Mark Fisher The Slow Cancellation Of The Future

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

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These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:01

  Okay, yeah, so I'm going to talk today then about some of the main ideas in my new book, Ghosts of My Life, which really in some ways runs parallel to or is the other side of the kind of ideas that I deal with in capitalist realism really. If capitalist realism is about the complete takeover of capital, not only…

• 00:05:43

  The slow cancellation of the future, I think, which captures not only that sense of termination, but the gradual nature of it. Of course, it's not that the future in culture disappears overnight. It's not that the future in culture disappears overnight. It's not that the future in culture disappears overnight. It's…

• 00:14:31

  Since 1994, I don't think, you know, I think that that's flattened out. It's not that nothing at all has happened, but I think it's hard to make the case that almost anything that has been produced in those 20 years subsequently was sonically unimaginable in 1994, I think. It's, you know, it's a whole series of fairly…

• 00:18:55

  That ought to have been a very very long time ago. I think part of the reason for this is that we can see the 21st century, in many ways, as a disaster for musicians, actually. That a lot of the developments, or the key developments in the music culture of the 21st century, ...are not... have not been good…

• 00:30:00

  Art schools in that period were zones where, you know, the working class could go. And there was an encounter between the working class and the kind of established high culture avant-garde or experimental art scene. And that encounter was highly productive for popular music culture. And really, with the rise…

• 00:36:33

  That doesn't really get rid of... That gets rid of our experience of boredom, but it doesn't stop things being boring. You know, I think the particular lure of a lot of 21st century culture is this mixture of curiosity and boredom at the same time. We're sort of bored even as we're curious about things, actually. That…

• 00:41:36

  It seems to me more of a problem than nostalgia, actually. Is the... And, you know, given the immense weight of the kind of PR industry, branding, et cetera, and their role in deliberately producing this waning of historicity, I think, it can't be underestimated. You know, they... They're this force which... You know…

• 00:45:53

  And it's a kind of fidelity to those yearnings and longings that is one of the things that I track in the book, really. Um... OK, well, I'll leave it there if... If that... Seems a good point to end on, if that's OK. OK, well, thanks, everybody.