Reading Capitalist Realism is akin to walking unhappily through the storm of life with only one word for "water", and then hearing seventy finely tuned descriptions for the precise version of sideways-sleeting bullshit that you experience.

The core of Fisher's book is the ideology called capitalism, so successful and omnipresent that it cannot see itself. Having conquered the world with science and imperialism, socialism via force of arms, diplomacy, and public-private partnerships, and finally the last sanctums of labor, culture, and personality via the multifarious tools of advertising and public relations, capitalism is left with nothing further to conquer. And for a predator who needs continual motion and prey, that means its own destruction.

Fisher flashes through academic theory, psychoanalysis, media critiques, political analysis, his own life experiences. It's these last where Fisher is most trenchant, precisely describing the ennui of interaction with a consumerist-entertainment matrix which can fulfill any expected need instantaneously, but as soon as an issue becomes complex or worse, unprofitable, casts you in a Kafka-esque decentralized bureaucracy where no one has the power to do anything. Perhaps the best bit is a process of teaching self-assessment, which Fisher reads as a Maoist confession remade in the language of McKinsey Consultants. The goal is to have good numbers, but not too good, and make sure to include some failure so we know you're taking the process seriously, but don't worry, you won't be required to fix them and the won't be used against you*.

Under Fisher's analysis, culture is no longer a domain of communication, but one of endless formless "content", marked most notably by a total absence of meaning. The mental health crisis, the avalanche of discontent, is an individual manifestation of a social patriarchy that cannot set boundaries yet constantly restricts behavior, and a nursemaid state incapable of caring, only of finer gradations of punishment. The centers of power are absence and impotent, incapable of saving this world or building a better one. We see in the failures of Capitalism to make even modest political progress, in its inability to provision real social good like housing, healthcare, and education, even as the screens get better, the entertainment more entertaining, and the data-based monitoring more uncannily invasive.

The thesis is dazzling and dense, but I feel like it works in this case because the details aren't important. What is important is the rage, the despair, the grief, the bone-deep sense that we have to seize the Barricades of Imagination, even if we cannot yet see what they are, if we are to survive.

WE ARE INSIDE THE MACHINE. THE MACHINE IS KILLING US. THE MACHINE IS SHAKING APART.

*offer void if we do decide to use them against you.