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Because right-wing commentators aren’t the only ones who think Biden’s mind is basically gone—lots of voters think so too

Since mainstream media venues by and large epistemically rely on the views of the masses to supply journalists with their coverage frames, news operations end up treating popular concerns about Biden’s age as a kind of sacrosanct window into reality rather than as a hype cycle perpetually fed into the ambient collective consciousness by anti-Biden voices intending to sink his reelection chances.

By contrast, most of the news sources the right sees as hyperpartisan Biden spin machines actually strain at being fair-minded and objective, which disinclines them toward producing any sort of muscular pushback against the right’s relentless mischaracterizations.

Of course, a major reason why the public thinks this is because the entirety of the right-wing information superstructure is devoted, on a daily basis, to depicting Biden as severely cognitively compromised

even if we grant every single concern that Klein and others have voiced, it is indisputably true that Joe Biden remains an intellectual giant next to Donald Trump

“Unlike a newsroom where many stories are often checked, fact-checked and triple-checked by copy editors and others to make sure it’s verifiably accurate, the same isn’t necessarily true of political news influencers,

It is the informality and break from tradition, however, that are among the keys to news influencers’ increasing prominence. People want “someone that they relate to and trust” to interpret and curate their news

Share of U.S. adults who regularly get news from TikTok, by age group

No news-focused creator broke through as often this summer as Harry Sisson, CredoIQ data shows. The 22-year-old New York University senior drove more than 100 million views from viral posts in June and July through what he calls “a mix of news and advocacy for Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party.”

Sisson’s July video reporting Biden’s exit from the race, in which he called Biden a “fantastic president,” has 1.3 million views—more than the TikTok videos on the same topic from CBS News, MSNBC and C-Span.

“A lot of people get their news from social media,” said Sisson, who said he aggregates news for his one million-plus followers from a variety of sources, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. “If I can be a reliable outlet in the eyes of the people, I want to fill that role.”

Joey Contino, 33, who is based in New Jersey and runs an account focused on politics and the Russia-Ukraine war, says viewers are drawn to creators’ stripped-down, conversational approach to news.

“When it comes to mainstream media, I understand they have a certain way they do their broadcast, in front of the lights, in front of the screens,” Contino said. “I think we’re more in the realm of hearing things from your best friend than hearing things on TV.”

He rarely gives his opinion, he said, other than his view that Ukraine should be supported in its war against Russia. Contino’s 240 viral posts this summer picked up more than 35 million views.

The Journal’s analysis covered the 200 accounts with the most viral political posts excluding those that were inactive or not English-language. The Journal categorized the accounts as news influencers, legacy outlets or others, such as politicians and comedians, based on criteria developed with several media researchers.

As a whole, the influencers’ feeds were more likely to lean either progressive or conservative, the Journal found, and 80% of them were classified as partisan by CredoIQ. Legacy-media accounts, on the other hand, were more politically independent, according to CredoIQ, which assigns partisanship leanings based on the views expressed by creators and topics they cover.

Share of TikTok accounts with the most viral* political posts in June and July, by account type and partisanship

But how does an uproar over a nonexistent problem (or even a marginally existent problem, should it ever prove so) defeat his cost-benefit analysis? Knowing the facts, hard as that work can be, remains basic to understanding and alleviating suffering.

His changes of mind appear to have left him unburdened by humility that he might have it wrong again.

Thousands of excited fans packed an arena to hear the two men—allies and possibly competitors one day for the Republican nomination—kick around the tenets of this new ideology: a leftist’s critique of American intervention abroad and of big business; a populist’s loathing of “elites”; a New Dealer’s zest for intervening in the economy; a libertarian’s obsession with free speech.

“Factual truth” is more vulnerable and thus more precious. It is “the very texture of the political realm”, she wrote. Indeed, she warned, “Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.”

The Department of Homeland Security estimates that 11m people lived illegally in America in 2022, the most recent year for which it has data. Yet Mr Vance routinely insists that Ms Harris has admitted 25m people illegally.

Like claims of voter fraud or Haitian pet-eating, his number is both misleading and unfalsifiable. Can you prove there are no Martians stealing Americans’ Amazon packages off their front steps?

“Rational truth”, Hannah Arendt wrote, could rebound from the assault of political power. Banned in one era, Euclidean geometry might be rediscovered in another.

