theory → postweb capitalist realism
Key concepts: digital attention, platform economy, predatory vision, cognitive circuitry hijacking, perception manipulation
1. tech business disconnecting people
2. normalisation of
Connecting People
The biggest promise of information technology was connection: people in the 21st century were supposed to be more in touch than ever before. We were promised empathy and compassion for everyone and their neighbour, and of course their environment. The World Wide Web was going to be our cozy home, for the whole species to inhabit together like a big spider family. As we now know, that did not happen. Instead, the world has become hyperpolarised — economically, politically, ideologically. Chronically online is an expression rapidly losing its meaning; it is now simply expected that any socially active person should be constantly present in some form of cyberspace. When someone goes offline for even a couple of days, we start to worry. We are hyperconnected to the cloud but tragically disconnected from each other — and even more so from ourselves.
In the early 2000s, Nokia, the largest cellphone manufacturer at the time, had a catchy marketing slogan: “Connecting People”, famously accompanied by an image of two hands reaching for each other. The idea of the mobile phone as a symbol of connection has since been engraved in the mass consciousness, and most innovations in that field have been presented to us through the lens of deep (fake) social connection. Look at any Apple or Facebook commercial, and you’ll see the same idea repackaged and resold to us again and again — separated family members calling each other from different countries via FaceTime, coworkers collaborating efficiently and effortlessly in virtual workspaces, teenagers bonding through social media and expressing themselves creatively through AI filters and animated emojis. Big Tech has been telling us the same story for almost two decades — that they are in the business of connecting people. And we are still listening, even though we know it isn’t true.
The real agenda of these corporations has been exposed countless times, on the biggest scale. The problem is that when it comes to information, the biggest scale itself has been appropriated, bought, and paid for by these very companies a long time ago. With a sleight of hand, every revelation about Big Tech spying on users, trading private data, hijacking attention, and manipulating emotions through cognitive psychology becomes an international sensation on major media platforms, provokes a controlled outrage and ultimately gets normalised, taking its place in the postmodern media canon. Hardly anyone believes these companies prioritise the public good or care about fostering healthy social connections, but nobody really cares anymore either. It’s yesterday’s news — an outdated sensation that barely deserves any attention past its short expiration date. In times of constant turmoil, at the peak of a mental health crisis, we act as the rational and social animals we are — dismissing alarmist narratives if the public consensus tells us that it’s fine to do so, even if we know that this public consensus is artificially controlled and disconnected from reality.
Too Much Information
Platform capitalism has led us into the era of information fatigue and societal apathy at scale. This pattern of numbed indifference is evident in the way we conceptualise climate crisis as a society: while we nominally accept climate scientists as authoritative sources, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the severity of their evidence and our collective concern. Each new report documenting biodiversity loss, rising sea levels, or record-breaking temperatures produces less public reaction than the last. The bar for novelty and shock value is set higher than ever before, and anything even slightly lower than that is deemed yesterday’s news and given low priority by default. This accelerated news cycle, deliberately exploited by political figures who overwhelm the media landscape with constant controversy, transforms even the most egregious violations into ephemeral spectacles. When every day brings a new outrage, last week's constitutional crisis becomes merely a faded memory. The revelation of corruption, conflicts of interest, or outright lies from officials once had the power to end careers and reshape governments; now such exposés barely register as newsworthy (unless packaged as entertainment).
Perhaps most troubling is our resigned acceptance of misinformation itself. The emergence of sophisticated deepfakes and AI-generated content has accelerated the collapse of shared reality, and this existential threat to democratic discourse is met with a collective shrug. Such a reaction makes sense: when everything on the news is outrageous and potentially fake, nothing seems particularly worthy of outrage. The information landscape we inhabit is so vast and contradictory that exhaustion becomes a natural response. This is the essence of the post-truth condition — not that truth has ceased to exist, but that we have ceased to believe finding it matters. The constant bombardment of crisis narratives has conditioned us to treat each new catastrophe as merely another data point in an endless stream of bad news, diminishing our capacity for the sustained attention that meaningful change would require.
