Manifesting Mark Fisher: Instagram, Network Extension, and the Making of a Decapitalised Film

Abstract

This article sets out an assertion that a mass art project can make a virtue of ‘network extension’ through an Instagram account, to build creative community, new connections, and physical artwork outcomes. We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher is an example of a ‘manifested artwork’, where Fisher’s ideas on capitalism and community are explored through electronic media. We have taken the work of critical theorist, Mark Fisher, and subjected it to a process of détournement, alluding to the work of Guy de Bord and The Situationists. The thing in itself—Fisher’s processed ideas—are reprocessed and held up against the posthumous period between 2017 and now, since he died. The assertion in the work is that while the tools are circumscribed by a set of ‘standards’ and ‘production processes’, this does not delimit them from being employed towards the evolution of embodied and shared actions that develop a counter-narrative or something that eschews the methods of Hollywood or broadcast television documentaries. We just have to learn ways to do this. ‘Decapitalising’ a process, working with human agency and good will, turns the platform of Instagram into a tool of empowerment—reappropriating the algorithm and capturing the collective back from the closed corporate system of control. We see that a form of value is pulled back out of the machinic effects of a proprietary platform.

1. Introduction

The digital age has reshaped how art is produced, shared, and viewed. A major aspect of this is that artworks, once observed in galleries as static forms, are now just as likely to be experienced through the temporalities and spatialities of networked space, or what was often referred to as cyberspace. Duchamp’s ‘Nu descendant un escalier n° 2’ is an often-cited work of the machine age. Created in 1912, the painting shows a nude female figure descending a staircase, more as a temporal diagram of motion, than as a classic work of art. The work is deliberately descriptive in title, echoing the work of his contemporaries—the Italian Futurists. As Duchamp notes,

“The Futurists were also interested in somewhat the same idea, though I was never a Futurist. And of course the motion picture with its cinematic techniques was developing then too. The whole idea of movement, of speed, was in the air.”

At this point, the early 1900s, we begin to see that the fields of cinema and art begin to reference each other. The electric machine of the projector enables us to see thousands of images across the field of vision. The age of media is born.

As McLuhan ([1964] 2001) famously argued, media are not neutral channels but environments that extend human faculties, literally an extension of our emotional space. For McLuhan, electronic media in particular extend human nervous systems across space and time, creating new forms of connection but also new vulnerabilities and problems, as evinced in Jodi Dean’s work on ‘Communicative Capitalism’. Today, Instagram exemplifies this condition: a commercial, algorithmically driven platform owned by Meta, designed for engagement capture, advertising revenue, and data extraction—one that also bars the main function of the internet, to create shared inline links. Yet, as We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher demonstrates, such a platform can be turned against its own logic—used not for monetisation but for collective creativity, solidarity, and critique. It can be manipulated towards other ends, if we deploy the basic function—human extension and shared authorship. Ultimately, it can be redistributive—opening up the potential for further connection, as has been the case with the film that was collectively made.

This paper documents and reflects on the creation of We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher, a 65 min collaborative, meta-fictional film produced over 12 months entirely through an Instagram account. Rather than a linear production pipeline, the project unfolded as a process of “manifestation”—building connections and reaching out to networked strangers—turning conversations into collaborative acts. The result is more than film; it is an evolving thing, an instance of what we have described as a decapitalised art project. It drives towards co-authorship and not extractive labour, forging something that in itself shows a way out of the ‘impasse’ of capitalist realism that Mark Fisher and others describe.

However, the film does engage directly with Fisher’s borrowed concepts—Capitalist Realism, Hauntology, Precarity, and the unfinished sketch of Acid Communism—while enacting them through its mode of production (Fisher 2016a). It also resonates with Dean’s (2009) concept of communicative capitalism, where online interaction serves capitalist accumulation more than democratic exchange.