For Mr Vance, what binds this amalgam together appears to be illegal immigration. He blames it for everything from the price of eggs to the cost of housing, from the state of the schools to addiction, crime and the deficit

r Trump is teaching the next generation of politicians that such dispute is the short-cut to power. Do not be surprised if Mr Vance is less open to the possibility that Ms Harris got more votes should she, in the end, actually do s

I soon discovered that I had as much to learn from the counsel of the dead as I did from the advice and consent of the living. The reading of history damps down the impulse to slander the trend and tenor of the times, instills a sense of humor, lessens our fear of what might happen tomorrow.

y object was to learn, not preach, which prevented my induction into the national college of pundits but encouraged my reading of history.

On the opening of a book or the looking into a manuscript, I listen for the sound of a voice in the first-person singular, and from authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence—in Gibbon’s polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla’s command of the subjunctive, in Mailer’s hyperbole and Dillard’s similes, in Twain’s invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world’s “colossal humbug.”

On listening to President Barack Obama preach the doctrine of freedom-loving military invasion to the cadets at West Point, I’m reminded of the speeches that sent the Athenian army to its destruction in Sicily in 415 bc, and I don’t have to wait for dispatches from Afghanistan to suspect that the shooting script for the Pax Americana is a tale told by an idiot.

The common store of our shared history is what Goethe had in mind when he said that the inability to “draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.”

It isn’t with symbolic icons that men make their immortality. They do so with what they’ve learned on their travels across the frontiers of the millennia, salvaging from the wreck of time what they find to be useful or beautiful or true.

What preserves the voices of the great authors from one century to the next is not the recording device (the clay tablet, the scroll, the codex, the book, the computer, the iPad) but the force of imagination and the power of expression. It is the strength of the words themselves, not their product placement, that invites the play of mind and induces a change of heart.

How do we know what we think we know? Why is it that the more information we collect the less likely we are to grasp what it means? Possibly because a montage is not a narrative, the ear is not the eye, a pattern recognition is not a figure or a form of speech.

The surfeit of new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that within the wind tunnels of the “innovative delivery strategies” the data blow away and shred. The time is always now, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, last week, three months or three years ago. Unlike moths and fruit flies, human beings bereft of memory, even as poor a memory as Montaigne’s or my own, tend to become disoriented and confused.

I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

In this other world that I call “the river,” the kind of gambling, risk-taking world, all that matters is that you’re right. It doesn’t matter who you are; it matters that you’re right and you’re able to prove it or bet on it in some way.

And that’s very against the kind of credentialism that you have within the progressive Democratic left, which I also call the “indigo blob” because it’s a fusion of purple and blue. There’s not a clear separation between the nonpartisan centrist media and the left-leaning progressive media rooting for Democrats. Different parts of The New York Times have both those functions.

I think people are exploiting the trust that institutions have earned for political gain.

You have the C.E.O. of OpenAI saying, yeah, this might destroy the universe, but it’s a good gamble to take.

On the one hand, there are lots of signs that risk tolerance is going down, among young people in particular.

They’re smoking less, drinking less, doing fewer drugs, having less sex — a different type of risk tolerance.

They are less willing to defend free speech norms if it potentially would cause injury to someone. Free speech is kind of a pro-risk take in some ways because speech can cause effects, of course.

On the other hand, you have various booms and busts in crypto. You have Las Vegas bringing in record revenue. You have record revenue in sports betting

What you seem to be doing in the book is making an interesting cut in society between people with different forms of risk tolerance and thinking about risk.

it just seems to me we are in a world now where institutions are less trusted.

some people respond to that by saying, OK, I make my own rules now, and this is great and I have lots of agency.

some respond by withdrawing into an online world or clinging on to beliefs and experts that have lost their credibility or just by becoming more risk averse.

you spend time with people whose approach to risk you find sophisticated and interesting. One of them is Peter Thiel. What did you learn spending time with him?

There’s a good book by Max Chafkin about Peter Thiel called “The Contrarian,” which is convincing that Thiel is actually quite conservative more than libertarian and probably quite religious.

I mean, the amounts of wealth and success and power that Silicon Valley has — I do think some people pinch themselves and wonder if they have been one of the chosen ones in some ways, or been blessed in some ways, or maybe the nerdy version of it, think they’re living in a simulation of some kind.

