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by kobebeef 1548 days ago
Fisher really clarified for me what I’ve always sensed in the back of my mind. That time has in a sense stopped. I was always into futuristic things as a kid, and I still am. But today I’m left with a feeling that “the future”, or how we imagined the future, was more futuristic back then than it is now.

As someone working in the tech industry, I’m eager to work on something exciting and futuristic. But what I find is that any project is constrained by the logic of neoliberal capitalism. Social media sites have to be designed to be addictive and pull people’s attentions away from real family and friends, otherwise you can’t earn profit and compete. The future doesn’t excite us anymore because all technology has given us is a boring, robotic, and atomized life.

3 comments

Somewhere, Mark Fisher wrote, "Nobody is bored, everything is boring."

I think he meant people are always busy fiddling with their phones or whatever, but the content they are consuming and producing is uniform and absent any surprises.

It was easy to be optimistic about the future when it felt like each decade things were becoming better than the decade before.
> Fisher really clarified for me what I’ve always sensed in the back of my mind. That time has in a sense stopped. I was always into futuristic things as a kid, and I still am. But today I’m left with a feeling that “the future”, or how we imagined the future, was more futuristic back then than it is now

Yeah, that's the general take of End Of History, that the zeitgeist of what's to come has collapsed onto mere different hues of Liberalism in all its expressions, but we will see, specially with Trumpism might be showing its head again globally soon enough, but ofc it ought be noted that Trumpism, is itself yet another branch of liberalism