Crise no ciberespaço-tempo neoliberal (Fisher 2013)
FISHER, Mark. 2013. Cyberspace-time crisis. HO Gent. Studium Generale. Belgium. Acessível em: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOQgCg73sfQ
CRISE NO CIBERESPAÇO-TEMPO CAPITALISTA
I’m trying to point to with this notion of cyberspace-time crisis (Fisher 2013, Fisher 2013, 6:50)
CYBERTIME
the temporality that is imposed by cyberspace (Fisher 2013, 7:10)
CYBERSPACE
I use the term cyberspace deliberately as opposed to the internet (Fisher 2013, 7:19)
ANOS 90
Nos anos 90, a internet era “a sideline of life” (Fisher 2013, 7:49)
In the 90s one had to dial up the internet, and I noticed a number of people at my age now quite nostalgic for that period. That was when the internet was good: when you could contain it, when it was a resource, when you went to the internet for things and you could take them away (Fisher 2013, 8:36)
LIMIAR 1: BROADBAND
“the first major threshold towards where we are now” (Fisher 2013, 8:10) was “switching to broadband, when people stop using dial-up connections to the internet and instead you could have the internet on all times (Fisher 2013, 8:03)
LIMIAR 2: SMARTPHONES
but I think smartphones just take us onto into another threshold where you have to opt out of cyberspace (Fisher 2013, 8:24)
I think we’ve reached a new pitch now with the arrival of smartphones, a new threshold (Fisher 2013, 7:29)
As soon as you’ve got a handheld internet connected device, then you have to opt out of being in cyberspace at all times. That changes our perception of everything, and particularly then it changes changes our perception of time it induces, particularly via social media”, a “panic temporality” (Fisher 2013, 9:00)
TRABALHADOR PRECÁRIO NO NEOLIBERALISMO, EMPREENDEDORISMO MANDATÓRIO e DEPRESSÃO
When you’re precarious i.e when you’re required to think like a self-employed person, an entrepreneur at all times, any time you’re not making money you think you’re wasting time. Of course you take time off, because the human organism hasn’t reached the stage yet where it can work all of the waking hours available, but one does so feeling guilty all the time, because you’re losing money. That state of constant and permanent anxiety that you feel as a self-employed person (Fisher 2013, 10:19)
When you’re self-employed, how much money is enough money to be secure? There’s never enough, because you might at any point completely lose all of your forms of income. This state of mandatory entrepreneurialism certainly extends to precarious workers, but I think there’s a more general form of precarity, as I’ve found when I’ve moved into permanent employment, where we’re now required to hustle and market ourselves even when we’ve got ostensibly permanent jobs. This is the background condition of our lives under neoliberalism. (Fisher 2013, 11:23)
I think this this sense of being constantly deflected, of being in an anxiety dream where we know we ought to be doing something but we can’t do it, where there’s something that we’re supposed to be heading towards but we’re blocked by it, we can’t get there, there’s always something which is stopping us. That sense of temporality […] I think is the one in which most of us live almost all the time now (Fisher 2013, 35:07)
“Sell the kids for food”. That’s the line from Nirvana, from years ago, and that’s the world we’re in now, sadly (Fisher 2013, 39:13)
We all feel we’re lacking time and that we need to be more than one of us (Fisher 2013, 43:46)
This is so paralyzing because of the interlock of work and libido. My excuse for carrying my phone around all the time, even when I was out with my wife, would be “I’ve got to check it for work”. Of course, that’s partly true, when I was in this condition of self-employment and permanent entrepreneurialism et cetera. (Fisher 2013, 45:36)
We’ve got finite lives, we know there’s no god, so why do we waste our life working? […] In the 19th century anarchists were already calculating how much work you’d need to do in order to satisfy basic human needs and desires, and even then they were saying 20 hours a week. Now, with the massive increases in technology, the amount of necessary work ought to be very small. Why are we doing more work than ever then? What’s that about? Clearly there’s a kind of political economic drive which has nothing to do with the technological capacities that human beings have got now. I think that’s partly to do with what I would call artificial precarity (Fisher 2013, 47:50)
