The Memeing of Mark Fisher is a book Mike Watson, a leftist cultural observer, was born to write. Watson ties the book’s namesake—the late Mark Fisher and his enduring idea of “capitalist realism”—to the ideas and figures associated with the original Frankfurt School. Central to the book is the “memeification” of Fisher, which might just represent the greatest validation of his thought—as Watson puts it: “there is no alternative, nothing will escape ‘capitalist realism,’ not even the book of the same name.” One of Watson’s aims is to move the left beyond its penchant for unhelpful in-fighting and “cultural navel-gazing” toward revolutionary online content. Watson’s opening chapters explore how memes have been so effective at blunting radical possibilities. For example, recent U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang (who is by no means a radical) managed to derail his political messaging of universal basic income through the use of popular right-wing memes, which served the accidental purpose of making it impossible to understand where he was ideologically positioned. As Watson sees it, the great promise of memes is also the biggest reason to fear what they can do: since the internet has become a great equalizer of access to images, texts, movies, etc., it has also facilitated each subcommunity with content it can use to push out its own narratives, its own conceptions of truth. In an overall sense, this leads to “less, not more, truth.” Delving into QAnon’s strange history, Watson notes how this online movement rapidly spread its conspiratorial messaging through meme use. The memetic spread of QAnon has done something that no singular meme or meme movement has managed up to now. A meme is usually looked at in terms of its spread across platforms. … QAnon, however—like Pizzagate to a lesser degree—spreads into the psyche and lives of its followers. There is no central conspiracy driving the movement; the lack of a grand narrative has led the masses to begin writing their own story. What’s more, posits Watson, the truly revealing thing about the current edition of meme culture is not just its ineffectiveness at instituting change, but how it has been co-opted for profit. “Internet corporations don’t care what you do,” he writes, “so long as you give them data—and the online left is simply one niche identity that achieves this.” The internet doesn’t just foster bad forms of political dialogue, it profits from them. For Watson, if we are to move beyond the cycles of outrage and profit online, we will have to “rewire [the internet] toward education, organization, and reflection. And to achieve this we need memes that challenge the breakneck speed that platforms encourage us to browse at.” Just as Walter Benjamin in his wandering through the Paris arcades saw art and its consumption as a site of class tensions, so too should we see our present online moment. Both possess the possibility of liberation but also the danger of reactionary forces so long as material conditions are not shifted with it. A stark contrast from Benjamin’s era is the ability for the masses to not only freely consume imagery but to produce it, to a degree never before possible. This possibility is bringing the 1930s to full fruition “with an unprecedented level of freedom and financial independence offered to creative practitioners as well as to gamers, meme producers, authors, and amateur models.” But the latent revolutionary power of this medium has been blunted. The political class has largely succeeded in using the medium to divert the public’s attention from the underlying conditions of capital. And as a result, just like in Benjamin’s day, the medium has yet to produce any revolutionary moments. Even worse, populist “voices” can use the medium to feign having the people’s interests at heart even as those voices work against collective interests. Watson argues: “What populist leaders offer is an extension of the notion of fame for all via a removal of academic, scientific, and political experts as the gatekeepers of power. However, this comes at a price, as those same populist leaders remain on the other side of the still impenetrable ‘glass ceiling,’ preventing the promise of internet media from developing into genuine political agency.” What’s more, Watson notes the difficulty in trying to avoid transforming into a human piece of monetization. Even as supposedly independent platforms such as Patreon or Twitch seek to hand over more control to creators, they would not exist without the visibility Big Tech offers. Indeed “our every use of the internet—every mouse click—feeds into the capitalist system.” With streamers even monetizing their sleep, we may also find ourselves feeding the system as we dream before long. Yet, Watson argues, there is reason to cling to hope. We possess unparalleled tools of education and self-expression. We are being watched, but so are our politicians. We possess the tools to build and benefit from creative works even as we ourselves are monetized: “It is up to us to leverage the freedom (however little, however much) we have within the capitalist whole to prevent the slide into tyranny.” Watson next turns to Frankfurt Scholars Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. The two explore the human subject’s inability to accept its connection to nature (death, in particular), despite our many attempts to overcome it. The attempt to evade this connection has resulted in “immense tension turned inward.” For Adorno, this is tied closely to mythology’s persistence in our lives; it serves as a distraction to the material realities around us. An example Watson gives is of a group of baby TikTok witches attempting to “hex the moon” in the summer of 2020. He notes that apart from this odd belief in magic persisting in modernity, the more disturbing reality is that this belief distracts from a more pressing task—taking on global capitalism and a global planetary catastrophe. All of this is firmly bound up in the human need for narratives. Whether it’s QAnon or those fighting for socialism, it is the need for a story that gives movements a drive and purpose. Watson notes the outgrowth of depressive memes such as “Doomer” and “Doomer Girl” as indicia of the depressive influence of capitalist realism and its lack of alternatives. Of course, these memes are eventually co-opted into capitalism itself and also turned into profit. Watson points out that these realities make creating and implementing new strategies difficult, yet, there remains hope in the use of online platforms to discuss and debate political theory, even as data capitalism tries to reel them in for a few more dollars. And it often does. Fisher himself has been converted to a meme, including the creation of a bed blanketed by the cover of his seminal text. As Watson says: “The memeing of Fisher’s theory, book covers, name, or visage in such a cavalier fashion is evidence that 21st-century capitalism is capable of grotesquely distorting even one of its most forthright and lucid critiques.” As both Fisher and Adorno before him saw little hope of a future beyond capitalism, what do we now have to resist its same demands and effects? The answer, Watson says, also lies with Fisher, in making our sickness into a credible protest movement, of turning our individual depressions into social problems. Watson rounds out his exploration between Frankfurt and Fisher with Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. He notes that Benjamin sought to show how culture and economics are intertwined. Culture is an accumulation of the past playing out in the present. In this respect, he picks up Benjamin's interpretation of Paul Klee’s Angel of History—we must progress not by seeing a boundless future of possibility, but by looking into the past and noting its remains even as we are swept into the future. Despite the 20th century’s promise of personally owned cultural goods (taken to new heights in our own moment), this did not disperse the greatness of objects—consider the difference between prints of Mona Lisa and the Mona Lisa—nor did it provide any sort of emancipatory gains. Yet, argues Watson, this availability “allowed people to construct their own histories and form their own aspirations” and even today can be a window “into the true conditions of capitalism.” Taken together, Benjamin's insight was ultimately not how we can envision the future, but how we can understand the past through the vast array of cultural objects and how this informs our future. Watson puts it like this: “Can the audience reconfigure history in new constellations?” In this way, Benjamin’s “flaneurism,”—a stroller or loafer—when taken up intentionally, “is a demonstration against the division of labor.” Turning to the present moment, Watson argues that the new task of the online left is to develop ourselves into “digital flaneurs,” taking on the vast array of digital objects not as passive observers but intentional wanderers: Today, we take aloof flaneur-like walks through digital arcades replete with memes and videos co-opted as data commodities. In doing so, we might take time to assemble constellations of these image objects so as to reconstruct from them the history of capitalism and to allow possible future assemblages conducive to a socialist vision. This may require a slowing down of our media consumption, not to a turtle’s pace, but enough to make reflection upon the mechanisms underlying our current digital era of capitalism possible. … In this way, as we look back on the accumulated debris of history, like Klee’s angel of history, we will be able to reconfigure it rather than be configured by it. Marcuse, a fellow Frankfurt adjacent theorist of the ’60s, also saw the realities of late capitalism as limiting the bounds of human imagination. For Marcuse, this played out even in sexual experience, where promiscuity itself was encouraged not as a challenge to the norms of the power structure, but to help maintain it. Watson drives a clear line between this thinking and our present moment, where the ready availability of graphic pornography, the sexualization of mainstream TV and film, and the ubiquity of sexualized amateur models has taken on this role of recapitulating the structure of power. Watson draws a clear example of internet celebrity Belle Delphine who successfully sold her bathwater to a fan. Making large sums of money online, it would seem that she was able to leverage her sexuality toward autonomy and personal economic liberation. Yet, Watson notes, “capitalism ultimately ruined her pretense to autonomy from the system by leading her to engage in the banalest possible act she herself could have engaged in for the public: actual sex.” In this way, Marcuse was far more right than he could have realized: the very possibility of liberation from the system will be absorbed into it, even at the margins of what is “acceptable” in polite society. Despite its potential to be pulled into to the power structure, Marcuse argues that art embodies the very goal of all revolutions: to secure the happiness and freedom of the individual. Marcuse, the other Frankfurt thinkers, and Fisher, posit the possibility of “reclaiming our desire and creatively sublimating it to the fostering of a communitarian society.” Watson exhorts the online left to reclaim the revolutionary potential of art, including memes, through “creative output that challenges the tendency of the data economy to push us toward quantitative goals both online and in real life.” This means adopting irrationality itself, as the “irrational” act of compassion is “the one political calling that can justify our empty human existence.” We can yet leverage our wanderings through the “online arcades,” taking the useful things we find there to challenge capitalism’s digital excess and ultimately turn it outward into the streets. As bizarre as it may have sounded at the outset, Watson convincingly weaves a tale of how even the most absurd aspects of online culture carry the seeds of a possibility beyond capitalism. His book is essential in a moment where hope seems to be rapidly receding from the left movement, not just in understanding and interpreting our present online moment, but in its radical potential. ~ Arc Digital Review by Dan Melo, https://books.arcdigital.media/p/memeing-mark-fisher?r=mutbx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct

Rating 5*. Brilliant. Mike Watson, through his three engaging and urgently topical books, reveals the connections between aesthetic theory and contemporary online culture. This reader was rather unfamiliar with the thoughts of the Frankfurt School and the writings of Mark Fisher, but this book provides a perfect introduction to the ideas which can entertain and inform us as we we sit amongst the ruins of western culture. ~ James Self, Amazon UK

Rating 5*. Entertaining and thought-provoking. Takes an entertaining and thought-provoking view of modern events through the lens of the Frankfurt School - with reference to the work of Mark Fisher - a worthwhile education into these interesting thinkers against a familiar context. Watson's points are well made and for this reader, relatively new to this area of thought, a useful and accessible primer. ~ James Allen , Amazon UK

Rating 5*. Predictive! A clear and concise analysis of our troubling times, placing capitalism at the center of a mental health crisis exacerbated by the internet. Watson contextualises meme trends alongside conspiracy theories and the thought of Fisher and the Frankfurt School, pointing out a way forward. Recommended ~ Anil, Amazon

Rating 5*. Clearly written and insightful. In the pre-digital era, the way society understood itself was through all of the traditional "Gutenbergian" mediums - newspapers, magazines, books, and then more recently something like television. Today, it is actually something like memes that are on the front lines of the media in our globalized, digital world. I think this is a very good, insightful book about a part of the internet we don't often take very seriously. However, by taking these memes seriously, and then using thinkers like Fisher and the Frankfurt School to assist in the excavation and analysis, Watson comes away with a very interesting and certainly an extremely timely book about digital culture and the greater world of neoliberal capitalism. ~ BFC, Amazon US

Rating 5*. This book continues from Watson's last book "Can the Left Learn to Meme" by using contemporary media to introduce key concepts of critical theory and explore their relationship to today's concerns. Where it differs is in the scope and depth of the work, going past introduction and deeply interrogating the habits we fall into while logged in. "The Memeing of Mark Fisher" is a thoughtful exploration of meme communities, libidinal investment, and the way that capitalism subsumes radical artistic gestures to better serve the interest of capital. Watson shows a deep understanding of Mark Fisher's work from "Capitlist Realism" to the unfinished "Acid Communism" by highlighting the often overlooked aspects of Fisher's work in the popularization and memeification of concepts such as capitalist realism and hauntology while showing historical connections to Frankfurt School thinkers through Adorno and Horkheimer's Culture Industry and Benjamin's Constellations. The true gift of this book is that it does not merely reintroduce old marxist concepts or talk negatively (or positively) on contemporary media. Mike Watson presents many original thoughts and holds on to the possibility of art along with community action to break the spell of capitalist realism and lead to a post capitalist world. ~ Dirt: Son of Earth, Amazon US

Rating 5*. Memes and Theory - fun, concerning, perceptive. In a time that seems data capitalism is inescapable and all encompassing, and unconvincing arguments of how to escape the construct rather than fight it abound, this book has been very insightful. Mike seems to be more interested in the tools to disrupt capitalist realism than to simply escape it. As someone who has been a little intimidated by Frankfurt School writers I feel like this is a good primer to go into their works with more understanding and thoughts about how relevant they are for today. ~ Jeffrey, Amazon US

Watson, while not affiliated with any third-level institution, presents a work that deserves to be read by both academics and leftists alike, a work that offers quick catching fuel to the fire that is the leftist imagination in 2021 – a much needed remedy for our present political climate, both online and offline. He is a digital heir to the Frankfurt School, the New Left and Fisher, and his next work should be eagerly awaited as we work to diagnose the ever-stranger times we find ourselves in. ~ Marx and Philosophy Review by Jack Dignam, https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19726_the-memeing-of-mark-fisher-how-the-frankfurt-school-foresaw-capitalist-realism-and-what-to-do-about-it-by-mike-watson-reviewed-by-jack-dignam/

A fantastic read, and without a doubt the most important response to Mark Fisher’s work in a very long time. The first work on Capitalist Realism to offer, not just a unique contemporary analysis of its reach and myriad forms, but a treatise on its roots, and just maybe, a glimpse at the map that shows the exit. Insightful, timely, and ultimately very inspiring. ~ Bram, host of the podcast STRANGE EXILES , Amazon review

