MaMa Zagreb
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2017–2026
46:15 · 593K views · May 22, 2014
Mark Fisher's 2014 talk in Zagreb on the slow cancellation of the future, about cultural stagnation and the sense that popular culture has stopped producing the new.
Mentioned in threads about cultural stagnation as the obligatory related talk by Fisher.
4 comments from Hacker News
Wait till we realize that nobody is buying the software we vibe code anyway. We've seen this game before, with the Dot Bomb and 9/11. A lot of you have 6 figure jobs that will simply be gone next year after the election, never to return. That winter lasted about 5 years until 2007 when the iPhone and social media sites like Facebook went mainstream. This winter won't end. Or more accurately, it is the end. Maybe we should stop debating whether we're in a crisis and start looking at the 5-10 year endgame of the Singularity. We're entering the eventuality that many of us have predicted since the arrival of the internet 30+ years ago, that prices will get lower but nobody will have any money to buy anything anyway. The feeling that we're doing something wrong with our lives will continue to intensify. We'll try so hard, and get so far, but in the end, it doesn't even matter. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm turning my attention away from trying to play the job game with AI. I'm looking instead at how we can provide time/money/resources to the middle class after capitalism can no longer provide them. A conservative friend of mine just read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, which I didn't see coming, especially since he beat me to it. In the neurodivergent spirit of not being able to do anything alone, what if we all read it? [LINK] [LINK] I'm predicting that it stops just short of what full automation can provide. Loosely the evolution of economics goes: hunter-gat
I really enjoyed this documentary when I saw it, and also ended up watching Bitter Lake and (half of) Century of the Self. The concepts were quite bold and the seemed nearly-self-evident. But then I asked myself, "so why am I just only now hearing about all this?" as a heuristic of the measure of the sufficient strength of supporting evidence. It dawned upon me that some of the techniques of desire-manufacturing/advertising that used psychological techniques, as mentioned in Century of the Self , were also used to compel the viewer about the curated historical web of causality. And I really think that Hanlon's razor supplants to much of the powers that be mentioned movie. I almost feel like this movie really displays the enouement of neoliberalism: nothing ever changes in this world any more (thus we're near "the end of history"), we're stuck in a massive deadlocked monetary system that has only "unrealistic" alternatives, "humanitarian interventions" in conflicts are necessary crusades and we cede that they may have the same power dynamics of imperial invasions but since they are done in the name of freedom and democracy they are to be absolved for their ambitions, and so on. I think that in that regard, the documentary falls short of exploring things that are subversive to hegemony. I was unsatisfied with the idea of watching a powerful documentary about hypernormalisation without searching for a critical explanation of the hypernormalisation of the documentary maker, too.
Related: – Mark Fisher: The Slow Cancellation Of The Future this video - Ted Gioia: Society Without a Counterculture [LINK] I don't know whose, if anyone's, explanation, I believe. The phenomenon (of cultural stagnation) is real, though. This Gucci 'homage' to Stanley Kubrick struck me as an excellent example of the problem: [LINK] It's not just that it cribs from the past, but the cynicism: an ad that inserts some giddy fashion model into Clockwork Orange, and saps the scene of its irony. Kubrick pulled that film from the UK market after release for fear it had inspired a rape and a murder. An 'homage' doesn't turn a cautionary tale into an aspirational commercial.
Obligatory mention of Mark Fisher and his talk "The Slow Cancellation Of The Future". [1] [1] this video