Look back at the 20th century. The 1960s had the space race, psychedelic utopias, and radical civil rights dreams. The 1970s had punk’s "No Future" (which was, paradoxically, a future-oriented rebellion). The 1980s had cyberpunk and neon-lit dystopias. Each decade had a distinct sonic and visual signature.
In the post-Cold War 1990s, Francis Fukuyama declared "The End of History." Fisher translated this for culture: if history is over, so is genuine novelty. All that remains is to endlessly reprocess the archive. mark fisher slow cancellation of the future
At first glance, the term sounds like science fiction—a gradual erasure of tomorrow by some unseen force. But for Fisher, it was not a metaphor. It was a clinical diagnosis of 21st-century culture. Fisher argued that sometime around the turn of the millennium, society lost its ability to generate new visions of the future. We did not run out of time; we ran out of imagination . Look back at the 20th century
If you feel a vague melancholy, a sense that time is moving but nothing is changing—that is the slow cancellation. The 1980s had cyberpunk and neon-lit dystopias
In 2014, the British writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher coined a phrase that has only grown more resonant with each passing year: