Noah

“Everything we've consigned to the world of things, everything we've presumed dead, is revealing itself now to be in possession of a terrible agency, a higher-order control beyond what we ever could have imagined. Their inanimateness has been little more than a clever veil. They are autocrats at base, incapable of negotiation. The crust and the sky; the sludge, sea, and dust: these are are always have been the true subjects. It is we who are the objects now, intermediaries for their massive churn. And as we dig them up, they bury us—so slowly we barely notice.”
― Daniel Sherrell, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World

“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“I’ll never figure out if I’m supposed to let worry get the best of me,” she said. “Because I don’t want to fall off a cliff but I don’t want to risk never looking over the edge.”
― Margaret Killjoy, A Country of Ghosts

“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?