By the mid 2000s, the late Mark Fisher had turned a small corner of the internet into the site of some of the most searching cultural criticism around. Blogging under the alias k-punk, his range was expansive. Blairism, Goldie, The Hunger Games and Amy Winehouse might all fall under his critical gaze on any given day of the week. At its best, Fisher’s writing was exhilarating. His posts were like lightning strikes, capable of instantly illuminating hitherto hidden aspects of the political and cultural landscape.

Fisher was in his thirties at the time and working as an FE lecturer in Kent. As he put it in an interview in 2010, he had ‘started blogging as a way of getting back into writing after the traumatic experience of doing a PhD’. It worked. His thought certainly bears the intellectual imprint of those intense, heady postgraduate years, studying philosophy at the University of Warwick and knocking around with a collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. It all culminated in his 1999 PhD thesis, Flatline constructs: Gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction. And it’s clear that Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche, not to mention the likes of Baudrillard, Zizek and Lacan, all continued to infuse his thought and writing. But while many of his academic contemporaries lost themselves to pedantry and career advancement, Fisher used all this ‘theory’ to actually try to make sense of the world.