system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How did Mark Fisher explain the ravages of the Internet and social media as being the products of capitalist realism?

I remember seeing clips of Fisher and reading of his criticising the Internet and social media for contributing to the siphoning off of our critical faculties, our autonomy and our attention spans, especially as derivative of the broader, flawed capitalist realist sphere within which they were arguably  conceived.  What I don't recall, or can manage to explain, is how he *explicitly* did/might have explained the nature of social media in feeding off us in this way as being a **product** of capitalist realism (and thus the sort of thing which, if criticised for the reasons above, would amount, by implication, to something of a critique of capitalist realism more generally). How can the evils of social media, to put it bluntly, be explained in terms of their being the product of capitalist realism?
gpt
I don't think social media can be explained as being merely a *product* of capitalist realism for Fisher. One of the insights that Fisher takes from D&G and Land is that technology is fundamentally driven by libidinal desires. For Fisher, the image of authentic living free from technology is naive anarchism. We can't just chalk up all the technology we use every day to being a product of ideological or psychological manipulation, we use it because it caters to our own desires. One of the most fundamental desires that modern technology caters is the need for public space and community. Of course, social media cannot truly fulfill those desires and in fact probably makes things worse but that is precisely the point where a genuine leftist project should step in, to cater to those unfilled techno-libidinal desires - to provide a true sense of community and not the market-logic version of community that Facebook gives us. So for Fisher, any leftist project that can not account for the desires that cause people's need for Iphones and Facebook and what not is doomed to fail. That means that one of the key tasks in the fight against capitalist realism is precisely to re-libidinize culture, to bring back a genuine excitement and edge to popular culture and technology, think of counter culture in 60s San Francisco for example. This theme of libido, technology and counter culture is also central to Fisher's very last text, the introduction to his unfinished book *Acid Communism*, published posthumously last year.