This apathy we experience is a direct product of attention capitalism's fundamental architecture. What is often deemed as generational character trait (eg “doomer” or “blackpill” mindset) is actually a systems-level outcome, engineered through platforms designed to fragment consciousness and commodify human attention. The media landscape itself accelerates this process through algorithmic recommendation systems that privilege emotional intensity over informational value. News about IDF bombing another hospital in Gaza competes with Elon Musk's latest meme tweets in the same attention marketplace, flattening all content into equivalent units of engagement. This equivalence transforms even existential threats into mere entertainment products with diminishing half-lives. The "firehose of falsehood" approach, mastered by certain political actors to the point of landing them in the White House, deliberately overwhelms fact-checking mechanisms and exploits our cognitive limitations. When confronted with contradictory information from multiple sources, many retreat into epistemological nihilism – the exhausted conclusion that determining truth is either impossible or simply not worth the effort. This resignation serves power by effectively neutralizing accountability; if nothing can be definitively known, then nothing can be definitively condemned, and no one has to bear responsibility. Except, of course, that everyone still has to face the consequences.
There Is No Alternative
“TINA” is a slogan that captured the essence of neoliberalism and layed the ground for the political landscape that Mark Fisher called capitalist realism. In his own words, “capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable“ — any viable alternative expanding that horizon immediately falls victim to the capitalist machine the moment it’s thought of. The system's greatest triumph is not just dominating the present but colonizing our conception of the future.
In Germany, similar thinking manifested in the concept of alternativlos, frequently associated with Angela Merkel's policies during the eurozone crisis. This framing of policies as without alternative proved deeply unpopular among many Germans, with alternativlos being declared the Unwort des Jahres ("unword" of the year) in 2010 - reflecting public frustration with the narrowing of political discourse. During this period of economic debate, the AfD emerged in 2013, initially as a Eurosceptic party challenging Germany's approach to the eurozone crisis. The “alternative” in AfD might not have referenced the “alternative” in TINA directly, but they indeed rhymed — eventually getting blended together in the public consciousness. Monopolising the very notion of alternative might be AfD’s greatest achievement — if you are not happy with the status quo, the only other option on the menu is a far-right dystopia.
The Unwort des Jahres selections, wildly popular in Germany, provide a revealing window into the county’s political anxieties since reunification: from CDU’s alternativlos in 2010 it made its way to Remigration and Biodeutsch in 2023 and 2024. These far-right buzzwords of the recent years emerged almost exclusively from AfD rhetoric, as the party shifted toward openly nationalist and anti-immigration positions and stopped shying away from comparisons to the nazi party. The far-right has effectively positioned itself as the primary opposition to the status quo, creating a troubling dynamic where rejecting their vision seems to reinforce the neoliberal assertion that no real alternatives exist. The political spectrum increasingly presents a false binary: either accept the current system as inevitable or embrace nationalism as the only viable alternative. This narrows our political imagination precisely when we need to envision new possibilities beyond this restrictive framing.
So how exactly did we get here? Ironically, the question itself hints at the answer. This question is thrown around so often that one can argue this mode of perception is now the default mode of human existence — like missing your stop while scrolling social media on a bus, only to look up and find yourself somewhere unexpected. This collective bus ride feels like a stream of oblivious distraction with scattered moments of acute self-awareness, and the number of stops keeps decreasing. Our attention is pulled in multiple directions simultaneously; we are used to being constantly distracted, and even profoundly important developments can only capture our undivided attention briefly.
Precorporation and Interpassivity
In today’s oversaturated media landscape, “exposed” means “normalised”. We tend to mistake exposure for resolution, believing that simply bringing issues to light means they have been addressed, when in reality these revelations are quickly absorbed into our collective consciousness without prompting meaningful change. This cognitive sleight-of-hand is commonplace in our information ecosystem: we get triggered by a news post, our emotional reaction is milked and monetised by the corresponding platform, and its algorithm swiftly redirects our attention to the next item, perpetuating the cycle. Most modern scandals follow a predictable arc: the shocking exposé, the flurry of outrage, and then — the big nothing. The investigation into political corruption that dominated headlines for days vanishes completely within weeks. The revelation of corporate malfeasance is soon replaced by the company's latest product launch. The war crimes documented in high definition become just another entry in an endless catalog of atrocities, with the names of devastated regions reduced to hashtags on news feeds.
Fisher's notion of precorporation crystallizes the terminal condition of cultural expression under late capitalism—not merely the absorption of once-radical elements, but their anticipatory neutralization. "What we are dealing with now," Fisher asserts, "is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead... the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture" (2009, p. 9). This precorporative logic — operating at the level of desire-production itself — renders even the most seemingly transgressive gestures already-accounted-for within capitalism's predictive apparatus. They are merely pre-formatted "rebellion products" within capitalism's affective marketplace. The radical edge is blunted before it can cut—predetermined, calculated, and thus defanged of truly disruptive potential.
