Mouse

“The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that
capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one
effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural
objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or
Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum,
where you see objects torn from their Iifeworlds and assembled
as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a
powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of
practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of
previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into
artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of
realism; it is more like realism in itself.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there's no work to do. If neoliberalism's magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fanaticism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures