I’ve written about imagining progressive alternative futures here before, mainly as ways of breaking out of the chains of capitalist realism (most are tagged as Mark Fisher and/or Acid Communism if you want to read them). I’d like to pick up that thread of thinking again, especially since…
I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who…
Read the rest of “Is it easier to end capitalism than to imagine the end of capitalism?”…
My creativity and inspiration have been very limited of late. Sometimes this just happens, and at other times there’s a definite correlation with what’s going on in the world. In this particular case I strongly suspect the latter. While we’re certainly not suffering anywhere near the…
Read the rest of “Diggers, Moss, and Bacon: a round-up for February”…
I’m a visual artist, so this brief piece about Mark Fisher’s draft introduction to his planned book Acid Communism (sadly never to be realised due to his premature death) examines the concept from an artist’s perspective. As an immediate warning to the curious, I want to make clear that…
The problem with modern democracy is that it has thoroughly convinced everyone that you only get one chance to improve society every five years. Didn’t succeed this time? You’ll have to wait another five years before you can try again - that’s the rules. The way to start to change…
Read the rest of “Albion: utopianism and the post-apocalyptic pastoral”…
I’ve lifted the term “post-apocalyptic pastoral” from a book review by Goodreads user Terry from Toronto who effectively seeded my reading list by citing Richard Jefferies’ After London: or, Wild England (1885), Edgar Pangborn’s Davy (1964), Richard Cowper’s The Road To Corlay (1978),…
Read the rest of “Post-apocalyptic pastoral and post-industrial”…
“The time for sending messages in bottles has passed. As seas toxify and rise over the shorelines, who will be left to read them? Nonetheless, we have to communicate. So we communicate. To anyone who will listen. Through the haze of wine, cannabis, SSRIs, exhaustion, overwork, climate depression,…
In a recent blogpost Ellen Rogers wrote of her current Gnosis project: It’s taken me 4 years to try and articulate what this project is about, but I felt like I was repeatedly going back to square one… Until recently all I really knew was that I was blindly following a feeling that…
Read the rest of “The Psychedelic Gothic in Acid Renaissance”…
I’m starting to see more people talking about the need to imagine the future, which is both fantastic and absolutely necessary. What follows is a series of quotes and outward links with some of my own opinions interspersed as segues between them, or, as this format was called back in the…
Back in the 1970s there seemed to be such a myriad of ideas about potential shared futures, exploring all aspects of the political, social, and cultural. The aim of neoliberal capitalism of the 1980s onwards was, and still is, to close down all these possibilities - as someone (Fredric Jameson?…