This is a short text built out of notes furiously scribbled a few hours before the event at Housmans hosted by Adam C. Jones and myself on 12th April 2025. The event was an anti-book launch of Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs. No books were sold, but Fisher’s work was discussed in the context of the boycott against Watkins Media and Watkins’ investments in Israeli AI and tech infrastructure.
Thanks to everyone who attended the event, and I hope many got something out of the disjunctive synthesis that Adam and I often offer audiences when we appear together. It is always a strange pleasure to find so much common ground, as an accelerationist in conversation with someone so skeptical and critical of those discourses. With that in mind, I found myself drifting repeatedly back to a difficult line of thought that I think runs throughout the work of Fisher and his peers — one seldom given the attention it deserves — and that is broadly the focus of what follows: the digitalisation of the black Atlantic and our living-through its consequences.
William Gibson, Count Zero:
— ‘OK’, Bobby said, getting the hang of it, ‘then what’s the matrix? If she’s a deck, and Danbala’s a program, what’s cyberspace?’
‘The world,’ Lucas said.
Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs:
But if cyberspace is the world what is the world?
No online, no offline. No ‘touching grass’. Despite what we keep on telling ourselves, there is no transcendence from one domain or the other.
To ‘touch grass’ is already Internet slang for logging off, which has moved from online to off, as frequently heard in meatspace as it is read on social media. It is one of many instances wherein we ignore the inseparability of these two ‘worlds’, even in the act of drawing a hard line between them.
We know this, even if we don’t like to acknowledge it. We know the superficial irony of being able to buy Karl Marx’s Capital and have it be delivered the next day by Amazon. We know the stupid comments made regarding our critiques of society and our participation in society. We know Mark Fisher addresses this repeatedly.
But we are not trapped here, nor did Fisher think so. He was interested not so much in the easily observable fact that capitalism is indifferent to the content of what circulates — all capital cares about this is perpetual circulation. What he was interested in was the fact that not all the things that capital circulates are, by default, ‘owned by’ capitalism. Not all of capitalism’s products belong to it nor act in its own interests. Something things produced by our capitalist system have consequences for the system itself that it cannot foresee or easily contain. Fisher, then, was interested in the interzones of an as-yet undecidability, and maneuvering in this space politically to leverage new forms of freedom or, as he put it, aligning oneself with ‘postcapitalist desires’.
This situation is not only an issue for ideas or for commodities, understood rudimentarily as objects, but also for people — or, more specifically, modes of subjectivity.
The most obvious of these — in terms of the West’s particularly telling moral panics — may well be trans people: those individuals who disregard the gatekept boundaries of century-old biotech to hijack mutating strands of endocrinological knowledge in line with their own agency and desires, contradicting — even exceeding — the insistency of the signifying chain that we know as ‘capitalist realism’.
But what is far more pressing , in the context in which we are appearing here today, is the radical mutations of black and brown bodies and the various modes of subjectivity understood through a racialised lens, which also exist in and are a product of — but also exceed — this same capitalist paradigm.
We can address a disappointing rewriting of history here, in light of the first “official” edition of Mark Fisher’s PhD thesis, written whilst he was a student at Warwick University and a member of the para-academic accelerator known as theCybernetic Culture Research Unit.
Ccru is today too often mired in an inapposite and totalizing whiteness. This is no doubt the result of white supremacists seizing upon the work of Nick Land and claiming it as their own — something that too many on the left have allowed them to get away with, as neither side of the political divide makes any attempt to engage with Land’s work or, even if they do, the surrounding context in which it appeared.
Lest we forget that the very first essay collected in Land’s Fanged Noumena damningly argues that Enlightenment thought — and its narrowly patriarchal, white-supremacist, family-chauvinistic understanding of ‘Reason’, which compartmentalises European excellence whilst othering all those who live otherwise — finds its logical conclusion in apartheid South Africa.
Lest we forget the attention Fisher pays in his PhD thesis to the synonymous entanglement — it is not a metaphor — of cybernetics and Haitian voodoo practices in the novels of William Gibson. Fisher is here interested in the proliferation of capitalist and anti-capitalist sorceries alongside each other, as both make use of the same materials, which he would return to years later in the essay ‘Digital Psychedelia’, when writing on the Otolith Group’s Anathema in 2012.
