cyber-gothic ghosts of the cancelled future

back from today to a discussion, repetition is important. we can see that the events of the last months of 2015 and the theoretical debates that took shape around those events are perfect fragments of our current dystopian and paralyzed global landscape. following the attacks in paris in november 2015, alain badiou’s scorching philosophical intervention and mark fisher’s response that deepened this analysis as a cultural pathology not only decipher the events of that day but also the collapse of the decade we left behind, along with the spell of the untouchable libertarian schizophrenic condition. over the past decade we have witnessed the slow, painful decay of capitalist realism; yet this decay has taken place not as something giving birth to the new, but as a state of necrosis in which old monsters are resurrected in cyberspace. badiou’s observations on the structural crises of global capitalism, combined with fisher’s synthesis of contemporary nihilism, retromania and the concept of “steampunk capitalism,” make reading once again the cultural and political autopsy of this chain of catastrophes stretching from 2015 to 2026 not uninteresting, but valuable. the left turning it into chewing gum in its mouth has started to become increasingly boring, but the most real truth worth talking about, while living in the end times, is fundamentally this. the more system critique has become banal, the more necessary it has become. whatever we reach for, the most likely thing we will find there has already been seized by the ugly guard dogs of the order. the cancellation of the future and the retromania of war let us recall hilary benn’s famous speech in the british parliament in december 2015, in support of air strikes on syria. the hysterical storm of applause that erupted in the chamber that day was actually the clearest sign of how deeply contemporary politics has sunk into a creativity crisis. this event was a perfect example of “retromania” on the political stage; just like a new star wars movie in cinema, they were selling us a slightly worse copy of the same old lie, the same stale plot, once again. benn’s intervention was nothing but a mere repetition of the archaic discourse that legitimized the disastrous attack on saddam hussein years earlier and ultimately prepared the ground for the emergence of isis (daesh). here lies the greatest, most priceless value of badiou’s intervention in 2015: it pulled us out of the comforting numbness of reading these events merely as “foreign policy mistakes” or “intelligence failures.” as badiou very clearly stated at the time, and as fisher agreed, from the perspective of capital, what happened in iraq, libya or mali was not a “mistake.” these were a new, post-colonial experiment that opened “temporary autonomous zones” (taz) for capital accumulation and allowed free plunder by being freed from the annoying bureaucratic obligations of establishing and governing a state. badiou very rightly called this strategy “zoning.” western imperialist powers no longer bother to build new states; they simply destroy old states entirely, creating anarchic voids where armed gangs roam freely and capital can trade much more comfortably. indeed, at that time isis was not merely a terrorist organization, but a multifaceted commercial company fully integrated into the global market, selling oil, cotton and works of art. capital’s structural fantasy and those counted as “nothing” looking back from 2026, we experience much more painfully that the capitalist “west” has always rested on a structural fantasy: the illusion of a clear distinction between inside and outside. this fantasy, which believed it could keep those dark regions beyond the borders out through policing, has now completely collapsed because border policing no longer works. the enemy is already inside, and moreover, the “victims” can no longer remain outside the screen, in that silent and invisible space, even if they wanted to. the cold and ruthless demographic statistics badiou presented at the time are the basic social reality of 2026 today. while 1% of the global population owns 46% of resources and a 10% oligarchy owns 86% of the planet’s wealth, the remaining 40% middle class crushes each other to share only 14% of global resources. what is truly horrifying is, as badiou insisted, that 50% of the world’s population owns nothing. however, the issue is not merely one of poverty. today there are more than two billion people in the world who possess neither the qualification of “consumer” nor “labor force” for capital, and are therefore literally counted as “nothing.” because capital refuses to reduce working hours in order not to lower its profit rates, it has completely pushed this gigantic mass outside the system, treating them as a kind of “surplus population” or “those who should not exist.” fisher’s critique of capitalist realism intersects precisely at this point with badiou’s marxist analysis. capitalist realism was a gigantic fantasy that the “human resources” needed for capital’s growth were as infinite as capital’s own growth drive. yet today capital is crashing into every kind of limit; and the most important of these limits are “existential limits.” structurally, capital cannot care about anything; its only concern is accumulation. yet human beings, by their nature, cannot help caring, cannot help valuing something. today the only thing capitalism offers people is a gigantic “existential poverty” accompanied by material poverty. in a system where the only reward for sleepless cold mornings and low-wage night shifts is the continuation of the same meaningless cycle, people are expected to be “passionate” about producing and selling low-quality commodities that nobody really wants. when badiou’s observation of western subjectivity sharing that 14% share combines with fisher’s definition of this “existential poverty,” it perfectly explains why today’s middle class has turned into such a fear-filled, racist and border-closing eager mob. this segment, mortally afraid of losing its privilege and falling among those counted as “nothing,” is today the most loyal customer of increasingly fascist state apparatuses. cyber-gothic isis against the boring nihilism of steampunk capitalism one of the most critical points of distinction in the 2015 debate was how terrorism and isis would be defined. badiou rightly compared isis militants to fascist gangs of the 1930s or 40s (for example, the vichy militias in france). according to badiou, these young people were actually an internal product of global capitalism. because they could not satisfy the “desire for the west” inside them, they repressed this desire and turned it into a destructive, suicide-prone death drive, that is, pure nihilism. isis gave these young people, under the name of religion, a mafia-like hierarchical gang logic, a little money, a bit of corrupt luxury and a fake sense of “heroism.” it was not islam that was fascistizing the youth; on the contrary, the fascistization process was cloaking them in islam. however, although mark fisher agreed with badiou on this “fascist gang” definition, he pointed out that this classification risked covering up isis’s real appeal and its relationship with the current collapse of capital. according to fisher, isis was not an ordinary fascist gang but a mirror held by twenty-first-century capitalism to its own nothingness. moreover, isis had managed to become an incredibly “slick brand”; it had a much more effective appeal than any brand capital could produce at that time. this distinction leads us to a very important cultural observation: the deadly conflict between cyber-gothic and steampunk . fisher emphasizes that for the last thirty years capitalism has produced nothing new and has become completely dependent on past forms of exploitation. postmodernism was the cultural form of capital’s blockage; it reheated and marketed already existing beliefs, nationalisms, re…