Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future
Why Hacker News recommends it
Mentioned in threads about cultural stagnation as the obligatory related talk by Fisher.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2017 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Cites pizza · 2017-02 · on “HyperNormalisation (2016) [video]”
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
Cites thomassmith65 · 2022-08 · on “The Book That Explains Our Cultural Stagnation”
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.
Cites meeuwer · 2023-04 · on “Culture Is Stuck”
Obligatory mention of Mark Fisher and his talk "The Slow Cancellation Of The Future". [1] [1] [this video]
Cites zackmorris · 2026-08 · on “AI is removing the middle class of software engineering”
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