The central tension in this project is whether such platforms can be repurposed for collective creation rather than extractive commodification or ‘likes’. This essay argues that they can, at least partially, when approached with a strategy of network extension (using McLuhan’s core idea)—a method that explores the connective potential of the medium to generate embodied, offline outcomes—pulling the digital medium back through itself, an inversion back to the human scale and location, a crafting of what we have in front of us.

2. Context: Mark Fisher and the Persistence of Ideas

Mark Fisher (1968–2017) remains a central thinker in critical and cultural theory. His published works Capitalist Realism (Fisher 2009), Ghosts of My Life (2014), and The Weird and the Eerie (Fisher 2016b) connected philosophy, politics, and popular culture in ways that continue to shape academic and artistic discourse. We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher is a film that draws from all three of Fisher’s published texts, utilising them as a framework and source for a new evocation of his ideas in contemporary society. This is timely, given Fisher’s death in 2017 and a generational reengagement with his work.

Fisher’s work draws down from multiple sources, challenging the common accepted processes of academic publishing. Capitalist Realism draws heavily on the work of Jameson (1994) and his well-known phrase “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism,” dating back to his essay ‘Seeds of Time’. In Fisher’s iteration, this becomes “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

It is as if—by extension—Mark Fisher wishes to continue the mythmaking that Hatherley (2024) asserts around this phrase in his obituary of Fredric Jameson. Of course, Fisher pre-deceased the older Jameson. The inflexions and rewrites serve to connect into what we would now call ‘meme culture’, associated with social media platforms. Like Jameson, Fisher created an effective way of doing critical theory through port-manteau word play and hybridisation of existing concepts. This makes theory legible and akin to reading a magazine, as opposed to an academic text. His work reaches out to those who might not engage with critical theory or ‘difficult texts’.

Fisher’s capacity as a communicator is what Beckett (2019) refers to as a “listener and pattern recogniser”. It made him more than a theorist; he was a public intellectual whose work inspired not only scholars but musicians, artists, and activists. To a large degree, this was a consequence of his formidable ability to get around the UK and Europe, influencing and impacting many of those who encountered him.

Mark Fisher’s sudden death in January 2017 intensified the spectral quality of his writing. Acid Communism, the unfinished manuscript he left behind, has increasingly become an emblem of another way forward, an unfinished ‘joke’ pointing towards new collectivist futures beyond capitalist realism. This work still resonates in left-wing activist circles, an idea of what Franco Berardi (2011) describes as a ‘recombinant left’ in his influential book After The Future. As music critic Simon Reynolds observed, Fisher’s influence was already global before his death, but his absence has amplified the urgency of his questions and created new contexts for revision of his ideas.

The spectral nature of Mark Fisher’s writing, in particular after his death, is addressed in the film. Not only does Fisher talk about ‘lost futures’ but he crosses over into his own critical theory, as a spectral presence for new readers and those reengaging with his work. This is particularly resonant for new generations of young people encountering ‘austerity politics’ and the sense that the future they may have been promised, or other generations had, has been denied them. An outcome from the film and its wider impact has been an understanding that Mark Fisher spotted something that is now ‘baked in’ to late capitalist society. This can be seen as an ‘impasse’ or entrapment, as Jodi Dean calls it; however, the metafictional nature of the film attempts to subvert the notion of enclosure by showing, or demonstrating, other actions or forms of agency in its method of production. The “We’ in the film title is deliberately asserting collective agency.

We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher situates itself within this legacy, not as biography or documentary. Instead, it operates as a meta-fictional experiment, threading Fisher’s ideas through fictional narrative and collective voices.

3. The Medium Is the Manifestation (As Method)

The project began with a simple proposition—create a film about Mark Fisher using Instagram and allow the responses to develop the work. Rather than treat the platform as a distribution tool alone, the account itself was imagined as the production and distribution site. In effect, this meant that the ‘behind the scenes’ banal actions, shooting schedules, and screenings were all visible to the followers. This in itself was an inside-out approach, to what is often a closed process. The only things that were excluded related to personal data or issues that referred to Mark Fisher’s close associates and friends. This in itself became a necessary inflexion point for the process and the film, informing what was included or not.

