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The New Yorker
Page-Turner

Mark Fisher's "K-Punk" and the Futures That Have Never Arrived

[hsu-hua]

By Hua Hsu

December 11, 2018

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Mark Fisher was a writer and academic from the English Midlands who,
in the early two-thousands, felt at odds with many of the
institutions around him. Fisher, then in his mid-thirties, had
devoted himself to theories of capitalism and Internet culture that
few people in his immediate vicinity appeared to care about. He was
zealous about obscure music and cinema at a time when critical
discourse seemed to be reorienting itself around our biggest stars.
So, in 2003, he decided to start a blog.

Mark Fisher
Fisher feared that we were losing our ability to conceptualize a
tomorrow that was radically different from our present.Photograph by
Georg Gatsas / Verso Books

Fisher's blog was called K-Punk. The K came from kyber, the Greek
root of "cyber," and it was intended to signal his interest in a time
before the rise of the sort of cyber boosterism that Fisher
associated with Wired magazine. Punk, for Fisher, was a way of being
and seeing that involved a refusal of things as they were. The blog
would be a place to workshop and refine ideas, and a forum for
debates that seemed marginal within academia but too dense for
mainstream magazines.

[hsu-hua]
Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of "A
Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific."
More:BooksWritingBloggingCriticismInternetMusicTheories

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