Screenshot from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983).
I can’t recall when I first started putting my writing on the internet, but in one way or another, my whole adolescence has been primarily a digital activity, and much of my time spent online has been with blogs – mine and others. In a way, this is the promise of a certain formative history of the internet. Not exactly the democratisation of the public sphere, something a little less polished then that. This, too, is the promise of adolescence. A series of annoying phases as you stumble your way from childhood to something resembling an adult life.
At the moment, I’m reading k-punk, a posthumous collection of Mark Fisher’s writing from 2004 to 2016. Fisher’s output is vast; the book is almost performatively thick, nearing almost 800 words of posts and articles. Both the foreword and introduction look back fondly to the sense of community around the early blogging scene, how thrilling it felt to share and encounter ideas, how unlikely it all seemed, the endearing sense of competition between writers eager to post faster, better, more daringly.
The difference between Fisher’s articles and blogs is apparent. In a technical sense, the articles might be better, if by better we mean direct, comprehensible, to the point, and outlining a well supported argument, but they are basically boring when interspersed with the posts. His books are where you’d really go for the argument, anyway It’s in the blogs that he’s thinking aloud, that the ideas are information and being distilled.
The writing is part of a life being lived. Simon Reynolds recalls how many of Fisher’s ‘signature fixations’ were right there from the beginning, quoting the description his band, D-Generation, described their music as ‘techno haunted by the ghosts of the punk’. Certain repetitive turns of phrase or preoccupations become more apparent in this collection because they’re all before us, but while reading, it’s important to remember the asynchronicity nature in which they would have been written, being posted sporadically, as movies and albums were being released and discussed. ‘The blog circuit was a true network,’ Reynold’s writes; it’s hard to imagine any comparable feeling of optimism about blogging today.
For Fisher, the animating ambitions were modest. ‘I started blogging as a way of getting back into writing after the traumatic experience of doing a PhD.’ Darren Ambrose describes the dual ‘intensity and informality’ of the blog’s early days. As his career picked up, especially from the momentum of Capitalist Realism, the blog would wither way, become less frequent. Some of this was writing; other books, and many articles. A lot of this was teaching. The recently-published Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures captures a lot of the energy of the blogs; I can only imagine now what it must have felt like to sit through one of those lectures.
The structure of the book is fascinating in many ways. The collection is a distillation of a wider output of Fisher’s output, which necessitates a guiding editorial logic that goes against the free-wheeling approach that defined so much of early blogging culture. ‘The aim was always’, writes Ambrose, ‘to provide as comprehensive a picture as possible of the blog throughout its lifetime by selecting pieces that reflect both its eclectic content, its theoretical pluralism and most of all its remarkable consistency.’ Eclectic, pluralist, consistent: perhaps this is what people mean when they talk about finding their voice. Perhaps most significant of all was the decision to structure the content across themes – books, TV, music, politics – and then formats – interviews, reflections, and the unfinished introduction of his next book project.
By this, they hoped to further reveal the hyperlinked nature of Fisher’s writing; how a series of articles and blogs across the years would explore and refine the same ideas. I wondered if an alternative route through the book might be possible, like listing the page numbers that would offer a chronology of publication, might make sense too. In Fisher’s own words, why did he start the blog? ‘Because it seemed like a space – the only space – in which to maintain a kind of discourse that had started in the music press and the art schools, but which had all but died out, with what I think are appalling cultural and political consequences.’ This resonates with me despite knowing it's not true of the reality of digital spaces today, or perhaps ever was true, if by true we mean something definitive of its character.
The internet has been a significant part of my formative years in a predictable and familiar way. Self-expression is the wrong term, yet it's an oddly sticky vocabulary within this conversation: self-interrogation and exchange is better as it doesn’t assume we already have something to say. The current energy around self-publishing, with Substack and the chaos of corporate control at Twitter, Threads et al, is an example of everything it shouldn’t be – but first and foremost it’s boring, a dull remake that misunderstood the original. Some might say that nostalgia is easy; by this they mean easy to indulge, but I would counter it is easy to dismiss too. The ways this legacy might be imagined, elaborated, if not outright fabricated speaks to the desire for an alternative from the present – that’s valuable and generative. This leads elsewhere, towards a different kind of digital space, or offline maybe, back to small run print zines. I’ll post about it when I know.