to expand, but not nearly as fast as it did before. This alone doesn’t completely negate the ideas of the lecture, obviously, but it’s worth considering the factors of the future slowing down other than culture

I just started two weeks ago to read his books and it's so eyes opening and I feel his kind of views so much! When I was a teenager in the 2000s I always had a feeling of a lost generation, no unique pop culture, nothing really new... I was jealous about my parents and their popculture when they've been teenager. I know the feeling of a lost vision, no idea what's a good idea of the future, what to believe in, sometimes strong feelings of depression... Mark Fisher was genius, he described that so perfectly! And with every sentence more I read and listen to him, I'm also a little bit more sad he died. Would love to know how he would comment our world now.

Geez, in 2014, if that's when this talk happened, then Fisher is only saying what would be undeniable in 6 years - that the "future has disappeared." 2020, the Year of Mass Blindness.

The culture is relentlessly boring now and the internet as site or enabler of new creativity has been a massive disappointment, probably because it's mainly just a speeded up communication and purchasing tool, not really a medium, in the same way that hardly anyone made art using the telephone or the credit card. Part of the problem is that the 20th century was just such an explosion of new artistic ideas that they dried up the well. Rock 'n' roll and dance music have played out a series of variations. They're simply not new anymore and have few ways left of being new. In avant garde music and art, where do you go after minimalism, conceptualism and electronic media? In practice, sadly, it seems you go to one hell of a lot of pastiche. For those of us who grew up in eras of youth rebellion, it's kind of weird to see young artists actually aping the productions of their parents' generations in punk or electronica or conceptual art. But all this old artistic newness ran in parallel and hand in hand with the sense of epic societal change. A friend of mine is a writer and comic artist who was active in the 70s and he says his generation thought anything was possible. Art was thought to be part of the revolution, the new way or the explosion of new ways. We have lost that motivating sense of purpose and meaning for our art. It's all just entertainment and you're either successful financially at it or not but can't hope for more than that or anything outside it. It's now clearly revealed as just part of the capitalist status quo.

19:45 -19:53 is spot on. A thing i try to tell people is that a big difference between now and the 20th C. is that now, because 99% of music is available on demand and practically free (at the moment); it's often taken for granted. That cultural artifact which has no "price" can easily be seen as having no "worth", in terms of subjective or objective value. It's discouraging, if you're the one working to make that artifact.

I keep coming back to Fishers lectures. What pains me the most is that i started my university studies (after several years of misguided and failed arts studies) in 2017. For the duration of my studies, Fisher has always been already dead. What makes this even more sad is that he was the kind of a person who would have answered emails sent by students...

RIP to a real one. Nobody is doing analysis like this anymore and it's sorely-needed.

Legend. Adding to that from a 2021 perspective - in between the cracks of the global monoculture chewing past aesthetics and spitting it out as revivals and remixes , there *are* some gems and innovative cultural moments (the soundcloud niche scenes for example). Problem is, i feel like even present culture is a ghost - rarely does the art i encounter on the internet really last in collective memory, nor does it manifest loud enough in physical spaces and communities. Then, how do we map our collective experiences, communicate the subtleties of our perceptions between humans ? This is crazy. RIP Mr Fisher

A shining beacon. Pure intellect. We are wandering around fields of inhumanity hailed as achievements of humankind.

Though this lecture is from 2014, watching it in 2021 feels like its something published only yesterday. For me, that is evidence enough of the cultural malaise.

So nervous until he could jump head first into how cool jungle music is

Brilliant, true, and sad.

Really interesting talk. I'm definitely going to read Mark Fisher.

The remixes of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the dancefloors of the living

I have similar thoughts and observations, but I often wonder, too, how much of this change in how I am experiencing time and history has to do with getting older. (Born in 1970, I belong to the same generation as Fisher.) The older one gets, the faster time seems to pass.

lately I've seen a couple of these videos predicting "what will music sound like in 2030, 2040... 2100", but it was all just slightly different variations of breakcore. this is also why the 90s futurism seems more futuristic to me than anything we're experiencing today. it seems like we hit the peek of futurism back then and its hard to even imagine anything beyond that. altho it might be a temporary stagnation, perhaps aesthetics such as solarpunk, that go against the exploitative dystopian reality we live in, are the new futurism

One thing’s certain the analog world has been relegated to novelty and Gen X are the last generation to experience it as mundane reality, this undoubtedly colors our view of the future.

Hmm, after hearing the whole talk - he makes some good points, but I think it's a bit too neat. It is too easy to be pessimistic about the present when one reaches a certain age, and I think that can't be left out of the equation.

nobody tell him about videogame remakes

thanks for the recommendation Chuck Klosterman

I really didn't expect him to have such a high-pitched voice

How about 1000 years ago, when music rarely changed every hundred years....