If you’re an university lecturer now, you can’t sit back and think “that’s it, now I’ve done all the testing, I’ve done all the qualifications, now I can sit back and think and develop my ideas”. No you can’t. You’ve got to constantly prove your status by continuing professional development by status reviews, all this kind of thing; by writing log books, aims and objectives, all this kind of nonsense which has no purpose other than to produce anxiety and disable people from agency or thought. (Fisher 2013, 56:17)
LONDRES, CIBERESPAÇO e NEOLIBERALISMO
The intense lab of neoliberalism that is the UK, and London specifically. The vast kind of inertial frenzy of London. London and cyberspace are like metaphors for each other in lots of ways. An inertial frenzy, where there’s a frenzy of activity where nothing really happens, that’s London. Why? Because we’ve all been deprived of the most minimal sense of security now, we’re all hustling all the time. We’re hustling or promoting, we’re literally running around (Fisher 2013, 12:06)
If you go to London, world capital of control addicts and cyberspatial misery, everybody, almost without exception, is looking at their screens almost all of the time. That’s a massive behavioral change in the human population over the course of not even a decade. People probably started doing that maybe four or five years ago, looking at tiny screens. Everyone’s not reading books. They’ll read a newspaper quickly, but quickly get rid of that [to the] important business of looking at this really tiny screen that you can’t really see properly (Fisher 2013, 21:43)
CAPITALISMO COMUNICACIONAL
Why are we now so obsessed with communication? Phone calls and letters in the 90s didn’t occupy that much of my time. If I got a phone call from a friend it might be nice, if I got a letter it would be quite nice maybe, but I didn’t follow the postman around all day looking for a letter. (Fisher 2013, 13:32)
Why is the case that communication has become unmoored from any other purpose apart from itself? Cybernetics as a science was a study of communication and control […], but now we have control by communication (Fisher 2013, 14:32)
There’s a really bad synergy between the imperatives of the dominant form of capitalism now and certain communication technologies. (Fisher 2013, 16:18)
I think we need to find a break somehow in this endless inundated flow in order that we can have agency, as opposed to the illusion of free choice (Fisher 2013, 1:17:01)
I’m not pessimistic at all. And I’m not anti-technology. It’s the capture of certain form of communicative technology by the dominant form of capitalism that is the issue now. What would soviet cyberspace have been like? Think about that. There’s lots of different ways in which we can imagine cyberspace working. It’s the synergy between a particular form of communicative technology and the currently dominant kind of model of social relations that is the issue. There’s lots of technological solutions, and we’ve got to go back to that problem of how can we work less and open up more time for lucid explorations. The proper management and allocation of resources and time etc, is our thing, it’s been a left-wing thing. This was stolen from us by neoliberals, but this society is utterly chaotic and unplanned, while planning, security etc. are actually conditions for creativity and novelty (Fisher 2013, 1:57:57)
ESQUIZO PÓS-MODERNO
Textos de Baudrillard dos anos 1970 (“The ecstasy of communication”) parecem “basically a description of what it is to be on Twitter. These texts are all about that inability to construct a coherent self anymore, in the face of this constant input, instanteneity, a kind of schizo subjectivity, as Baudrillard would put it, which has no higher halo of private protection anymore (Fisher 2013, 15:27)
A screaming low-level panic that is just a feature of being on Twitter (Fisher 2013, 16:44)
What is Twitter? Twitter is just a comments box for the world. (Fisher 2013, 18:42)
This constant call to be outraged about things as soon as I get up in the morning and go to check my phone (Fisher 2013, 19:27)
VÍCIO
Increasingly people are getting up in the night to check their mobile devices (Fisher 2013, 20:07)
The first thing you do is go to your mobile device check in that kind of excited panic in which we do this kind of thing, and immediately feel this heavy weariness come over you, the weariness of the demands of cyberspace, which are literally infinite. […] This low-level panic, of course, is exacerbated by the actual shitness of the mobile interface. Just think how crap, how ill suited for purpose, these machines are! (Fisher 2013, 20:16)
It’s like we’re all in some weird game show we have to send a message in a really short amount of space (140 characters), really quickly. And you’re living like that all of the time. This is highly stressful, but that’s not the kicker even. The kicker is we actually enjoy it! It’s not that we’re forced to do it. We’re not officially forced to do it. Although some people are now required to do Twitter for work, we’re not forced to do it, we enjoy it (Fisher 2013, 22:55)
It’s routine for people to check texts even when they’re driving (Fisher 2013, 24:24)
It’s a form of addiction and compulsion and something which you have to think about how bad this is. That’s really snatching away all of our lives (Fisher 2013, 24:45)
Communication binging is just like speed, like amphetamine in the 50s (Fisher 2013, 20:03)
I think there’s a very serious side to this kind of techno-amphetamine which we’re on, and a constant panic kind of temporality that is imposed by this combination as a set of mandatory kind of entrepreneurialism arising from precarious working and social conditions: the sense that anything can be snatched away from us at any time, that things are just getting worse and we’ve got to be grateful even for the small things that we have got. Years ago people had security, but that’s all gone now, and particularly for you younger people. This is a story you’re told well: “You know we had a bit of security and a nice life, but your life’s gonna be worse than ours. Sorry about that.” This is the message right? “We just haven’t got enough for all of you. Sorry but you must compete with one another for the little bit that’s going to be left in the future”, and it’s a horrible picture (Fisher 2013, 26:28)
Individuals are locked into repeating loops, where their activity is pointless but nevertheless they’re unable to desist. The ceaseless circulation of digital communication lies beyond the pleasure principle. The insatiable urge to check messages, email or Facebook is a compulsion akin to scratching an itch which gets worse the more one scratches it. Like all compulsions, this behavior feeds on dissatisfaction: if there are no messages you feel disappointed and check again very quickly; but if there are messages you also feel disappointed, because no amount of messages are ever enough and you also then feel the weight of those extra demands that the messages have placed upon you. (Fisher 2013, 44:46)
The different drives that get kind of compacted together, one of which is the sheer manual drive to just click stuff. There’s a kind of emotional or affective drive which is to be recognized, to get information, to feel part of belonging. There’s also a kind of manual drive which is just through the fingers themselves. When I first had my Blackberry (which I had before my iPhone), of course I got very quickly addicted to that. The red light coming on alerting me, anything in life could be stopped at any point. As Berardi points out, sex and even things which we think we would enjoy are big distractions from checking our messages. “Jesus, hurry up, get over with, let’s get back to the messages, the important things of life”. So what I was doing as I was out for dinner with my wife, I knew it wasn’t socially acceptable to check, to fiddle with my Blackberry on the table (I probably wouldn’t feel that now, when it’s much more normalized), so what I did was I had the Blackberry under under the table and let my fingers do the clicking motion even though I couldn’t see the screen. It was okay, my fingers were satisfied, they were clicking. I think the kind of schizoanalytic point from Guattari, about the desiring machines and these things that are clicked together, different kinds of drive, is fully illustrated by that kind of compulsion. (Fisher 2013, 46:00)
DETOX
After a period of exhaustion and compounded by this insomniac kind of pressure of Twitter, I emerged from that kind of depression with ideas flowing again, and I thought: “I can’t live like this anymore”. I’m not going to withdraw from cyberspace, but I have to contain it (Fisher 2013, 25:56)
The moment of actual vertigo when I delete from my ipad and my smartphone the apps of Facebook and and Twitter (Fisher 2013, 1:01:38)
I’m going to have to go upstairs where my desktop is in order to go on these things, and you’d be surprised how quickly that dehabituates you from being on them all the time. And then I actually quite decided to enjoy being on Facebook and Twitter, because if you only go on them once or twice a day, there’s a whole store of things that are there for you: you’ve got a lot of messages, you’ve got a few alerts and that’s quite nice. Have a break, have a bit of chat for a while and you can go back to your actual life, which isn’t that. And then you can also go on there and actually talk about things which aren’t it, because you’ve actually had a life which is not it, your whole drive of your life isn’t “how can I convert this experience into 140 character”. […] It just means that I don’t fall into that temptation of having them on constantly as a background of my life. […] We need the right dose of cyberspace, and we can develop kind of collective pragmatics of how we do that; and that’s not a complete withdrawal but a kind of partial withdrawal […]. I found that since I’ve done that my sense of time, my capacity to think, has increased massively (Fisher 2013, 1:01:33)
