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The Future is still ours; Autonomy & Post-capitalism Mark Fisher
"The Future is still ours; Autonomy & Post-capitalism Mark Fisher" uses feedback, automation, or machinic desire to describe modernity as a recursive system rather than a human-centered project.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The key claim is that cybernetic process and capitalist abstraction belong to the same field. Feedback, machinic desire, and recursive automation describe how modernity runs through distributed systems rather than sovereign subjects.
These pages make recursion operational by tying desire, signal, and control to technical process. Cybernetics becomes a vocabulary for understanding how abstraction feeds back through bodies, media, and institutions.
That matters because the archive's account of meltdown depends on feedback rather than simple linear progress. The future arrives here as recursive escalation, not as planned development.
How to read this text
Begin with the page's account of feedback or machinic desire, then move outward to its claims about culture or politics.
Track how automation, recursion, or systems language displaces centered agency. That shift usually reveals why the text sits in this section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
4 Mark Fisher – The Future is Still Ours Advertisement – Book Bloc 5 Book Bloc: A writer-led radical bookshop The Future is still ours: Autonomy & Post-capitalism Mark Fisher Adam Curtis’s recent documentary series All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace argued that discourses of self- organisation, which had formerly been associated with the counterculture, were now absorbed into dominant ideology.
Definition · paragraph 2
6 Mark Fisher – The Future is Still Ours Mark Fisher – The Future is Still Ours 7 are balanced by trust and cooperation; initiative and inventiveness are required rather than compliance; smartening up rather than dumbing down.” Since the right is now prepared to talk in these terms, it is clear that networks and open systems are not enough in themselves to save us.
Definition · paragraph 1
Practi- cally all mainstream political discourse is suspicious of, and sceptical towards, the state, planning and the possibilities of organised political change. This feeds into the ideological framework that I have called capitalist realism: if systemic change can never happen, all we can do is make the best of capitalism.
Definition · paragraph 1
This feeds into the ideological framework that I have called capitalist realism: if systemic change can never happen, all we can do is make the best of capitalism. There’s no doubt that the right has been able to profit from identifying the left with an allegedly superseded ‘top down’ version of politics.
Definition · paragraph 2
Does all this then mean that ideas of autonomy and self-organisation would inevitably be co-opted by the right, and that there is no further political potential in them for the left? Definitely not – far from indicating any deficiency in autono- mist ideas, the co-option of these ideas by the right shows that they have continu- ing potency. Seeing what is wrong with Blond and his ilk’s appropriation of autonomism will also tell us something about what the difference between right and left might be in the future.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.