Endless, endless, endless dialectics.

i had mark fischer's thoughts lingering for quite some time and began to really question 'what happened in electronica in the 90s, really? what was this sweet man so enthused about? what might i have missed from not having an opportunity to go back and suss with full inclusivity of genre, etc?' i had an understanding, some fave artists; though, had not allowed myself to research and hear it first hand. so, i used youtube to create some playlists that would allow me to go back, surround myself in the era, and see how i 'felt' about fischer, the past, the present, and where we might be headed (or not) into the future. those playlists are on my youtube page. maybe they might assist you, as well? idk. it made me a lot happier. they'll be there forever.

Thank god we have these recordings.

Man when he put the Arctic Monkeys on blast my heart sank 😂

the feeling of being adrift in time is something most in the West can relate to, but i think most of the feeling of progress of the 20th century came first from technology changing how we live and how society was organized and then in the latter half in social norms being broken through. we reached a place in the 90s where at least in the most privileged class, one could say or do virtually anything without surprising anyone. all restrictions are off, all markets are open for exploiting.

It's so amazing hearing what for me was only a ever a vague feeling in regards to arts & culture being expanded upon and put to words so well and easily digestible. So glad this made it to my recommended videos. Sorry to hear he has passed.

Very interesting and insightful. Brilliant, thanks.

This is an absolutely brilliant video that manages effectively explicate and use the best of "postmodern" theory to build on marxist foundations to demonstrate the way we ARE using what has happened to the music we can now barely stand to listen to.

Just found out about you today. And as a film studies student from 2009-2012 all of the ideas of you Mark have reminded me of the zeal and excitement I felt in those days that change was possible. If I’m able to be strong enough I want to be part of the alternative. I have also struggled deeply with addiction, depression, thoughts and attempts at suicide. I will be buying your book and reading your blogposts post haste. Thank you

Yes, Mark Fisher's observations are indeed compelling! But believe it or not, there was a professor of music at U of Chicago who was somehow able to see, on the horizon, the imminent end-of-cultural-time, from the vantage point of 1967; see Music, The Arts, and Ideas by Leonard Meyer (1967, with 1994 Postlude). (The internet then was only 'gasoline' thrown on the fire that Meyer had already identified.) In the 1970s and 1980s, Stanislaw Lem likewise described an Eternal Present in which we would soon be trapped, and which he characterized as an 'ocean of trash' where 'your pearl will not be found'; see A Perfect Vacuum (1999[1971], p. 85) and One Human Minute (1986) by Lem. Both Meyer and Lem are in turn referenced in this connection in The Chemistry Redemption (2010) by Conal Boyce, who speaks of 'the end of the art-historical time-line' in a way that resonates strongly with Mark Fisher. @Manu Forster, I too was struck by, "The dimension of the future has disappeared. We're trapped in the 20th century… What it means to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on hi-res screens/ distributed by high-speed Internet, actually" (at 3:21).

Really interesting lecture. I often think when watching old Top Of The Pops repeats how totally different 1985 is to say 1979 yet between 2000 and 2006 there wasn't much difference musically or stylistically. I think the effect of the Cold War is another factor in explaining why our arts and culture in the west at that time had such a fantastic forward momentum. The collapse of the Soviet Union had a huge effect on Western music and culture as I believe that from the 1950s to at least the 1980s during the cold war there was a lot of funding put into the arts, and a lot of space created for the arts, as there was a desire to show authoritarian societies (especially younger people in those societies) the freedoms enjoyed by younger generations in the west. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and as the grip of Neoliberalism and monetrism really tightened on western countries this desire seemed to wane.

I'd never heard of this guy until now, but boy is he on the money. And now I found he committed suicide! FFS, what a total waste for all of us. As he wrote: "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." And this was before the *other* pandemic, COVID, which seems to have dropped the average sanity on the planet by about 15%. I don't know where this world is heading, but I just want to say to anyone happening to read this: it's ok we are all here in the little lifeboat that is planet Earth. Find your own truth. For me I find it helps to keep a sense of history: this whole amazing roller-coaster ride has been running ever faster since H.Sapiens evolved 300,000 years ago. None of us is going to get out of this alive, so we might as well enjoy the ride. Each of us can look to deal with our own demons. Begin it now, begin it today, even if the human race as a whole seems for now incapable to deal with its own. There are so many beautiful people who have lived or live today, so many wonderful ideas that have been shared. That can be its own distraction, but through this beach-coming I have found fragments that I have shored against my ruins. I won't name any of mine here, because yours will be different, but your answers are there I promise. OK I will name one: read the one page "Desiderata" as an emergency booster shot, to give some peace of mind against the storm inside and out. Start from there.

