The Man Who Saw the Future: The Legacy of Cultural Theorist Mark Fisher film

CCapitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? It was published in 2009 for critical silence. Journalists and academics initially dismissed Mark Fisher’s book, ignoring the cultural theorist’s requests for coverage and interviews, and even the owner of his then publishing house, Zer0 Books, lamented that it was unmarketable. Fisher, who was also prone to self-doubt, questioned the importance of his thesis and the seriousness of his own approach after trying, and failing, to write a conventional methodological work on the theory. As of December 2025, more than 250,000 English-language copies of Capitalist Realism have been sold, with translations available in Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, German, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Hebrew, Korean, and Danish. Fisher, modestly, was aiming to sell a few hundred.

The academic-turned-polemician was respected for his honest, if not brutally honest, writing and was adept at expressing the public mood. Fisher, who initially gained a following through his k-punk blog (2003–2016), popularized the idea that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, which was first attributed to the American Marxist philosopher Frederic Jameson. Featuring essays centered around popular culture, labour, mental health and education, Capitalist Realism – published just after the 2008 financial crisis, and generated during the pro-business policies of Tony Blair’s New Labor Party – is a small, comprehensible volume that challenges our profit-based economic system and reflects the endemic feelings of despair that many experienced, then, and continue to do today.

Conrad Kaye, writer and co-creator of the BAFTA-winning financial drama Industry, told me he “always” recommends Fisher to people. “It is unparalleled in documenting the unconscious human drives that underpin the immortality of capitalism, and the hellish digital panopticon we have created for ourselves to live or burn in.”

“Mark had great powers of empathy,” says Tariq Goddard, his friend and former editor and co-founder, with Fisher, of Zer0 Books and its successor Repeater Books. “I think his talents were largely innate, but distorted, which is interesting, by his social experience.”

Fisher committed suicide in January 2017, at the age of 48, having suffered from depression on and off since his teens. (His wife, Zoe, told the inquest that the NHS only offered a phone call to a GP; she said at the time: “We fell foul of a lot of the reforms that were going on.”) Born in 1968 to conservative, working-class parents, Fisher grew up in Loughborough, and considered himself a lifelong outsider. The freelance writer mostly worked in what he described as an “in-between space,” moving between postgraduate studies, temporary jobs and periods of unemployment. He was not appointed lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at the University of Goldsmith at the University of London only after his forties, after teaching for several years at a further education college and despite his efforts, he never got a job in the British media.

A recently released experimental documentary, We’re Making a Film About Mark Fisher, aims to further disseminate the critic’s ideas, including lesser-known ones. The 65-minute film describes itself as a “no capital” film, operating outside of mainstream, profit-driven production. Artists Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter self-funded the project, creating an Instagram account (@markfisherfilm) to recruit 70 volunteers, including composers, technical crew and graphic designers. Distribution was also formulated organically, on an order-by-order basis, with viewers even designing their own marketing posters. “It’s a space to think,” says Mellor, noting that Instagram, and unpaid labor, reinforces capitalism. “Is it really possible to make a movie without capital?” she asks.

Via archival recordings, interviews, and imaginative performances, Fisher’s philosophy of “hauntology” recurs throughout We’re Making a Film About Mark Fisher, emphasizing that modern society, as a result of “capitalist realism,” is haunted by a future that never happened: “The job, the house, the vacation, the life…” narrator Justin Hooper explains. Mellor and Poulter’s personal street shots, eerily evocative of urban surveillance, show crowds of Britons demonstrating against the Iraq War in 2003; In exchange for the increase in university tuition fees in 2010; And against military intervention in Libya in 2011; And against the visit of US President Donald Trump in 2018; and against the genocide of Palestinians in 2025. Recurring clips create a sense of melancholy about lost, hopeful possibilities: a video shows a teenager shouting “resist” over a loudspeaker at the London March for Alternative in 2011, which was attended by about half a million people.

The future energized Fisher, while the limitations of the present pained him. According to American artist Steve Kurtz, interviewed in the film, “Intellectual artists were never given the possibilities and opportunity to put forward the new.” His clever and distinctive K-punk blog – which formed the basis of Capitalist Realism, followed by other compilations Ghosts of My Life in 2014 and The Weird and the Eerie in 2016 – covered niche experimental art, along with the mainstream. Analyzing popular culture with brutal honesty, Fisher has used criticism as a tool to raise political consciousness, advancing public conversation in the process: he championed the art and spirit of popular electronic musician Burial; He criticized Adele and the Arctic Monkeys as examples of the music industry’s market-driven obsession with the aesthetics of the past; He wrote about pulp stories, Franz Kafka, HP Lovecraft, Christoper Nolan, Children of Men, Margaret Atwood, and even the TV show Supernanny.

But during his final years, Fisher changed his way of thinking. The academic moved away from the call for technological development and pushed towards a freer artistic future in the style of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on collective cultural production and calling for people to reclaim the Internet. “He saw that some things from the past were okay, and that digital technology, especially automation, might be too close to neoliberalism to be as exciting as he thought it was when he was younger,” explains journalist Andy Beckett, interviewed in the documentary, Repositioning Fisher. (While completing his PhD at the University of Warwick in the 1990s, Fisher became involved in the accelerationist thought movement that emerged from the university’s Cyberculture Research Unit.)

Today, Fisher’s ideas still resonate. “Acid Communism,” the critic’s latest unfinished project that draws on his late thoughts about the futurism of the 1960s and 1970s, has been taken up by artists like Canada-based social sculptor Mickey Aurora, who last year contributed to an interactive installation of Vancouver’s street community, offering striking images alongside free food and water, indoor comfort and staff trained to respond to overdoses. Likewise, “The Science of the Dead” – which, although coined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, was deployed by Fisher to demonstrate that modernity is plagued by what might have been. Adam Curtis’s series Surveillance by Loving Machines, shown on the BBC in 2011, highlights the failure of technology to democratize society, after it has been exploited by corporations and regimes to suppress dissent. Kay told me that Season 4’s filming of the call center show Industry, which aired on television earlier this year, was inspired by Fisher’s belief that the call center is the perfect metaphor for neoliberalism: centerless, disembodied, and unresponsive.

It’s encouraging that “We’re Making a Movie About Mark Fisher” points to another way forward. Since October 2025, audiences have used Instagram, with its £70bn advertising revenue, to organize, coordinate and watch in-person group performances at universities, backyards, cinemas, living rooms and art galleries located everywhere from Coventry to Brisbane, Australia, via Malmö, Sweden. The collective quest to undermine capitalism continues, and the film concludes by saying: “We’re making a movie about Mark Fisher, and now that you’re watching it, you’re watching it, too.”

We create A film about Mark Fisher screens at the ICA, London, on 19 May. You can find other offers on Closeandremote.net