Name: K-punk
ISBN: 9781912248285

K-punk

When Mark Fisher committed suicide in 2017 at the age of 48, we lost one of the 21stcentury’s greatest cultural theorists. An icon for today’s insurgent “alt-left”, from 2003 to 2016 Fisher wrote dazzling analyses of our strange and terrifying world—neo-liberalism, the loneliness and distracted boredom of digital life, and how these realities are reflected in music, film, TV, and literature. He also developed a vision of a different future – based on community, democratic control of the economy, creative freedom for all, and harnessing technology for the good of humanity. K-Punk collects Fisher’s most incendiary and influential posts from his seminal blog “k-punk”, as well as a selection of his brilliantly insightful film, television and music reviews, together with his extraordinary writings on politics, activism, mental health, and popular modernism for numerous websites and magazines. Also included are two previously unpublished essays, the unfinished introduction to his planned book on “Acid Communism”, and an analysis of the 2016 US Presidential election, written shortly after Trump’s victory.

What Hacker News says

drb91Mar 2019

For more along this train of thought, I recommend "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?" by Mark Fisher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism:_Is_There_N...

I also highly, highly recommend "K-Punk" by the same author (now deceased, RIP): https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mark-fishers-k-p...

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rev0lutionsDec 2018

K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher

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jonjackyJan 2021

Invented things --- like punk music -- according to the author Mark Fisher:

"... to the detriment of innovation, boredom itself has been has been radically transformed by the advent of digital media. Today the slightest hint of restlessness or pocket of spare time tends to have us reaching for our smartphones -- and yet the possiblity of real boredom, and the urgent desire to escape it, has historically acted as an important cultural catalyst. For punks in the 1970s, the "dreary void of Sundays, the night hours after television stopped broadcasting, even the endless dragging minutes spent waiting in queues or for public transport" were viewed as a "challenge, an injunction and an opportunity". Nowadays, "in the intensive 24/7 environment of capitalist cyberspace, the brain is no longer allowed any time to idle; instead, it is inundated with a seamless flow of low-level stimulus". In compulsively engaging with frivolous online content that we recognize -- even celebrate -- as tedious, we sorely limit ourselves. We have arrived at a situation in which "no one is bored, everything is boring" ..."

From Hauntings by Tom Graham, a review of K-PUNK by Mark Fisher, in TLS, May 24, 2019, p. 32

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