Peter Thiel is a sort of template of the V.C. mind, which is oriented toward being right in important and counterintuitive ways three out of 20 times and doesn’t care about being wrong 17 out of 20 times. You want big payouts, not a high betting average.

The two things that you hear from every V.C. — one is the importance of the longer time horizons. You’re making investments that might not pay off for 10 or 15 years.

No. 2, even more important, is the asymmetric ability to bet on the upside. They are all terrified because they all had an experience early in their career where Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page or Sergey Brin walked through their door, and they didn’t give them funding and then they wound up missing on an investment that paid out at 100x or 1,000x or 10,000x. And so if you can only lose 1x your money, but you can make 1,000x if you have a successful company, then that changes your mind-set about everything. You want to avoid false negatives. You want to avoid missed opportunities.

There’s a bias in the world you’re describing — an aesthetic around talking in probabilities. I see this a lot in Silicon Valley. I would call it faux Bayesian reasoning, where they’re given some probability, but they have no reason to base the probability. And it makes you sound much more precise. It makes you sound like you know what you’re talking abou

SBF was known for always talking in terms of expected value, which is very appealing to the kinds of people you’re describing. But it can become a costume of sloppy thinking. I’m curious how you think about it.

There’s two things here. One is there is a jargon, where there’re just a lot of shared cultural norms and unspoken discursive tendencies. It’s just the way we communicate, I think, in the river. But also, it’s really easy to build bad models.

Look, in some ways, these V.C.s are obviously incredibly deeply flawed people. So why do they succeed despite that?

I think because the idea of having a longer time horizon, No. 1, and being willing to make these positive expected value, high-risk, but very high upside bets and gathering a portfolio of them repeatedly and making enough of these bets that you effectively do hedge your risk, right? Those two ideas are so good that it makes up for the fact that these guys often have terrible judgment and are kind of vainglorious assholes, half of them, right?

I want to end on a part of your book I found really interesting, which is about the physical experience of risk in gambling but in other things, too. You talk about pain tolerance, you talk about how the body feels when you’re behind on a hand and you’re losing your chips

You’ve talked about being on tilt. But I see it in politics, too. There is a physical question that comes into the decisions you make. Tell me a bit about how you think about this relationship between the body and the ability to act under pressure to make intuitive decisions in moments of very high stress.

Human beings have tens of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure, which is inclined to respond in a heightened way to moments that are high stakes, that are high stress moments. Your body will know when you’re playing a $100, $200 game where it really matters. You will just know

You’ll experience that stress. Even if you suppress it consciously, it will still affect the way that you’re literally ingesting your five senses. So if your heart rate goes up, that has discernible effects.

But actually your body’s providing you with more information. You’re taking in more in these short bursts of time. People who can master that zone — and I use the term zone intentionally because it’s very related to being in the zone, like Michael Jordan used to talk about — learning to master that and relish that is a very powerful skill because you are experiencing physical stress whether you want to or not

How much is that learnable, and how much of it is a kind of natural physical intelligence that some people have and some people don’t?

I think it’s actually quite learnable

you can tone it up or tone it down. I mean, it’s terrifying the first time it happens, but when you start to recognize it and you make a conscious effort to slow down a little bit and take your time and try to execute the basics

It’s not as much about trying to be a hero. It’s about trying to execute the basics. Because if everyone is losing their [expletive], if you can do your basic ABC blocking and tackling, then you’re ahead of 95 percent of the people.

is gut instinct overrated or underrated? It depends on how much experience you have. The best poker players can have uncannily good instincts based on reading physical tells, just the kind of vibe someone gives off.

I played a lot of poker in writing this book, and you develop a sixth sense for whether someone has a strong hand. And you can test it because you can say, I know that I’m supposed to fold this hand here, it’s a little bit too weak to call against a bluff, but I just have a sense that he’s bluffing. And lo and behold, you’re right, more often than you think.

Payne cites a famous experiment by Henri Tajfel, a pioneering figure in social psychology, who found that his students heaped exorbitant significance onto a distinction as meaningless as whether they overestimated or underestimated the number of dots in a picture. The students started favoring the members of their “in group” and disparaging the members of the “out group.”

Payne says that he has repeatedly replicated the effect in his own classes: “Underestimators quickly assume that they are the realistic and cautious group, and hence smarter and better than the overestimators. Overestimators, on the other hand, assume that they are optimistic and positive people, and hence better than the dreary underestimators.”

It doesn’t take much for people to turn trivial differences into psychologically potent chasms between “us” and “them.

Early in his book he recounts the surreal experience of asking his brother Brad if he believed that Trump had won the 2020 election. To Payne’s surprise, Brad admitted that Biden had won — but only, Brad specified, “by the letter of the law,” adding that “there was some malfeasance,” even if “it can’t be proven.” Payne could see how this conclusion allowed his brother “to come to terms with the evidence” while also letting him “hold on to the larger feeling that Biden’s win was, deep down, illegitimate.”

most of us identify as the “good reasonable people” of his title. Our “psychological immune systems” kick in to discount or reject any information that would make us think otherwise. We want to believe that we seek the cold, hard truth while they wallow in self-serving lies

We also live at a time when ostensible validation for any belief is only a click away. “People are not passive dupes,” Payne explains, “but rather they seek out the stories they want to be told. If one channel shuts down, they just find another.”

Morris, for his part, uses the term “epistemic tribalism” to describe the tendency of people to reach conclusions through “peer-instinct conformist learning” — a fancy way of saying that we’re susceptible to the influence of peers

Morris says that rationality isn’t our “strong suit,” but rationalizing is. He offers the example of students who were given a fake newspaper article about a congressional vote. The policy details made no difference to their evaluations of the plan. If their party voted for it, they liked it; if the other party voted for it, they didn’t — and they denied that party loyalty had anything to do with their views.

our “tribal instincts” are what enabled early humans to collaborate, generating the kind of “coordinated activity” and “common knowledge” that allowed our species to flourish

If we can find a way to “harness tribal impulses,” Morris writes, we could “heal a nation.”

Morris argues that such discrimination persists because of “ethical tribalism,” which “involves no anger, malice or ill regard” toward others, but which bends the rules in favor of one’s own “clan” — people who pass the “culture fit” test because they come from the same group

Undoubtedly the people who do the discriminating would like to see themselves this way — not as hostile and mean (toward others), but as kind and generous (toward their own).

seems eager to reassure readers that, whatever their political allegiances, their motives are not just understandable but good; they are not acting on ugly prejudices from “a century or half a century ago.”

“Bringing about political change is separate from debating politics,” writes Payne, who goes on to explain that genuine persuasion requires trust and connection — both of which seem to be in diminishing supply these days

He says that change is slow, and connecting mostly requires interacting one on one

But people have to want to build that trust in the first place

And then if you ask those SAME PEOPLE okay: well if that’s the CASE… then how should we be TREATING other people or cultures that see things differently than YOU do. And again for a lot of young people LIVING in a postmodern society their answer is often…that we should treat them with TOLERANCE.

And it makes SENSE: see because in a world where every moral conclusion is equally valid…then, of COURSE, you should be TOLERANT of people to be able hold whatever positions they WANT to. 

there’s OTHER people out there that would say to this person… that this tolerant relativism is actually…a glaring contradiction. That it’s SUCH A contradiction that it actually becomes an indefensible, philosophical position…because if every person and every culture out there is equally correct about morality…then that would mean that even the most INTOLERANT cultures, would have to be right as well

Which then makes your ADDITIONAL belief that TOLERANCE is the CORRECT way to be BEHAVING in this world…it makes it INCOMPATIBLE with TRUE moral relativism. 

the reason YOUNG people would be the ones that you see HOLDING this kind of position… is because they often times haven’t really been TESTED yet in life…where there’s a LINE in the sand and they’re FORCED to TAKE SIDES in difficult, moral issues, that NEED a decision to be made. 

Tolerant Relativism if you wanted to break it down…is REALLY something you see MOSTLY… in privileged, wealthy, WESTERN societies…because they would say the ONLY type of person that can HOLD that position for very long… are people that live in societies that are PEACEFUL enough… that they don’t really HAVE some group that opposes their entire existence that they feel they need to DEFEND themselves against. 

You know they’d say it’s funny… how your moral relativism starts to FADE a bit the second there’s a dude with an axe on your doorstep…it’s a pretty difficult act to pull off when you’re watching your family get dismembered in front of you to say your beliefs, my beliefs…let’s just call it halfsies halfsies why don’t we. 

Again there’s SOME people out there that would say that TRUE moral reasoning…. ONLY actually begins…when someone DECLARES a set of moral universals…and then is mature enough to recognize the WEIGHT and COMPLEXITY that comes along with DOING something like that.

as we talked about a couple episodes ago to Zizek: EVEN WITHIN something like postmodernism… that on the surface is SKEPTICAL of ANY of these universals…in the sense that postmodernism ELEVATES DIFFERENCE and CELEBRATES it as the most important factor…to someone like Zizek…this is NOT a postmodernist REJECTING universals…to HIM this is JUST creating a UNIVERSAL out of DIFFERENCE. 

maybe it’s IMPOSSIBLE for someone to NOT be following moral universals…it’s just possible for people to not be AWARE of the ones they’re supporting…or to live in a place that’s PEACEFUL enough to not REQUIRE you to look at yours deeper. 

let’s PROCEED from here as though this is the case. That a VERY important piece of making ANY sort of PROGRESS in the world…is GOING to require people to DECLARE certain moral universals…and then to be able to ACT on them without having to apologize for them constantly. 

This PERSON would say there’s an INFINITE number of WAYS that history can be interpreted…and OUR responsibility is to SUBVERT the existing narratives and tell the stories of the voiceless from the past!

IF that is TRUE…then it would make TOTAL SENSE to Mark Fisher why the cultural LOGIC of postmodernism…LEAVES us in a PLACE he thinks…where we are COMPLETELY STUCK…in the present. 

he CALLS the western world a society that has a memory condition: the western world has what’s called anterograde amnesia. 

: there’s a MOVIE that can help illustrate his point here. Mark Fisher compares how we are as a society…to the character named Leonard…in the movie Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan in the year 2000

The main character is a guy named Leonard…that can’t FORM new memories. Importantly in the movie he’s ALSO a guy whose wife was murdered not too long ago.

And he remembers EVERYTHING about his life up until a certain POINT…but once he gets sick, no matter how hard he tries, he just doesn’t remember anything BEYOND that.

Now in the movie…he’s ALSO trying to SOLVE the murder of his wife, so whenever he gets a piece of information he doesn’t want to forget that could help him figure it out…he tattoos it on his body, he takes a bunch of pictures, he makes notes about it…he essentially is a man…that has a MAJOR MYSTERY that he needs to solve that is SUPER important to him, but is constantly living in this HAZE where he CAN’T form new memories has to be SKEPTICAL of everything around him and lives pretty much every day in a state of confusion. 

To Mark Fisher…this DESCRIBES the life of a modern person maybe BETTER than it first may seem, and it CERTAINLY describes the condition of society overall. We are LIVING in a state of CULTURAL amnesia…where we CAN’T remember our PAST, which then makes it IMPOSSIBLE to accurately diagnose the present, and even MORE difficult to be able to IMAGINE a different social future that may be better off for people. 

THINK of the CONFUSION that postmodernism often LEAVES people in. When you QUESTION…GRAND NARRATIVES about the world you live in…and MORE than that: when QUESTIONING narratives and universals BECOMES something that’s VERY important to yo

the COST of that often times are the things that TRADITIONALLY, have GIVEN people a clear sense of IDENTITY all throughout human history: that is the METANARRATIVES that UNIFY societies together around certain common stories we have about reality. 

As an example: THINK of how this applies to HISTORY…as ONE of those common stories societies usually have.

There’s ONE version of history that’s taught to people in CLASSROOMS…that centers history around great WARS that have taken place. Memorizing a bunch of dates…THIS is when Napoleon invaded Russia…THIS is when the Magna Carta was signed…in other words: HUMAN HISTORY… is just a progression of different great leaders… SEIZING territory from each other. 

And there’s a CRITICISM of that view that is well received by people in post modern society that says: well THAT’S not the whole story of what humanity is! We’re talking about ALL human BEINGS here…HUMAN history is JUST as much the summer romance between two people that fall in love…the life of a street vendor in 9th century baghdad…

that could BE because you live in a really safe, peaceful country…it could ALSO just be you MANUFACTURING a peaceful environment like that in your LIFE, by surrounding yourself with FRIENDS who all AGREE with you. 

again this is generally seen as a REALLY NICE sentiment to people LIVING in a postmodern world. 