Another thing I’ve done is print out things if I want to read them. It’s not just that when you’re reading something on the screen you don’t really read it, because even if you don’t actually click off the screen onto Facebook, Twitter, email, whatever, there’s a screaming low-level panic in your brain going: “click off this now, don’t really concentrate on this, there’s much more interesting stuff out there than this”. But if you print stuff out, it’s a contract with yourself you are going to read it and this produces this strangely calming effect of actual print, where you can’t click on it, you’ve just got to read it. It’s actually quite a nice experience to go back to that kind of time (Fisher 2013, 1:03:48)
BIFO (cyberspace X cybertime)
Franco Berardi (Bifo) is very good on this, about the stress on the organisms, the tensions between the infinity of cyberspace and the finitude of the organism. “The acceleration of information exchange has produced, and is producing, an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind, and even more in the collective mind. Individuals are not in a position to process the immense and always growing mass of information that enters their computers, their cell phones, their television screens, their electronic diaries and their heads. However, it seems indispensable to follow, recognize, evaluate, process all this information if you want to be efficient, competitive, victorious. […] The necessary time for paying attention to the fluxes of information is lacking.” [BERARDI, Franco. 2009. Precarious Rhapsody. Semio-capitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation. London: Minor Compositions, p.40-1] There’s that double thing which produces the intense weariness and exhaustion you feel, not at the end of the day but at the beginning of the day. As soon as you’re inside cyberspace again you’re being assailed with multiple demands immediately. It’s actually impossible for you to deal with all of the demands that are made upon your attention, yet you feel that you ought to. (Fisher 2013, 40:34)
Berardi’s point about the pressure on the social brain, of always having things up to full capacity, of never allowing the social brain to idle. […] We don’t have any time for that [Mad Men‘s Don Draper’s] kind of idling anymore. The social brain is always occupied and inundated. So the whole collective social brain is paralyzed and that’s why there’s no creativity, and why everything looks the same now and nothing has really seemed much new this whole 21st century (Fisher 2013, 54:26)
NEOLIBERALISMO
Neoliberalism is a counter-progressive political development (Fisher 2013, 49:33)
Neoliberalism is a crude savage attack on civilization, on basic human progress (Fisher 2013, 50:36)
You can’t stop cancer yet, but we can eliminate some of the suffering that cancer causes, contain it. We have that capacity. It’s an absolute crime that that capacity is not used, and it’s got nothing to do with the technological or resource limits that are available to us. Those limits are artificially imposed (Fisher 2013, 51:06)
What we want is this different sense of time. We need space in the culture which is not dominated by business and busyness (Fisher 2013, 57:21)
What is work now? What are the things that most of us do? A lot of the time we’re not producing things that are actually useful, or even desirable, to people. Now a lot of what I would call work in my job, the things I don’t like doing, is simple simulation of productivity, bureaucratic simulation created by a kind of managerialists. The real parasites are not immigrants, not people claiming unemployment benefit. The real parasites of our society are the very high earners who propagate all this stuff to keep us in a state of panicked anxiety and radical competitive individualism, so we can’t act together and gain a collective agency (Fisher 2013, 57:32)
The big lie that has been sold to us by neoliberalism is that if you would withdraw security from people, then certainly they’ll be creative and this wellspring of creativity will just emerge. What happens if you remove security from people is they get like I was when I was self-employed: all of that creative energy goes into how can I make money. That’s the energy of this society. That’s a stupid thing for people to have to think about all of time (Fisher 2013, 58:41)
