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Hello and welcome to Behind the News, my name is Doug Henwood, two guests today joined by a theme of utopias and dystopias.

That they share a first name as pure coincidence.

We'll hear from Matt Coo-Hoon on Mark Fisher, key to a reissue of Fisher's 2014 SI collection, Ghosts of My Life.

And then we'll hear the Geographer Matt Huber's critique of a couple of schemes to beat climate catastrophe that seem more dystopic than utopic.

Mark Fisher was an English writer whose work focused on popular culture, politics, and collective psychology.

After many years of fighting depression, he took his own life in 2017 at the age of 48.

Fisher achieved internet fame a few years earlier with an essay exiting the vampire castle, which criticized a callout culture that had become a prominent manifestation of the online left,

of which hunting moralism and an atmosphere of snarky resentment had occluded all possibilities of transformative solidarity.

It was not well received in some circles.

Sadly, it could be applied to much of our virtual political culture today with little modification.

Fisher is also known for several books, including capitalist realism, his term for as he put it, the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system,

but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.

His 2014 essay collection, Ghosts of My Life, has just been reissued by zero books with a forward by Matt Kahun, and a post-grip by the Music Critics Simon Reynolds.

We're now joined by Matt Kahun, a name that's spelled with quite a few more letters than you might guess, CoLQUHOUN.

He's a writer and photographer from Hall, UK.

He is the author of Egress on Morning Mullen Colley in Mark Fisher, and the editor of Mark Fisher's post-capitalist desire, the final lectures.

Currently based in Newcastle upon time, he blocks it to ZenoGothic, that's X-E-N-O-Gothic.com.

Matt Kahun.

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