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Comment by esnowrackley | Hacker News Reader

I sincerely never thought I'd see Fisher on HN. His work is fantastic, tying together politics, pop culture, and philosophy into a cogent reading of our times. I would recommend reading Capitalist Realism over Ghosts of My Life if you're looking to get a sense of his ideas, or, at least I found the latter to be a harder read to get into. Both are good.

Younger folks have more and more trouble imagining a better world. It's crippling.

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Same sentiment here. Seeing the words 'Mark Fisher' at the top of HN is an utter shock. How is this possible? What else might be possible?

Same. I was like “surely this isn’t the mark fisher?”

>>What else might be possible?

This comes very close to:

>Fisher feared that we were losing our ability to conceptualize a tomorrow that was radically different from our present.

On the other hand, HN's 'What to Submit' [1]:

>anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Has hn become too much a thing that it has become its own information bubble?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I dunno, I have repeatedly seen the Adam Curtis/Mark Fisher/Walter Benjamin/Theodor Adorno contingent on HN come out of the woodwork when necessary :)

Graeber pairs nicely

> Younger folks have more and more trouble imagining a better world. It's crippling.

Not the young folks I know. My 16 year old has a very strong vision of a better world, as do many of her friends

Do you believe they have the tools to create that vision of a better world?

What fisher and I suppose GP is saying that a future radically different from our own. Especially one that is not inherently just window dressed capitalism. In zizeks words "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism"

Without context these sound like hollow leftie catchphrases but especially Mark Fisher managed to show in many ways how this manifests in capitalist realism

Escaping the bitter long path dependency we're on- not just trying to rectify some wrongs, but to really make better goes, make some changes to really try over, try better- it's so hard.

I really want to see a more progressive activitism take off, see some shared hope for much wider, much better. Rather than just tangling with iniquities, trying to vault to a higher level.

They almost certainly envision a world similar to now but with the glaring problems fixed. Mark Fisher is writing about the inability to imagine and begin to create entirely new futures (for examples look to the utopianism of early 20th century futurism).

Hard agree (albeit me being "younger folks")

My favorite of his works is The Weird and the Eerie. Capitalist Realism is good/important for making some of Gramsci's ideas more accessible to a contemporary and non-academic audience, but it's not as original.

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