Over 12 months, artists and followers interacted through Direct Messages and reposted fragments. Manifestation was utilised as an approximation of a cultural idea that to speak about something and broadcast it alone, can generate states of interaction or response. This is the core of the work conceptually.

The process followed six principles:

• Deep Dive into Fisher’s Work (a literature review): Fragments from Capitalist Realism, K-Punk, and The Weird and The Eerie were shared to frame discussion. This created a shared research path.
• Direct Interaction: Outreach to Fisher’s associates and contemporaries, such as Jodi Dean, Simon Reynolds, and Andy Beckett. In some cases, agreement was made to interview or use texts. In many cases, this was unsuccessful, as close associates did not want to speak (often out of respect for Mark Fisher).
• Decapitalisation: Participation was voluntary and reciprocal, without needing payment (but copyright remained with the provider). This enabled the whole process; in fact, it could not have been achieved as a finished work without this approach.
• Counter-Capitalist Practice: Treating the platform as a commons rather than a market, perhaps the most important step; this referenced Instagram as a tool of production—‘networked software’ with ‘reach’.
• Networked Production: Building a dispersed team of over 60 contributors across the UK and Europe. This was open-ended and developed through the process of sharing the research.
• Meta-Fictional Frame: The character “Parkins,” borrowed from M.R. James’s (1904) ghost story, became a narrative spine for the film—a deliberate device to convey some of Fisher’s more important ideas, for example, historic internet attacks and takedowns, such as the one that followed the publication of Fisher’s ‘Vampire Castle’ essay. Parkins in the film witnesses the oppressive and over-whelming interpersonal assaults that we now associate with social media, including being ‘ratioed’ (more comments than likes on a post).

The method was not centrally planned but ‘emergent’—inline with situational art as a mode—i.e., the process was allowed to run with indeterminacy as a ‘given’. This required a high degree of trust in unknown partners in the project. There was no level of scrutiny, rehearsal, or trail.

Instagram functioned as an extension of human faculties, disembodying signals (posts, messages) and reaggregating them into new forms (collaborations, scenes, performances, and actions). A stranger in Germany could Direct Message a response to a quote from Capitalist Realism, leading to a filmed contribution in Felixstowe, which in turn shaped a sequence edited in London. The artistic response (or mode) in play was to seek the point of least resistance, turning a response into a material thing or action. This element was the closest to the idea of human ‘craft’, in this case a film about Mark Fisher, but it could have been about collecting amber from a beach near Southwold in 1976.

This aligns with what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call ‘rhizomatic production’ framed as non-hierarchical making in this case. Fisher’s writing and the environment he studied in, at Warwick University, was heavily influenced by post-structuralist thought and Deleuze in particular. Rhizomatic art processes are non-linear, co-authored, often unfinished, and open to transformation and multiplicity (reordering/remixing). Instead of one “master” artwork or artist, meaning emerges across multiple nodes of activity. Combined with situational art-making modes, the purpose is to disrupt capitalist spectacle and create moments of human encounter and collective experience. These moments might themselves decay and become other things, or be lost. In essence, the world does not need to archive itself, drawn from Borges’ (1946) On Exactitude in Science, where we discover the limitations of drawing a map of the world at a 1:1 ratio. The internet might seem like this map, yet in fact it can be regarded as a set of immaterial pieces of data that lead to material and embodied actions—again, the idea of inversion of communicative ‘digital capitalism’ as a method.

The film manifested itself through the speed and immediacy of Instagram interactions, creating a constant feedback loop between research, production, and dissemination. A key consideration was to avoid any bureaucratic or resistant points in the production, tending away from licencing and capital. An example was licencing music from Warp Records, which would have required negotiation of fees and the timeframe of each licence.

As the film had no money and had a decapitalised form, it was necessary to avoid these commercial arrangements, in order to focus on what could happen within the outlined framework. Of course, this was disappointing to the producers of the film, as we would have been more than happy to include the work of musicians that Mark Fisher referenced in his writing from the early 2000s.

