Cybertime Crisis Revisited
Looking for jobs in 2024 prompted me to rewatch a Mark Fisher lecture again
My summer of 2024 was defined by finishing my MA degree and starting to look for work, in a half- or full time capacity, ideally with employment benefits. After nearly two months of searching, 20 applications and not a single job interview, I must say it is not going great. With this frustration in mind, I revisited the lecture Cybertime Crisis, which Mark Fisher gave in 2013.
The lecture was part of a studium generale lecture series in Gent, Belgium, where Mark Fisher was invited as a guest speaker. This lecture is one of my favorite Mark Fisher lectures that are available on Youtube. Albeit the audio quality could be better; there is a running gag that none of Mark Fisher’s lectures have good audio or video quality, which is kind of ironic because he wrote so much about ‘the metaphyisics of crackle’, of hauntology, of imperfect and fading memories.
The Mark Fisher who Mattie Colquhoun on their blog Xenogothic described as being perceived as “exceedingly pessimistic and furious about the state of things […] a depressive whose melancholy got in his own way” is also very much visible in this talk.
Starting from his own experience, Mark Fisher describes what it means to work precariously:
“To be self-employed (as most creative people are) is to be forced to think like an entrepreneur at all times. Anytime you’re not making money is a waste of time – this causes guilt and anxiety. If you remove securities from people (as the neoliberal policies since the late 1970s have done), they don’t suddenly start to become creative, but they are forced to put all their creative energy into finding ways to make money. And these circumstances are artificially induced!”
What I always appreciated with Mark Fisher is his ability to relate recent developments to his theories (as he was looking for new styles or trends to develop he was of course looking at all the recent things). In 2013, he related the ‘hunt for jobs’, which the younger generation has to go through, to the brutal competition of the Hunger Games. This happens so often with Mark Fisher, that he has a refreshing or interesting take on something that most people already know, but which makes them see the thing in a different light.
As I type this, I identify with this precarious feeling, yet still catch myself falling into the habit of trying to blame me, on an individual level, for not finding the right jobs. Maybe there is a really good job offer with employment benefits for a creative person just waiting around the next corner of the internet, I just haven’t found it yet. Still, the suspicion is growing, there aren’t secure jobs like this anymore. All the jobs that I see online do offer what Mark Fisher calls in this lecture “an inertial frenzy of activity where nothing happens”. Check results, manage others, improve experiences, that is what I usually read in the ads. And as I evaluate all these jobs and my chances of experiencing fulfillment in them, I identify with the group of Belgian students in their early to mid-twenties, who are Mark Fisher’s audience in the video. Talking directly to them, Mark Fisher furiously repeats one point over and over again: Our generation (not his) has been deprived.
It is interesting to see where Mark Fisher goes with this kind of shattering diagnosis, saying that this is mirrored and reflected in forms of dreaming that people have come up with. In the lecture he brings up The Unconsoled, a novel by Kazuo Ishguro, which reads like an anxiety dream about constantly being deflected from the things you really want to do. When looking for jobs, there is also this sense of deflection in my mind, a nagging voice asking ‘Have you looked there? Have you looked here? Have you searched for these terms?’, deflecting me from being in the moment or enjoying the things I really want to do.
Finally, there is the thread binding everything together: Cybertime Crisis. The demands of cyberspace are infinite and we feel them every morning as we check our phone, says Mark Fisher in 2013. Every morning I have like five emails with shitty new job listings from Doors Open, Linkedin or Stepstone. Although it is important to say that cyberspace does not equal the internet, one could say that the internet is part of cyberspace as in being part of what William Gibson referred to as a consensual hallucination. We spend time online (which is carefully measured and evaluated by entities out of our perception) and engage into stuff that we ascribe sense to, like having an idea how a proper job offer has to look like. We share our thoughts and impressions on social media, full of ecstasy for reward (Fisher namedrops Baudrillard’s Ecstasy of Communication there and says that book describes very accurately the experience of being on Twitter in 2013). Yet, taking a step back from this hallucination and becoming ‘lucid’ means to gain the insight that there are limits to this ecstasy, with simply no good jobs existing anymore. Thus, cyberspace includes offline capitalism as well.
In addition to being lucid in cyberspace, we would have to deflect our dreams again into different realms. In opposition to The Unconsoled, Mark Fisher introduces the novel A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest, which is about a collective dream simulation that people have in Wessex in 1977. There, the potential of collective dreams is clearly visible as the people in the novel do not want to leave the dream. Perhaps we need more input for collective dreams again in our reality, to get back to the dream we have been deprived of. For me, this would be structural safety for creative jobs, education for adults, music and movie journalism, and so on, simply put: Everything that invites one to dream.