It is really nice just to witness intelligent, well informed people talking about ideas. This, the essence of intellectual society, is imperative to the preservation of freedom. Too many people are dumb conformists, too many people are falling victim to the cult of misery. Only the pursuit of our dreams will save humanity.

boredom 1.0 no longer exists...no one is bored everything is boring... refuse to adjust to the dead present/future, politicize your melancholia, exercise melancholic maladjustment

This being already 10 years ago and still so current reveals everything of what he (so eloquently) is saying

The idea of our music/media as a distinct marker for years & decades started around 1930 with radio becoming commonplace. It is not an inherent human trait. In fact, this 80-100 year span where culture & history link up in a harmonious feedback cycle is the exception. We should feel lucky that we were able to have that experience. Pre 1930, transmission was in person only. Post 2030, media is too fragmented, where anyone with a computer has their own studio & distribution network. Gatekeeping TV/radio/record companies were rightly seen to be exploitative, but the fact that they released a finite inventory of content per year meant that a few lucky generations can hear a particular song and become magically transported to another time.

a bit long winded but man there are moments of brilliance here! I am sad to know this guy has died

Time was music, Music is money. Now was the future, The future is the past.

Don't worry Mark Fisher. The future is finally here. But holy hell are we unprepared.

Excellent, well-spoken work, that is. My qualification is that it is much too Futurist, even in its pessimism about Futures. The Nostalgia that we feel is a legitimate Reaction to the gentrified banality of Present Markets, Academia, Relationships, and Media. We seek to recreate the Past by seeking what the sages managed to discover, rather than pursuing what they sought. Yet in the process, while we cherry-pick that which we love from bygone times, we largely stay within the bounds of living generations, and it may be much too modernist to call something so recent "Past", "Archaic", or redundant. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche aren't redundant, though their fans may be; Shakespeare and Beethoven aged well over the centuries. What I perceive, though I am not a published scholar like this gentleman, is that, with every passing generation, adolescents sever ties with History to such extents as prior generations had not dared to do, and such a tendency for growing gaps in our collective memory accelerate, so much so that a "generation" turns into a narrow gap that's growing narrower with every passing year. The Youth pretends to Know that which the Elders overlooked, but it's no more than Snobbery; we're NOT the first to wake, and those who seem to sleep have been awake far longer. History in bygone times was far more stable, more profound, far deeper, though not nearly quite so vast. It's not just that the youngsters of today renounce the Past, but they renounce it MORE than youngsters of the Past renounced THEIR Past, and all that's left is that which gives the Present comfort in the absence of a Future. Our conservatives resist the Future and, by doing so, destroy the Past in all its Glory, yet our liberals, renouncing Past as Evil, simple recreate it in the Present, for without the Past's Trajectory we HAVE no Future, and I'd like to see us take some big steps BACK, as if caught in a maze, compelled to try a path we SHOULD have chosen, rather than resolving ourselves to a Dead End. If that makes sense, at all. *[({Dm.R.G.)}]*

Mark was a brilliant mind, but I do think his position on the evolution of music does kind of overlook the role played by technology (although he briefly touches on it here). Throughout the 80s and 90s many of the major new leaps in electronic music, and the limits of what was sonically imaginable were underpinned by recent advances in synthesis/sampling/digital music production/etc. By the time you got into the early 2000s, the technology was so advanced and the possibilities were so endless that it was now possible to make music that couldn't be dated simply by listening to the textures it employed. We'd also explored such musical extremities that the idea of creating something that (due to its sheer novelty) people wouldn't recognize as music started to become a bit far fetched. Even so, there is still plenty of music that has come out since that *could only* have been made in its own particular period and is not simply regurgitating past glories. (Also, as a translator/interpreter/former English teacher, I gotta say that for such a smart guy, here he's really struggling to grade his language for a non-native audience.)

He would of loved Carti

Watching this in October, 2021 crazy

It's called a Panopticon. And it's on purpose.

Wish I was smart enough to understand 100% of this. I feel like I’m only comprehending like 60-75%.

This guy sure likes jungle! Massive 🙏😤

just beautiful. RIP

2021.. So it goes. Mark got out because he knew. He's in a completely better place..

svaka cast MaMa, imali ste uglednog, pametnog i zanimljivog gosta.

it is tough to face the world as it is. we lost a great one with mark. i do wonder what he'd make of the recent acceleration of the cancellation of the future.

First time I listen to his ideas, I'm very impressed. A deep and original thinker.

Thinking of every movie trailer that has a slowed down symphonic "classic rock" track in it.

R.I.P.

RIP 🙏🏾

ive watched this a few times but the line towards the beginning about Jameson's thesis being "ubiquitous almost to the point of invisibility" just hit me

Fisher makes a lot of good points. I wasnt convinced at first, but when he made the comparison of the changes between '74 and '94 and then '94 and '14 I can see what he means. There is a definite slow down of innovation in music. I think South Park sums up this phenomenon with their "member-berries" episode. Everything is recycling old media in place of innovating.