Lest we forget that Otolith Group member Kodwo Eshun shared an office with Fisher at Goldsmiths in the 2010s, and was likewise an affiliate of the Ccru who is often left out of its history, as is Jessica Edwards, a young woman of colour described in Simon Reynolds’ Y2K report on the Ccru as its “latest recruit” and “a researcher … who used to be a professional dancer at raves and recently completed an undergraduate thesis entitled ‘Mapping the Liminal — Pentecostalism, Shamanism and Drum & Bass’.”
Lest we forget how Kode9 recently described the name of his record label Hyperdub — another product of the Ccru —
as a kind of umbrella term to talk about the electronic music of the Black Atlantic that had converged into the 90s musical singularity of jungle. In a counter-parallel to how English had been the lingua franca of the modern world, the lingua franca of electronic dance music is the music of the Black Atlantic.
(Something that is all the more apparent today, as hiphop has become the lingua franca of pop music overall.)
I am increasingly of the opinion that the Ccru cannot remotely be understood without a consideration of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, its wrestling with the cultural consequences of the Middle Passage, transatlantic trafficking and migration, and the innate hybridity of national/cultural notions of race, which delve into the implications of referring to certain cultural currents — like jungle — as “black English” or “black American”. I am increasingly frustrated that very few who continue to write about Ccru today ever make this connection.
I would argue that the discourses of Ccru are a product of this same black-Atlantic hybridity, inseparable from Baudrillardian prophecy as they are from the aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and Fisher’s text from that time, in exploring all of these considerations in the context of our cyber-world, thus raises many pertinent questions that are no less integral now as they were in 1999. In fact, I’d argue further that they are all the more integral, as rather than take on the task of thinking the present in all of its hybridity, of doing the net-work, we simplify reductively ad absurdum. We rarely think — academically, pop-culturally, journalistically — in ways that the Nineties and early Noughties demanded of us, and in this way, we have never truly been (post)modern.
Although not much of Bruno Latour fan, I am thinking explicitly here of his text We Have Never Been Modern, where he calls for a critical thinking of (and through) the network that is not so dissimilar to that demanded by Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds in their philosophical approach to popular music criticism:
Our intellectual life is out of kilter. Epistemology, the social sciences, the sciences of texts – all have their privileged vantage point, provided that they remain separate… Offer the established disciplines some fine sociotechnological network, some lovely translations, and the first group will extract our concepts and pull out all the roots that might connect them to society or to rhetoric; the second group will erase the social and political dimensions, and purify our network of any object; the third group, finally, will retain our discourse and rhetoric but purge our work of any undue adherence to reality … In the eyes of our critics the ozone hole above our heads, the moral law in our hearts, the autonomous text, may each be of interest, but only separately. That a delicate shuttle should have woven together the heavens, industry, texts, souls and moral law – this remains uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly.
But this is the task we are left with, decades later. Indeed, with this in mind, what are we to make of the contradictory practices of Watkins Media in particular — their publication of authors openly critical of Israeli apartheid whilst investing in Israeli tech infrastructure? Just as significantly, what are we to make of the first genocide in cyberspace? What are we to make of the tandem violent suppression of a people and of information about their experiences? What are we to make of the unstoppable proliferation of pro-Palestinian solidarity on tech platforms that are otherwise complicit in a system that has made apartheid still possible — which is not indicative of our impotent capture, but rather an essential action that Israel cannot overcome? Indeed, what is this if not an example of Mark Fisher’s accelerationist dreaming, which “rejects … the idea that everything produced ‘under’ capitalism fully belongs to capitalism”; which “maintains that there are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain; and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits.”
In Fisher’s various writings, from 1999 to 2016, this is the problematic that he engages with not so much as a contradictory entrapment, but rather as a starting point for the raising of political consciousness. Cyberspace is the world; the world is cyberspace. In this world, ideas, subjectivities, agencies proliferate that are both a product of and an inconvenience to our capitalist system at large.