An example from popular culture that Fisher uses to illustrate this phenomenon is Wall-E — a critique of consumer capitalism and corporations, produced by Disney. This type of content perfectly exemplifies interpassivity: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, so that we can keep consuming with a clear conscience. Like canned laughter in a sitcom, it interacts with itself so that the viewer can remain passive yet feel involved. In recent years, the format really took off: major studios have been producing such interpassive content at extremely high rates. Black Mirror, an antology show painting techno-dystopias of platform capitalism, has been acquired by Netflix — the biggest platform in the business. Severance, a show about workplace alienation and corporate control, streams exclusively on Apple TV Plus — a platform run by one of the world’s largest corporate exploiters. HBO dramas like The White Lotus and Succession, exploring class tension and liberal hypocrisy, ultimately reinforce the status quo by letting viewers enjoy the spectacle of critique without requiring any action. The system mocks itself, so we don't have to.
Com Commodified
In September 2020, Nathan Apodaca posted a 22-second video on TikTok where he is seen skateboarding on an empty road drinking cranberry juice from a half gallon plastic bottle, lipsyncing to Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams playing in the background. Nathan, a 42 year old Native American (Northern Arapaho)-Mexican Idaho resident, was on his way to work at the potato warehouse when he found his car had broken down and jumped on a board to make it on time. The TikTok ended up being viral, making him into another overnight success story and internet sensation. Soon to follow were late night shows appearances, mainstream media interviews, and commerical collabs with big brands. The brand that produced that cranberry juice, whose sales immediately skyrocketed, got Nathan a new car and a lifelong supply of their product.
In the digital marketplace of affect, “vibes” emerge as the ultimate commodity—ephemeral emotional textures packaged as lo-fi beats, Instagram sunsets, and TikTok nostalgia cores. Metamodernism’s pendulum swings here: consumers oscillate between craving curated authenticity (a cottagecore daydream, a neon-lit “liminal space”) and cynically acknowledging its synthetic seams. Algorithms monetize yearning, selling serenity or rebellion as interchangeable SKUs. Yet, within this transaction lies a paradoxical hope—that even prefab vibes might spark fleeting moments of resonance. The result? A culture equally fluent in hashtagging #aesthetic and deconstructing its emptiness, embodying the metamodern dance of buying in, winking, and buying in again.
Cognitive dissonance, mind trick — we thought about it so we feel like we have dealt with it.
WALLE, severance etc
Imperatives of Capital
The system speaks to us in hypothetical imperatives. It does not have to communicate with us directly — its representatives have permeated every aspect of our lives, taking on a role of whoever is closest to us at any particular moment when it needs to deliver its message. When a school teacher tells a student that they have to work harder for a good grade, it is hypothetically implied that the student has a desire to get a good grade, that is in turn driven by their desire to have a high GPA, that is in turn driven by their desire to go to a good college, and so on — the track is so beaten that it seems vulgar to even follow through. But if we were to follow it through all the way to the dead end, would we stumble upon a categorical imperative, a core moral principle that reflects our society’s most intrinsic values? And if so, whose imperative would it be — that of the student or that of the teacher, or are we to imply that their moral compasses are perfectly synchronised at that categorical level? The student might disagree with the teacher on every level and completely disregard this imperative, but what is important is that the student understands its hypothetical direction. Intuitively, we all know why we ought to study well, work hard, earn and save money — it is because all of it can be logically traced down to the categorical imperative that our society holds true. We don’t have to adopt this core morality but we absolutely have to understand or at least intuitively feel it, in order to even be considered members of the said society. A rebellious student can refuse to work harder and instead embrace a lower grade, while still being a perfectly functional member of society, but if they do not understand the hypothetical imperative behind working hard, if they do not seem to know why they need to work hard, they will likely be diagnosed and medicated as mentally deviant.
