Mouse

“The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that
capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one
effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural
objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or
Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum,
where you see objects torn from their Iifeworlds and assembled
as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a
powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of
practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of
previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into
artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of
realism; it is more like realism in itself.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the 'evil corporation'. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it. Take Disney/ Pixar's Wall-E (2008). The film shows an earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting it. We're left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations - or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large - is responsible for this depredation; and when we see eventually see the human beings in offworld exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting via screen interfaces, carried around in large motorized chairs, and supping indeterminate slop from cups. What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate … But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called 'interpassivity': the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Evil is not able to create anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures