“Value is too valuable to be left to capital.” —Brian Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value

The creepypasta meme referred to as The Backrooms — a collection of first-person visuals of endlessly self-replicating liminal spaces — would have been textual catnip for the writer and critic Mark Fisher.

Low-culture, horror-adjacent imagery, hauntological aesthetics, user-generated media, boring dystopia, claustrophobia, the weird, the eerie — all of these things were right up Fisher’s street.

In his 2013 book Ghosts of My Life, Fisher wrote about the traumatizing specter that the British TV series Sapphire & Steel represented for him as a young person. The dialogue delivered by a woman in a simulation of a World War II-era roadside diner during the show’s finale could serve today as a tagline for every bit of Backrooms-related content:

This is the trap, this is nowhere, and it’s forever.

The dearth of viable alternatives to capitalism was obviously front-and-centre to Fisher’s perennially recurring problematic — the ambient global sense of “anachronism and inertia,” he wrote.

In our increasingly technological, interconnected, and neoliberal world, lines of flight were becoming fewer and further between and there was, as Fisher feared, simply no escape: from mental illness, from socioeconomic class, from capitalist ideology, and ultimately, from self-destruction.

Also known by his blogging alias k-punk, Mark Fisher died by suicide on 13 January 2017. To think of the avalanche of crises that have befallen the world since his demise — the coronavirus pandemic, two new wars, cascading climate catastrophes, Trump 2.0 — is also to acknowledge that Fisher, as fragile as he seemed to be, may not have happily survived for long into the new millennium’s second decade.

And yet Fisher’s writing during his lifetime was never as popular, prescient, and indispensable as it has become in the ensuing eight years. To grimly adapt an adage of ancient folk wisdom, the best time to plant an apple tree was 20 years ago.

Had he only known that he would become a household name, perhaps Fisher would have gone on living. And still, in death at age 48, he achieved the sort of melancholy immortality bestowed upon the “27-Club” legends. A paradox.

What Fisher foresaw, and described more eloquently than most of his contemporaries (the verbose impenetrability of Slavoj Žižek, for instance, or Fredric Jameson’s rigid prose) was the slow cancellation of the future.

This was more than the No Future slogan of Maggie’s Sex Pistols-era Britain, or even the trend toward retromania during the early aughts that Simon Reynolds diagnosed. This was the wholesale erasure of future shock and its mutation into a contemporary form of hypernormalization.

The past would at once reiterate infinitely inside the present and be masked behind a flurry of superficial novelty in the form of revisionist history. It is no surprise that nine of the top ten grossing films of 2024 were either franchise reboots or sequels.

The question then becomes: does the public consume sameness because that is all that producers are serving, or does repetition of resemblance satiate some dormant and deep-seated desire in the zeitgeist?  

An inkling of an answer comes from late-capitalism’s nowhere-forever modus operandi. Perpetual economic growth relies upon the exponential exploitation of systems of value. And value itself cannot afford to be defined as anything beyond economic.

For instance, a Hollywood studio has to achieve ever-higher box-office receipts each year, making original cinematic stories progressively riskier. Furthermore, the stories themselves must represent and ideologically reinforce the profit-driven system that produces them.

The cultural value of prospective arthouse sleeper hits like, say, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, is sacrificed for the surefire financial success of another Godfather. Hence Deadpool & Wolverine and the fourth installment of Despicable Me.

The Backrooms simulates the illusion of variation amidst mindless proliferation. And while proliferation is abstract, ceaseless proliferation is the consequence of capitalist realism.

However, what’s at stake is more than just an indie filmmaker’s hypothetical oeuvre, the possibility of another Coppola breaking into the mainstream. Because capitalism incentivizes the worst possible human impulses, it becomes more profitable to escalate ethical dissolution than to elevate consciousness.

This is distinct from the panic of moral decay — Leonard Cohen’s dire warnings of “crack and anal sex” are the least of our concerns right now. Rather, capitalism makes it economically disadvantageous, for lack of a better descriptor, to do the right thing.

Think of the most handsomely remunerated professions and name one that benefits the common good more than individual advancement. Everyone can clearly see that the endgame is one kid in the playground holding all of the marbles. And we remain powerless to visualize much less mobilize any viable alternative.

When Mark Fisher died, he stopped imagining an escape route from the consolidation of capital, the impossibility of conceiving of value outside of monetary wealth. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I see obvious examples in art, which most often is functionally useless, but always has the potential to possess immeasurable value that transcends currency.

The importance of art is wholly incommensurate with its price tag. Like love, art and its experience can be simultaneously worthless and priceless. Art in its very existence gestures toward the dialectical evolution beyond capitalism, that which both Karl Marx and Jesus commanded, the triumph of the irrational, the immediate cancellation of the immediate, forever.

Mark Fisher co-founded Repeater, the imprint that published my books. But beyond that, I didn’t know him. Nonetheless, not a day goes by that I don’t think of him or read his work or wonder what he would have made of this or that. The world is a better place for having had Fisher in it, if even temporarily. I expect to encounter his ghost someday in one of my Father’s many mansions.

The work now is to confront capital’s metaphorical and virtual backrooms and reorient them into the real. Acknowledging that we are hopelessly lost, but making good time, is the first tentative step upon a path toward an improved future renewed.◼︎

_{Cover image: The original Backrooms image posted on 4chan.}