An observation, from us as artists, is that while we seek processes that utilise indeterminacy, we are at the same time aware of outline frameworks that capture or transact our work in advance of it being made. This tension effectively reasserts the presence of capital and the market as inevitable forces in the process of making. As we shall see, this all-pervasive nature often circumscribes how art is made and held up to be outstanding.

4. Decapitalisation and Communicative Capitalism

Jodi Dean’s concept of ‘communicative capitalism’ (2009) critiques the way online communication is subsumed into capitalist accumulation. Platforms like Instagram turn every interaction—likes, comments, and DMs—into data to be monetised. In this case, communication is not free exchange but captured surplus value. Dean’s concept of ‘capture’ aligns strongly with Fisher’s appropriation of Fredric Jameson’s idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism—an idea that we are contained within a system that is all-pervasive, everywhere and inescapable. The film We Are Making A Film about Mark Fisher, in essence, stands in opposition to the fatalism of both capitalist and communicative realism. Entrapment is viewed as ‘escapable’ by definition, as actions that lie outside of fiscal frameworks. Typically, art and finance are entwined as an example of capitalist realism, where success, market, and sales are coterminous. Success is capitalism.

In this project, the perpetuation of closed platforms, like Instagram, is in turn subjected to the idea of ‘recapture’, a term we are coining to talk about a process of utilising monetising platforms to bring about the reemergence of social capital and human wealth or consciousness. This is deliberately expressed as a Utopian ideal in the artwork We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher. The title is generative and reflexive, leaning towards collective language that can be readily understood.

The outcome of this process, however, is evidenced as creative contributions, made by unknown individuals to the overall project. Furthermore, as things gained ground (likes and follows), other people came forward and offered their time and services. This could not be anticipated in the manifesting stage, but nonetheless was an outcome that supported the overall aims and approach of the project. From a critical perspective, was it necessary to generate ‘likes’, ‘shares’, and ‘follows’ in order to overturn the machine at its own game? In fact, the analytics—albeit rudimentary—did provide what the tech industry calls ‘insights’ into what was popular and ‘drove traffic’. We could say that, at this point, we were in fact captured, as we viewed the analytics, whereas a ‘Trojan Horse’ mentality enabled us to play the game and draw this data back to our intentions—collective making. At the height of the analytical period, the artwork on Instagram gained 1.25 million views and reached 274,000 accounts. This, on Instagram terms, would be regarded as a highly successful ‘reach’.

The aberrant approach to Instagram as a platform does not mean the project escaped communicative capitalism. As Jodi Dean warns, the platform still captured our interactions and subjected them to broader commercial aims defined by Meta. However, the analytics were exploited towards our aims as well. An example of this was knowledge of periods of time where high engagement was likely.

The project sought to divert the flow in using the platform’s connective coding to produce embodied, offline outcomes and filmed sequences, which led eventually to a completed film. In other words, while communicative capitalism captured our signals, we reaggregated them into something it could not directly commodify: a decapitalised film and a human network. This is a clear and tangible result. It recalls McLuhan’s notion of emotional extension. Just as the text message smile exemplifies how digital signals carry affect, this project extended emotional and intellectual energy across the network, which then condensed into offline creative acts. A good example would be the production of new music for the film.

5. Narrative Frame: Parkins as a Guide

At the core of our approach to the film is the character of Parkins, borrowed from M.R. James’s (1904) ghost story Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. Played by Justin Hopper, Parkins becomes an unreliable narrator threading Fisher’s ideas across time. His role evolved throughout the production and scripting was added dynamically, as it became clear that as a device, he could convey Mark Fisher’s life and work.

This device accomplishes several things:

• It situates the film within hauntology, a key Fisherian (and Derridian) concept where past futures echo in the present.
• It resists documentary closure, keeping the film open, spectral, and unresolved—meaning that alternative endings can take place after screenings.
• It dramatises the temporal jumps of the project itself—from 1909 Felixstowe to post-truth 2025. The character enacts these jumps in time, echoing another touch point of Fisher’s work—the 1980s’ ITV programme Sapphire and Steel.

In walking through landscapes like Thamesmead, Oxford Street, and Felixstowe beach, Parkins embodies the oscillation between fiction and reality, past and present—moving from online to offline and back. His voiceovers anchor sequences that otherwise emerge rhizomatically from the networked production. He can unreliably narrate what has not yet happened but might do. His spectrality also disturbs the film.

In screening, it is apparent that Parkins creates a dramatic opening point—he enunciates his own movement from fiction to fact and he tells us about Mark Fisher as a narrator. His job is to take us from the global village of Felixstowe as a major UK port to the broader space of what capitalist realism is. As a device, he is then loaded with the same burdens of interaction and intersectional political framing that Fisher faced. In particular, we see Parkins in the Vampire Castle, Fisher’s essay and metaphor for the intersectional politics that hit him hard in 2013. Parkins is an enactment of Exiting the Vampire Castle (Fisher 2013), a way of showing a turning point in Mark Fisher’s life to an audience. The voices of Twitter are turned into voices in his head that occupy him and throw him off-balance. The viewer of the film can see this as pure drama or contextualise by reading Fisher’s essay. The challenge to us as the makers of the film is how much of this we subjugate to a mode of story-telling that is familiar as drama.

6. Phases of the Story Arc

The film unfolds across eight movements, each reflecting both Fisher’s trajectory and the project’s method:

• Mark Fisher in Living Memory: Establishing his presence as a living thinker.
• Hauntology and Meta-Fiction: Parkins enters as guide.
• CCRU and Cyber Futures: Archival reconstructions of the 1990s’ cybernetic turn.
• K-Punk Blogging Era: The urgency of early online intellectual culture.
• Capitalist Realism: Fisher’s central concept, visualised through protests.
• Exiting the Vampire Castle: Backlash, take-down, controversy, and withdrawal.
• Afterlife 2017–2025: Brexit, Trump, culture wars, algorithmic tides, political events, and locations (e.g., Parliament Square).
• Acid Communism and Call to Action: Unfinished potential, collective futures, and post-screening action.

Each phase draws from Instagram-sourced contributions: clips, texts, performances, and exchanges.

7. From Platform to Collective

Overall, we created a network of 60 artists, theorists, musicians, and writers in a one-year period. While some of them were known to us prior to the production, a significant proportion came forward via the Instagram account.

The process of high-rapport Direct Message conversations proved essential. These were often short, direct, and intimate exchanges that built trust quickly. This also required the use of communication skills and experience of dealing with uncertainty, undertaken by the author of this article. Overall, the method of production was in fact more reliable than previous capitalised modes of production. As a comparator, the author commissioned six digital art commissions in Cambridge (UK) in 2016 with a budget of £100,000. Each commission went through an intensive interview and producer model, aimed at reaching high artistic and production standards using digital media. Of these, two were considered to be successful in terms of delivering against the benchmark of the advertised call out. The assertion is that tighter, governed processes with over-sight do not necessarily make better projects.

Of course, in more detail, We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher contrasts with traditional production pipelines, which rely on contracts and curatorial hierarchies. The project operated through mutual recognition and shared purpose. The Instagram account was less a broadcast channel than a mode of convening and extending into offline encounters. It was filmed in Felixstowe, conversations with Jodi Dean were had online, and sound production took place in Manchester. These kinds of production processes would now be considered normative in keeping costs down in terms of production. The observation, however, is that this method of making reduced the production model to the minimum viable set of interactions, which might in capitalistic terms be termed as ‘efficiency’. As authors, we have been inclined to view this outside of the way efficiency is regarded in capitalistic frameworks. We can say that the best way to make something without capital is to optimise the valorisation of our own time, where we resist ‘precarity’ and the dehumanised modes of late-stage capitalism.

As an addendum to the open process and decapitalised method of production, the film generated considerable attention and streaming fees from people globally. While no remuneration was promised or even discussed, the process of making has been recognised by audiences. As artist producers, we are now in a position to offer a small amount of money back to those we worked with, an end-to-end example of the interest and kindness that surrounds Mark Fisher and his work.

8. Strengths and Limitations

We carried out an evaluation of the film at the point of screening it in September 2025.

Strengths:

• Decapitalised production: Refusal of monetary logic and systemic capital.
• Network extension: Building genuine connections across geography.
• Resonance with Fisher: The method itself reflected his critique of capitalism.
• Flexibility: Contributions could be small, fragmentary, and still valuable.

Limitations:

• Dependence on Instagram: The project still enriched Meta.
• Precarity of labour: Voluntary contributions risk replicating capitalist exploitation.
• Partiality: Not all voices could be included; some withdrew.
• Fragility: No financial stability means sustainability is uncertain.

These limitations align with Jodi Dean’s warning about communicative capitalism. In effect, any resistance within the system can only ever be partial, because ‘escape’ is in fact impossible. The early screening responses suggest that this ‘capture’ in the film leaves people often uneasy. A deeper solution or way out is sought or desired.

9. Acid Communism and the Open Ending

The film closes with Acid Communism, Fisher’s unfinished sketch. Fisher talks about the combination of the two words as a ’joke’, albeit a serious one. As an inference, it conveys a pejorative message to those working in a market economy that seems intentional. Fisher is referencing the idea that a reevaluation or evocation of the libertarian spirit of the late 1960s and 1970s is a useful waypoint beyond capitalism. Commentators, such as Andy Beckett in the film, imply that this is a shifting point in Fisher’s thinking—away from a modernist narrative—towards an idea of historical entanglement or reprocessing. The research period for the film showed that Fisher’s ideas on Acid Communism are in fact acting as a springboard for new projects. An example of this is artist Miki Aurora’s emergent practice focussed on cyber-feminism, occulture and situational art in Vancouver, Canada.

We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher treats Mark Fisher’s Acid Communism idea as a way to ‘land the film back in the room’. The ending, in this way, is directed back to the listener and viewer. We have made a film about Mark Fisher, but the viewer has made one too, their version. Parkins ends the film with this direct statement:

“We are making a film about Mark Fisher, and now that you are watching…so are you…”

In some sense, this is a call to action, or it might be felt as problematic. Hollywood films, the way we are trained to watch films from an early age, need to resolve this. The ending of the film is handed to the audience to deal with.

At the end, Parkins dissolves back into fiction.

We as filmmakers intend the work to remain open and unclear. The deliberate openness of the ending is crucial. It is crucial because, as Berardi says (and Fisher requotes), our culture cannot protest on a Saturday and then return to work on a Monday morning and imagine change.

Screenings in art schools, universities, and community cinemas are conceived not as end-points but as beginnings, often followed by discussions. The project asserts that Fisher’s legacy is best upheld through new creative acts, not passive consumption or as reverent heritage work.

10. Conclusions: Toward Networked Collectivity

We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher shows how an Instagram account—a tool of communicative capitalism—can be repurposed for counter-capitalist creativity. In treating the platform as a site of network extension, the project generates a decapitalised film and a wider human network, both of which persist beyond the edit. As an unintended outcome, this new network may be further explored to make other films and art projects.

The project is still ‘captured’ within Meta’s software but it has created distinctive human associations and friendships outside of the algorithm.

Alternative modes of production are possible, those that are collective, voluntary, and affective in form. The real success lies not in the film as a product, but in the process of manifestation.

In this sense, the project enacts Fisher’s unfinished call in Acid Communism—that is, to imagine and construct collective consciousness as a counter to capitalist realism. The challenge is ongoing, but the experiment proves that even within the network effects of communicative capitalism, we can devise spaces of solidarity, creativity, and common action.