Flatline Constructs

A philosophy of cyberspace and its aesthetics, exploring the ways in which new media machines are transforming humanity from the Outside.

Completed in 1999 during the era of the cult phenomenon that was the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Mark Fisher’s PhD thesis Flatline Constructs presents a rare glimpse into the philosophical core of the early internet age. Drawing on cultural icons from William Gibson to David Cronenberg, Marx to Deleuze, Fisher establishes the foundations for a new materialism enriched by the tech revolution. His task is simple: to explore where fiction and reality collide, and to present a gothic vision for philosophy where life and death are never truly far apart.

Flatline Constructs presents the groundwork for understanding Fisher’s enduring love of digital culture and eerie aesthetic sensibilities. Be it the horrors of Capitalist Realism and its “zombification” of consciousness, the weirdness of an inhuman outside in The Weird and the Eerie, the cultural technics of Ghosts of My Life, or the cyber-utopianism of Acid Communism, it all leads back to this first strike. Mark Fisher is still calling to our troubled present, from beyond the flatline.