But what that ALSO brings along with it some people say…is a CREATIVE LICENSE to able to REINTERPRET human history…and PRESENT it in a way that just BENEFITS whatever political ends you’re trying to JUSTIFY. 

For example in MY country the United States…the FOUNDING FATHERS of our country, who WERE any of these dudes with buckles on me shoes and powdered wigs? Like what’s the TRUE answer to that question?

in MANY cases in postmodern society…it all depends on what side of the political aisle you LAND on…ONE side of it interprets history in a way where these men were some of the greatest political minds to have ever LIVED on planet earth, launching the greatest experiment in nation building that has EVER been launched.

Now it’s ALSO possible to see these men as SLAVE owners, bigots, people that were actively complicit in the extermination of the native americans, and MUCH MORE. But WHICH one of these is TRUE? 

you’ll SEE this happen when it comes to MOST of a postmodern subject’s view of history. Where DEPENDING on what STORY you believe about the recent PAST of the place you live in…that will DETERMINE the way that you see the present, and then what you think the next, best MOVES are for the futur

But if nobody can AGREE on what their HISTORY is…then HISTORY isn’t a METANARRATIVE anymore that UNIFIES a society…HISTORY just becomes this fragmented STORY that’s used as an INSTRUMENT to prove your political bias. The SAME events, the SAME historical FIGURES…the MEANING of them will COMPLETELY CHANGE depending on who’s EVOKING them.

HISTORY is not the ONLY example of a metanarrative that’s been deconstructed to the point that it no longer has the same unifying potential as in former societies

From shared rituals, community bonds, a shared conception of truth more generally, MOST things that unify your understanding of what your culture is all about, and who YOU are as a person WITHIN that culture.

there’s a REASON SEVERAL, modern day philosophers… have DESCRIBED the world we live in… as Schizophrenic.

that’s obviously not a CLINICAL diagnosis they’re making…

t’s a metaphor for the TYPE of experience that’s often available for people, where there’s a BREAKDOWN… of these unifying metanarratives...that help us develop a CLEAR sense of who we ARE…and an obvious, DEFINED POSITION within the world around us with clear boundaries to it. 

Feeling confused, like you DON’T REALLY know what’s going on, and you don’t know who or what to read to FIGURE out what’s going on, and you think the ONE thing that’s for sure is that people that CLAIM to know what’s going on, are CLEARLY idiots, and you feel like every year sort of blends into the next with no REAL prospects on the horizon for different ways of living that may come about in the future…this is a COMMON complaint…of people LIVING in postmodern culture

it’s BECAUSE postmodernism…at bottom…IS the critique of the critique. It is a reaction video to a reaction video about reality. It is FUNDAMENTALLY, NOT ABOUT CONSTRUCTING any NEW cultural forms…it’s about DECONSTRUCTION. It’s about the elevation of DIFFERENCE to the level of the universal. 

This is what MAKES the critique so EFFECTIVE…but it ALSO COMES with certain social effects. It becomes VERY difficult to go EXTERNAL to yourself to find MEANING…or to DECLARE universals and look to the FUTURE as a way out

So, what HAPPENS…is when people can’t go EXTERNAL they turn INWARD towards NARCISSISM…and because they can’t go FORWARDS they turn BACKWARDS towards nostalgia. 

HIS is going to be the other part of this unique BLEND we talked about last episode that is going to LEAD us to this state of affairs called Capitalist Realism

Where everything we talked about LAST episode with neoliberalism, the focus is on the individual and the expansion of CAPITAL for the sake of CAPITAL…gets combined with postmodernism…that puts people in a HAZE where they are CONFUSED and INCAPABLE of ORIENTING themselves in TIME…let ALONE being able to imagine a different social future. 

To put it ANOTHER way: we are STUCK for Mark Fisher in a confused, narcissistic PRESENT moment…with NO conception of what the future should look like.

And as HE said: Capitalist Realism’s IMPOSSIBLE to define in a single sentence…the best way to SHOW people what Capitalist Realism is…is just to give them example, after example… that they can see in the world all around them

show through examples how IN this postmodern, neoliberal VACUUM that’s been created…how we ACCEPT the FALSE reality that CAPITALISM…is NOT an economic system…it’s just simply the WAY the world is, with no hope of changing it.