For something so foundational, this categorical imperative is surprisingly difficult to articulate, at least for a regular person. Its abstraction is present in the cultural canon, bearing different names but most famously captured in the concept of the American dream. The idea that anyone, regardless of background, can achieve success through hard work — is essentially the ideological engine of American capitalism. Being a unit of culture, American dream is closer to a meme than it is to an actual social dogma, like a painting of the real thing. If we were to define the real thing through the political or socioeconomic lens, we would probably end up at something similar to “continuous growth and accumulation of capital”. Going back to the student-teacher example, this has two implications: the first way to understand it is to think that the student needs to work hard because it is ultimately implied that the student wants to grow and accumulate capital. The second, more logical way is not to project growth and capital accumulation on the student and instead keep them where they belong: the student needs to work hard so that the capitalist society can grow and capital can be accumulated. It is neither the student’s nor the teacher’s business to accumulate capital — the actual implication goes //// beyond their personal aspirations and into the broader function they serve within the system. The student’s diligence is not just about securing a future for themselves but about sustaining the economic machine that necessitates continuous expansion. The teacher, in turn, does not merely evaluate academic performance but ensures the perpetuation of this cycle by reinforcing the implicit demand for productivity.
This is where the true nature of the categorical imperative reveals itself — not as an ethical principle rooted in individual autonomy, but as an operational necessity of the system. The moralising discourse around hard work and success masks its real function: to maintain the structural integrity of a society that depends on economic growth as its fundamental logic. This imperative does not ask whether individuals genuinely desire growth or wealth; it presupposes that they do, or that they must.
The Neoliberal God (and other bureaucrats)
roman inquisition reduced to a bureaucratic body
Mark Fisher argues in Capitalist Realism that neoliberalism isn’t just about free markets—it thrives on bureaucratic expansion, especially through compliance, audits, and self-surveillance. The transformation of the Roman Inquisition into a bureaucratic institution mirrors this: once a direct enforcer of doctrine through trials and punishments, it became a paperwork-heavy body regulating theological disputes in a more procedural, technocratic way. Instead of inquisitors burning heretics, we get committees reviewing theological papers. Completely different method and not nearly as much influence, but the nature of control itself has remained.
The Catholic Church → Global Media Networks & PR Management
The Catholic Church historically had direct, violent control (Inquisitions, Crusades, forced conversions).
Today, its power is more bureaucratic and media-driven—handling scandals (e.g., sex abuse cases) through PR strategies, legal teams, and internal reviews rather than direct suppression of critics.
Instead of burning heretics, it now manages reputations and influences global politics via lobbying and diplomacy.
Colonial Administrations → IMF / World Bank / Development NGOs
Direct colonial rule ended, but control didn’t vanish—it shifted to economic and financial structures.
The IMF and World Bank enforce debt and austerity policies that keep former colonies in a state of dependency (often called “neocolonialism”), but through contracts, economic incentives, and political pressure rather than direct military occupation.
Similarly, Western-funded NGOs often regulate governance and economic policies in the Global South in ways that echo colonial paternalism, but under the guise of "development" and "human rights."
Billion Dollar Heroes
Within today’s market-driven society, the correlation between an individual’s financial status and the commercial success of their biographical works reveals fascinating insights into what our culture values and celebrates. An examination of biography sales data demonstrates a significant relationship between net worth and reader interest, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that elevates business titans to cultural hero status while relegating many substantive contributors to relative obscurity. The publishing industry demonstrates clear preferences for subjects with substantial wealth, particularly those in the business world. Biographies of billionaires consistently outperform those of equally or more societally impactful individuals in scientific, academic, or social justice realms. This disparity manifests not just in sales figures but in the sheer volume of works dedicated to wealthy business figures compared to their counterparts in other fields.
Warren Buffett, with a current (2025) net worth of approximately $150 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, represents perhaps the most striking example of how extreme wealth correlates with biographical interest. The publishing phenomenon surrounding Buffett is unprecedented for a non-political figure. There are currently 47 books in print that simply have Buffett’s name in the title, a distinction that is matched only by major political figures and the Dalai Lama. One of those books sold 700000 copies in the first week at $35 a copy — that is about twice as much as the average for a 200 pages paperback ($9.99-$18.99). If you sell billionaires as modern heroes, you might as well charge a premium.
The sales disparity between biographies of business figures and those of other significant contributors suggests that in our market-oriented society, billionaires have assumed the cultural position once occupied by religious figures, political leaders, and military heroes. Within a capitalist framework that measures value primarily through market performance, biography sales provide perhaps the clearest quantitative metric of cultural heroism. By this measure, today’s most celebrated figures are unquestionably those who have accumulated vast personal wealth, particularly through business innovation and financial acumen.
Techbroligarchy
As many other Gen-Z neologisms, “broligarchy” might sound too silly to be taken seriously — not exactly a word you would expect to hear from economists or social scientists. Yet it has made its way from twitter and 4chan to mainstream press and even scientific journals (like GreenLeft and Counterpunch). The term is just too catchy not to use, and it is hard to come up with a more fitting one for this phenomenon that is undoubtedly central to the modern day Western politics and economy.
CCRU
This point of view might seem incredibly bleak. It certainly was for Fisher — after a decade of battling severe depression, he took his own life in 2017, which, as horrible as it may sound, did not come as a huge surprise to many of his readers. The issues he grappled with — capitalist realism, the collapse of alternative futures, and the psychic toll of neoliberalism — were not just intellectual concerns but deeply personal struggles. One could clearly see the progression of his thought drifting toward fatalistic acceptance and away from hope, as most of the actions he called for in his early works — such as collective organization, cultural resistance, or reclaiming the future — gradually gave way to a sense of paralysis. By the end, his writing often reflected a haunted awareness of being trapped in a system that rendered meaningful change nearly impossible.
Capitalism’s radical acceleration, which rendered most of Fisher’s early hopes obsolete, unfolded in parallel with — and often in accordance with — Nick Land’s hyperstitional philosophy. Land, with whom Fisher co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in th 1990’s, envisioned a future where human agency would be overridden by machinic processes, with capital itself becoming an autonomous, intelligent force dragging the world toward an inhuman horizon.
Commodification of the Vibes
In September 2020, Nathan Apodaca posted a 22-second video on TikTok where he is seen skateboarding on an empty road drinking cranberry juice from a half gallon plastic bottle, lipsyncing to Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams playing in the background. Nathan, a 42 year old Native American (Northern Arapaho)-Mexican Idaho resident, was on his way to work at the potato warehouse when he found his car had broken down and jumped on a board to make it on time. The TikTok ended up being viral, making him into another overnight success story and internet sensation. Soon to follow were late night shows appearances, mainstream media interviews, and commerical collabs with big brands. The brand that produced that cranberry juice, whose sales immediately skyrocketed, got Nathan a new car and a lifelong supply of their product.
This “success story” is told by the mainstream media in an overwhelmingly positive tone. Nathan’s personal attire is indeed nothing but positive — in every appearance when he is asked what he thinks to be the reason of this success, he mentions vibes — a word so algorithmically optimised that it is more a tiktok hashtag than a word. The story, as told by the media, goes something like this: Nathan spread good vibes with the whole world and was rewarded for it with a new life, an American dream in action, with Fleetwood Mac’s soundtrack.
In the digital marketplace of affect, “vibes” emerge as the ultimate commodity—ephemeral emotional textures packaged as lo-fi beats, Instagram sunsets, and TikTok nostalgia cores. Metamodernism’s pendulum swings here: consumers oscillate between craving curated authenticity (a cottagecore daydream, a neon-lit “liminal space”) and cynically acknowledging its synthetic seams. Algorithms monetize yearning, selling serenity or rebellion as interchangeable SKUs. Yet, within this transaction lies a paradoxical hope—that even prefab vibes might spark fleeting moments of resonance. The result? A culture equally fluent in hashtagging #aesthetic and deconstructing its emptiness, embodying the metamodern dance of buying in, winking, and buying in again.
Mainstream media framed it as a feel-good, bootstraps fairy tale—vibes rewarded, American Dream validated. Nathan himself seemed to agree. In interviews, he attributes it all to “good vibes,” a phrase as casually tossed around as it is algorithmically optimized. The narrative is simple: emit positivity, get discovered, get rewarded. No critique necessary. Fleetwood Mac plays softly in the background.
But in this transactional affect economy, “vibes” are not merely moods—they are commodities. Fleeting emotional textures are packaged and sold: lo-fi beats, Instagram sunsets, TikTok's nostalgia cores. This is where metamodernism thrives—caught in the oscillation between sincerity and irony, craving authenticity while simultaneously dissecting its fabrication. What looks like spontaneity is often pre-curated; what feels genuine is algorithmically suggested. Aesthetic becomes SKU.
Algorithms don’t just monetize attention—they monetize yearning. Whether it's tranquility or rebellion, the mood is market-ready. Serenity becomes a scrollable product. Liminal spaces become buyable. And still, in the midst of this looped commodification, there’s a residual hope: that even prefab vibes might accidentally resonate, that even mass-produced affect might evoke something real.
In the culture of vibe capitalism, we’ve learned to perform the dance: buy in, wink, and buy in again.