Look at all those great people we’re supposed to admire now. They haven’t invented anything. Steve Jobs, he didn’t invent anything. He’s a parasite! Simon Cowell? He hasn’t done anything. He’s just a parasite! What are these people good at? They are only good at making money. And that should be enough reward! If that’s what you want to dedicate your life to, just fucking do it! But don’t expect us to also admire you, and that you would be the model for everybody else all the time. We shouldn’t have to worry about making money all and every waking hour of our days. That’s a depressing kind of reality that’s been artificially imposed on us (Fisher 2013, 59:10)
You [young people] live in the “hunger games”, we [old people] have social democracy. You should be angry about this, not in this weird case of temporal chauvinism, where you’re kind of “our time is just as good as any other time”. It isn’t! It’s a bad time! And part of what makes it bad is this weird positivity that people feel they have to be in. There’s definitely a relationship between that mandatory positivity that that young people are required to have – “be cheerful”, “be positive”, “make things for yourself”, all of this stuff – and the actual depression, which is clearly increasing amongst young people: because they know they can’t do those things. (Fisher 2013, 1:35:37)
You [young people] have to recover a sense of the capacity for collective control of your own lives. Of course you’re gonna find that difficult. In the UK, young people up to 30 have never experienced anything that isn’t neoliberal domination, or what I call capitalist realism, and that is of course really depressing (Fisher 2013, 1:37:41)
There’s two major thresholds: the end of the 70s, with the arrival of Reagan, Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping; and then at the end of 89, the end of the soviet system. Two major thresholds into a world in which capitalism becomes theoretically, if not actually, global. And that is depressing (Fisher 2013, 1:53:14)
PROGRESSO
How can we define progress in human life? […] It’s simple: it is the capacity to limit that kind of arbitrary suffering of human beings to a minimum. And lots of developments of the 20th century did that. (Fisher 2013, 49:38)
Security is the condition for adventure – meaning entering into into new spaces, new projects, new ideas which you don’t know where they’re going – and I think there’s a relation between those two things. Funding security, funding of higher education, funding of debates about basic income etc, these are totally related to how we can revivify the creativity of a society (Fisher 2013, 59:50)
We don’t have enough work because most people aren’t doing anything that’s actually socially useful or desirable, so an appearance of work is now work. And then there’s meta work, where, if you’re a managerialist parasite, your job is to make work for other people, and that’s the kind of crazy world we’re in. We need to pitch this as a problem. And there’s an existential side to this. There’s a very practical side about the demands for funding: ultimately, time is money, but money is time, and money frees up time (Fisher 2013, 1:00:34)
Mad Men
Everyone is Peggy [Mad Men] now (Fisher 2013, 52:43)
One of the things that struck me watching Mad Men was the contrast between a form of capitalism in the sixties which exploited and parasited creativity, as opposed to the form of capitalism we have now, which makes creativity virtually impossible (Fisher 2013, 53:01)
Don Draper [Mad Men] was able to do that because there’s a whole kind of patriarchal structure of his wife at home to cook his dinners for him and Peggy at the front there. […] Everyone’s Peggy now. Once men had a space of creativity, now no one does that (Fisher 2013, 55:26)
ESPINOSA
I’m a spinozist. I don’t believe in free will. There’s no such thing as free will. That’s very key to capitalist ideology. But that’s not to say there’s no agency. Agency isn’t the same as free will. I believe in the great paradox from Spinoza, that human beings are most in bondage when they think they’re most free. Human beings are most compulsive when they think they’re being free. But what is it to be a normal human being? It’s to be the victim of compulsions of various kinds. Freedom is an achievement. This is a point of great value of Spinoza. Freedom is not like Rousseau, where you start off free and then you’re put into bondage by society etc. For Spinoza you start off as an infant in a state of radical abjection and you cannot connect cause and effect. You have to learn that. Infants are bombarded with this kind of dreamy chaos of stimuli which they have to learn to make into cause and effect. For Spinoza freedom is the capacity to recognize the causal factors which impinge upon you. You become free only by recognizing the extent to which you’re determined. The dominant neoliberal kind of model is to completely obscure that saying “you’re just free and these lefties bureaucrats want to control you and stop you, we just appeal to your free choice”. But if there’s a free choice, why is the Microsoft Word the shittest software ever? And if there’s free choice, why do capitalists spend so much money in advertising and branding? Because they know that they can appeal to people’s freedom, the very thing that most controls people. What inaugurates the world we live in now? 1984, the famous apple advert directed by Ridley Scott. If you’ve not seen this you should see, it’s really a quite impressive piece of work by Ridley Scott. Clearly based on Orwell, with these kind of grey drones sitting around, and along comes this woman athlete dressed in Apple’s colors, who throws this hammer into this big gray dismal control screen, which both represents IBM, those kind of big monolithic forms of old-school technology companies, and also the soviet system. They’re compacted together as representing the old world. The new world will be one where you’re free to choose, where no one can tell you what to do. (Fisher 2013, 1:11:21)
DEPRESSÃO
The objective marker of this [crisis in cyberspace-time] is the amount of depression amongst young people just increasing all of the time. If young people are so happy in this new world, why are they so depressed? (Fisher 2013, 1:15:30)
CRISE
You’ve [young people] been deprived of things, and the things that you’ve been deprived of are being sold to you as benefits: “it’s a great new world, you’ve got all this stuff, you’ve got all this capacity to do things” (Fisher 2013, 1:21:07)
Since 2003, approximately, there are no new sounds [music] of any kind. Now you say “this is a failure of this generation of young people, they’re just not as creative as previous generations”. But there’s nothing different or lesser about young people now and, in lots of ways, the sheer capacity to survive now, and of not being in a state of mental breakdown, is a testament to the resilience of young people now. The conditions aren’t good, but it doesn’t mean that things will will never change (Fisher 2013, 1:21:50)
NEUROPLASTICITY, CYBERBLITZ, DEPRESSION & CULTURE SPEED
There’s a certain degree of neuroplasticity etc, and a certain capacity of younger people, who are exposed to this earlier. Their neurological apparatus is much more plastic than ours. But there are hard limits to that. You can’t go on forever inundating the brain with more and more stimuli. The human organism can’t cope with that. It’s not possible to extrapolate from the cyberblitz of the last 10 decades and imagine that it will continue with the same rate of acceleration. It cannot, so something will break. Berardi’s arguments are interesting. He argues that the dot-com crash of of the late 90s, at the turn millennium, was caused by depression. Why was the 90s the decade of the emergence of cyberspace and of prozac? For Berardi those two things are totally related together. How did people cope with these new level of demands that were placed upon them? They started to take antidepressants which are now very common, particularly among young people. […] Everyone’s on downers now to cope with the cyberblitz, whether it’s antidepressants or other forms of self-medication. There’s a breakdown in the end of the 90s, according to Berardi, and there will be a breakdown. We cannot cope with this forever. There is this privatization of stress. It’s normalized, like the idea that “young people are depressed and that’s just part of life”. It wasn’t part of life! The increase of the depression amongst young people is shocking, and that ought to be the biggest possible condemnation of the world in which we’re now living. It wasn’t normal for young people to be depressed in the 70s. But we can’t go back, and I don’t want to go back to the 70s, to commonplace racism and all that kind of thing, because it was normal at that time. What we’ve got now, as a result of this frenzied over-stimulation of the neural cortex of the collective brain, is not a massively accelerated culture, but a very slowed down culture, a very homogeneous culture, a very predictable culture where nothing new ever happens. We want to go back to a future where new things happen. We do that by a de-binging of communication technology, which is a decelerant as a cultural influence (Fisher 2013, 1:23:13)
