Source: Aaron Ross Powell
by Aaron Ross Powell
“In the opening chapter of his book Ghosts of My Life, the Marxist theorist Mark Fisher argues that capitalism has destroyed creativity. That art—and he’s talking mostly about music in the book—has stagnated, that it’s no longer dynamic, but is instead endlessly remixing the past. I’ve always found this passage fascinating, because he’s very much onto something, even if not to quite the degree he imagines, but then he pins the blame in the wrong place. To the extent that we’ve lost the creative spark, in the way Fisher presents it, the culprit really isn’t capitalism. Or neoliberalism. It’s instead, to a rather blameworthy degree, NIMBYism.” (07/29/26)