The continued existence of the Palestinian people — against all the odds — is one such ‘inconvenient product’.
One topic of conversation that arose following this précis was the manner in which Mark Fisher’s “flatline” intersects this same problematic. In thinking about the flatline as a plane of immanence that is not so much between life and death, but rather constitutes their materialist relation, I thought about Giorgio Agamben’s writing on “bare life”:
The term originates in Agamben’s observation that the Ancient Greeks had two different words for what in contemporary European languages is simply referred to as ‘life’: bios (the form or manner in which life is lived) and zo? (the biological fact of life). His argument is that the loss of this distinction obscures the fact that in a political context, the word ‘life’ refers more or less exclusively to the biological dimension or zo? and implies no guarantees about the quality of the life lived. Bare life refers then to a conception of life in which the sheer biological fact of life is given priority over the way a life is lived, by which Agamben means its possibilities and potentialities.
Fisher’s investigation of the flatline shows that the bareness of zo? is promiscuous, making us all the more susceptible to the belief that inanimate objects — or something like AI — is ‘alive’. The blurring of the human and the machinic that so much black Atlantic culture has expressed likewise highlights the implications of “bare life”, albeit from the other side, where one becomes aware of one’s basic subsistence for capital, as quality of life (bios) is diminished and made secondary.
Agamben’s most memorable example of “bare life” is the malnourished Jewish bodies in concentration camps — hollow figures on the brink of starvation who remain alive only on a technicality, which is a consequence of their dehumanisation, but also effectuates further dehumanisation by those they ‘live’ alongside in the camps themselves, as individuals passed the point of saving.
How is this “bare life” further embroiled with Fisher’s flatline in the context of the violent images of genocide that have proliferated on social media for the last eighteen months? How are we to understand the cut made in our consciousness as we become accustomed to the images of the dead and barely alive alongside the proliferation of information that attempts to digitally emphasise the humanity of those suffering? “All recordings are ghosts”, Fisher declared in 2003, and who has not been deeply affected by the recordings of Palestinian life, in all its vibrancy, that only emphasise what has been lost?
It is in the context of Palestine, the amalgamated networks of propaganda and resistance, of Israeli fictions and genocidal facts, that the full weight of Fisher’s Gothic is brought to bear. For all of his engagement with fiction, this reality is not so far from his text. Rather, he engages with the difficulty of thinking theory as fiction (and vice versa), of the hybridity of knowledges required to understand all that appears before us. We need only consider the growing readership of a Palestinian literary culture in which fact and fiction are inseparable, and in which fiction becomes a mode of theorising Palestinian bios that can overcome an Israeli fixation on their zo?.
I am reminded of a talk given by Adania Shibli, author of Minor Detail, late last year in Newcastle, where she noted how the Arabic word for ‘literature’ can also be translated as ‘ethics’. It is a literary culture that, again, may seem at a distance from Fisher’s cyberpunk predilections, but just as cyberspace is the world, so too is the role of the Internet in contemporary Palestinian resistance and solidarity impossible to ignore. The future of Palestine is a flatline construct, and we must not forget this reading when using Fisher’s text for its critiques of contemporary techno-fascism. Because cyberspace is the world, so too is cyberspace the domain in which many radicals first cut their teeth. A techno-fascist infrastructure may own the means of proliferation, but it does not own all that proliferates.
Palestine exists in cyberspace.
Ccru, “Rinse Out”:
Cybernetics is not just about technical machines. Information warfare is not just about cyberspace. Its fundamental element is virtual reality, but an array of practical religions have been surfing it for many millennia. This is perhaps why so much of the ‘new science’ of complexity is ceaselessly converging with the cosmic materialism of Voodoo, Tantrism, Zen and the Chinese martial arts, pointing to non-Western influences on cybernetics, and the emergent lines of a future, beyond the pale. Situated on this continuum, information warfare is stripped down to a war of perceptions, hacking, jamming and stealth tactics in the nervous system, whether it be planetary telecommercial networks or the human organism.
Cybernetics includes resistance to cyberfascism.