'It is tempered and thoughtful and engages with different meme trends, wondering how they express certain structures of feeling and relate to different philosophical concepts and movements' ~ Matt Colquhoun (Xenogothic Blog/Repeater Books), Xenogothic.com the essay 'Memeing Politics' ... https://xenogothic.com/2021/07/01/memeing-politics/

With a host of respected academics—including Matt McManus, Alfie Bown, and Conrad Hamilton—already endorsing Mike Watson’s The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism and What To Do About It, there is little that has not been said to praise Watson’s latest work. Indeed, if with his 2019 book Can the Left Learn to Meme?: Adorno, Video Gaming, and Stranger Things Watson announced himself as a significant voice of the online left, then it is with his latest offering that he establishes his reputation as one of the most impressive analysts of our strange digital era. [...] Located within the framework of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, The Memeing of Mark Fisher boldly riffs on everything from conspiracy theories and memes to economic policy and election campaigns, as it skillfully assesses the role that new media has played in the recent rise of right-wing populism. In reasoning that the perceived dichotomy between culture and political praxis is a false one, Watson identifies the memeosphere as a key marginal seat, possessing the ability to decide our social and economic futures. With the Right so adept at leveraging new media, The Memeing of Mark Fisher culminates as a call to arms and urges the online left to use cultural production in a rally against apathy and cynicism. ~ merion west review by Al Binns, https://merionwest.com/2021/09/17/review-the-memeing-of-mark-fisher/

"[Watson] is a digital heir to the Frankfurt School, the New Left and Fisher, and his next work should be eagerly awaited as we work to diagnose the ever-stranger times we find ourselves in." ~ Jack Dignam, PhD candidate, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, Marx and Philosophy Review

"Mike Watson's book describes our current social environment in a detailed and very imaginative way, connecting ideas taken from media studies, philosophy, political theory and internet culture. Also, he makes a very bold statement about the importance of creative work and artistic production in challenging the most dangerous tendencies of neoliberalism, urging the Left to embrace desire and its creative sublimation - also in collaborative forms - in order to build a better society." ~ Valentina Tanni, art historian, media researcher, professor at Milan Polytechnic and Naba Rome

"The basic strength of the work is the way that it fixates on the formal attributes of technology in the age of Instagram, eschewing both philosophical polemics and dry economic analysis… if Srnicek is the best Marxist thinker of the data economy, Watson is—dare I say it?—the best Marxist thinker of the culture of data." ~ Conrad Hamilton, co-author 'Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson'

“The continued relevance of Mark Fisher’s work is strong evidence of the period of Capitalist Realism we still find ourselves stuck in. Mike Watson builds on this important tradition by directly addressing the memeosphere and social media discourse. Perhaps the emergent “doomerism” of online youth subcultures contains within it a glimmer of hope for an alternative future beyond neoliberalism.” ~ Joshua Citarella, Artist, Researcher, Twitch Streamer

'Watson's fantastic intervention takes on the depressive inertia of a post-covid, data driven, society and asks how an important history of philosophy can argue us out of the impasses of contemporary social and political life. Working with a tradition from Benjamin and Marcuse to the late Mark Fisher, Watson shows that a particular form of economic and political theory needs to be combined with his own brand of media studies and pop culture analysis to bolster the causes of the digital Left today. Assessing the defeats of socialist causes over recent years and analysing the digital world of elections and desire, Watson rebuilds a class solidarity from an important history of Marxist theory that can re-invigorate the Left today in the battle against right-wing populism and capitalist media discourse. This ambitious book, taking in everything from conspiracy and memes to economic policy and election campaigns, is a must-read for anyone who wants to join the battle for a better future.' ~ Alfie Bown, Royal Holloway, University of London

"Watson is fast becoming one of the most impressive left analysts of our strange digital era; helping to fill the void left by Mark Fisher's tragic passing. In his new book-part tribute to Fisher, part cultural analysis, part reflections on the Frankfurt school-Watson shows the enduring power of a dialectical approach to capitalist realism and exposes the many ways post-modern neoliberal culture has successfully neutered liberating aesthetics. In the powerful final chapter, Watson rethinks the potential of Frankfurt school critical theory to provide answers, and sketches an inspiring vision of what the acid-left can be. We may not have all the answers, but all of us should be very grateful Watson is on hand to help us ask the right kinds of questions." ~ Matt McManus, Professor of Politics at Whitman College

"In the wake of Trump, the pandemic, as well as notable social democratic electoral losses in the West, Mike Watson is doing something that is much needed; he's asking the right questions. The meme wars have indeed coincided with a perilous fog of confusion and tension among those invested in emancipatory politics, but Watson's analysis of such trends is a luminous source of clarity." ~ David Stockdale, Nightmare Masterclass Podcaster and YouTuber