Mad Men, 90s NOSTALGIA, ADDICTION & CUT-UPxCONSISTENCY
The people who are running the world, they’re not sitting there with three screens, trust me. They sit like Don Draper [Mad Men], with lots of free time available. They want you to be running around instead, in panic, constantly reacting to things. They’re not pushing all the buttons, they’re not doing that, they just want you to think they’re doing that. The point is that it doesn’t come as standard, so that’s what I mean about collective pragmatics, of partial withdrawal. That’s what I mean about people who are increasingly nostalgic for that period when you the internet was a resource aside from life, where you had your projects. You went to internet to record some of those projects, to get some resources, but you didn’t live in it all of the time. But the standard mode clearly is one in which you’re addicted first and then we have to withdraw from that. But we don’t want to go back to face-to-face communication, organic locally produced stuff […]. It’s consistency versus cut up. It’s not about slow versus fast, because we’ve got a slow-faster world where the massive speed of stuff coming into us is producing inertial glacial slowness in culture. So slowness is not an alternative to it, it’s already there. What we have is the difference between cut up (as a kind of incoherent stimuli which cannot be montaged together into a kind of totality) versus consistency (where one can be absorbed). Time can feel really quick when you’re absorbed in something. When you’re in a creative process you feel something has taken over you, that you’re running to catch up with it; time actually speeds up. We’re all like computers now, whose memory is overloaded, so everything’s slow and creaky. It’s like living in London, where even walking down the street in an odysseyan quest, and the more people run around the harder it is for anyone to actually get anything done, and the less you can achieve. So it’s not about slow versus fast, it’s about consistency and absorption. (Fisher 2013, 1:28:14)
CRIATIVIDADE
Creativity isn’t ever a property of individuals, it’s a property of a social or collective scene. It’s not that the individuals are less creative than they used to be, that’s just not how creativity works. Creativity is possible because of social conditions, and those social conditions have been removed, and all the evidence suggests that has had a massively deleterious effect on the production of novelty (Fisher 2013, 1:33:20)
The conditions for creativity are social and collective, and they have been destroyed (Fisher 2013, 1:34:50)
MEA CULPA, BREAKDOWN, 2008, ANTI-DEBT
We’ve gradually seen disappear the resources that were available to us, that we took for granted. We are culpable. The generation above us are the real fuckers, but we’ve sort of let this slip away. In the 90s many of us just thought there’s no point in politics anymore: “whatever, it’s all cyber”, like “states dont matter”, all of this stuff. I take responsibility that we’ve let this slip away in lots of ways, but I do think that there’s a capacity now for things to change. I really strongly believe that this breakdown is coming, in one way or another. We’ve seen glimmers of it in 2011 around the world, from everywhere in the Middle East, riots in in London, we’ve seen these breakdowns. A new normal is restored, but the one thing we can say for certain about the future is that things can’t go back to how they were before 2008. Capital has no solution to the problems that led up to 2008. Don’t think that they know what they’re doing. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re in a panic like everyone. How do they solve the key problem with capitalism, that is: how do you pay workers less all the time? And then the second problem is: if you pay them with nothing, then they can’t buy the stuff. So how do they solve that? They solved it by debt. That’s the big story of neoliberalism: underneath it was debt. But that model collapsed in 2008, and they haven’t got another one. You have been sold out. You will bear this debt. You [young] have worse lives than us [older]. This is what I mean by capitalist realism. Your lives will be worse than ours, and that’s just how things are now. And part of the thing is you shouldn’t accept this as the deal. You shouldn’t accept that you’ve been sold out and that your future is in a form of debt. Don’t bear this debt! Don’t accept it! (Fisher 2013, 1:53:40)
LaSPA is located at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (