for the cover of k-punk (Repeater Books, 2018)
'Blogs continue to do things that can't be done anywhere else ...'
I.
According to 2026 industry data [a], there are over 600 million blogs in the world.
Most of these are either inactive or rarely updated, but even so, there are over 7.5 million new posts published daily and blogs - whatever their status - make up almost a third of all websites.
Those who claim that blogging is an outmoded practice in the age of TikTok and podcasting are very much mistaken.
However, blogging has evolved over the years and is no longer what it was back in 2003 when Mark Fisher began posting on k-punk, a blog which, as Darren Ambrose says, was eclectic in content, theoretically plural, and remarkably consistent in quality [b].
Thus it is that k-punk remains the antithesis of the commercial, algorithm-driven blogging that dominates the online landscape today.
II.
Fisher clarifies his motivation for blogging in a post dated 16 April 2005.
He writes that k-punk provided the space "in which to maintain a kind of discourse that had started in the music press and the art schools" (19). By the end of the twentieth-century this discourse faced extinction; an event which Fisher warned would have "appalling cultural and political consequences" (19).
I have to admit, as someone never much smitten by the music press - and as someone rejected by Central Saint Martins - the gravity of this claim makes me smile. Was the death of Melody Maker truly such a catastrophe? [c]
III.
At their best, says Fisher, blogs enable the sharing of ideas and passions outside of the mainstream media and provide new ways of accessing culture.
In other words, they raise consciousness, as Fisher likes to say, which in turn "opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorising about, a collective perspective" (514) [d].
However, blogs can become black holes; generating "pathological behaviours and forms of subjectivity which not only generate misery and anger" but "waste time and energy, our most precious resources" (514).
That can be the fault of the person responsible for the blog. But often, says Fisher, it's due to those readers who like to leave comments of the kind that "reduce things to banal sociality" (558) [e].
IV.
When I started Torpedo the Ark in 2013, I really can't remember the frame of mind I was in. But I certainly aimed to write in a gay manner; one that challenged and didn't merely reinforce received opinion.
In other words, I wanted to develop a style that curdled genre distinctions and intensified the pleasure of the text by opening up the paradoxical and perverse aspects of language, free from the
moral and dialectical imperative to always speak truthfully and
coherently.
Above all, I thought it crucial not to make miserable, but, rather, to give joy as an enterprise of health. It was an ethical and vital conception of writing influenced by figures including Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, and Deleuze.
In 2003, however, Fisher was "quite badly depressed" (557) and started blogging "as a way of getting back into writing after the traumatic experience of doing a PhD" (557) [f]. In an interview with Rowan Wilson (2010), he recalls:
"PhD work bullies one into the idea that you can't say anything about any subject until you've read every possible authority on it. But blogging seemed a more informal space, without that kind of pressure. Blogging was a way of tricking myself back into doing serious writing. I was able to con myself, thinking 'it doesn't matter, it's only a blog post, it's not an academic paper'. But now I take the blog rather more seriously than writing academic papers." (557)
I understand perfectly what he's saying here. My experience with TTA was to first think of the posts as merely windows on to a wider and more important body of work, only to then see that wider body of work assimilated into the blog, with the latter functioning as a kind of Borg cube. Now I assemble longer works from the fragments first posted on TTA.
In conclusion, I would agree with Fisher; "blogs continue to do things that can't be done anywhere else" (558).
Notes
[a] See the article by Rebecca Tomasis, 'Latest blogging statistics and facts for 2026', on the Wix Blog (15 Dec 2025): click here.
[b] Darren Ambrose, Editor's Introduction to Mark Fisher's k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 15. Future page references to this work will be placed directly in the post.
All in all, Ambrose does a good job editing Fisher's extensive writings and I understand the need to select posts on the basis of length and abstract them from their original context. However, I was disappointed that he chose to exclude a number of very early k-punk posts "by virtue of the fact that they seemed wildly out of step with Mark's overall theoretical and political development, and because they seemed to reflect a temporary enthusiasm for a dogmatic theoretical misanthropy he repudiated in his later writing and life" (15).
That, I think, is an editorial decision we might challenge and, one day, I would very much like to read these pieces and develop a radically different reading of Fisher; more cybergothic and less acid communist. One of the reasons I have come so late to Fisher is because I find his beatification by his followers a bit off-putting.
[c] Clearly, for Fisher, it was; if only for the reason that his interest in theory was "almost entirely inspired by writers like Ian Penman and Simon Reynolds" (19). For Fisher, whilst blogging opened up new avenues, it also importantly "fulfilled many of the functions" (557) that the music press used to fulfil - encouraging young people to engage with ideas and be creative, etc.
[d] It's a little surprising to see Fisher not only use the word living but italicise (and thereby emphasise) it. Usually, he's a fierce opponent of vitalism (even in its Deleuzian form) and in his early work - including his PhD thesis on Flatline Constructs (University of Warwick, 1999) - he even puts forward the (Nietzschean) idea that life is only a very rare and unusual way of being dead.
For an interesting reading of Fisher's gothic materialism addressing the question of mechanism and/or vitalism, see Em Colquhoun's post on Xenogothic (16 August 2018): click here.
[e] What Fisher says in full is this:
"Blogging networks shift all the time; new blogs enter the network, older ones fall away; new networks constitute themselves. One of the most significant developments was the introduction of comments; a largely unfortunate change in my view. In the early day of blogs, if you wanted to respond to a post, you had to reply on your own blog, and if you didn't have a blog, you had to create one. Comments tend to reduce things to banal sociality, with all its many drawbacks." (558)
I would be very interested to know what Simon Solomon thinks of this ...
[f] To be fair, doing a PhD can be an intense experience (though I probably wouldn't use the term traumatic).
Doing a PhD in the philosophy department at Warwick in the mid-late 1990s, which is where and when Fisher did his (and where and when I did mine), was perhaps uniquely pressured as one was surrounded by supersmart individuals on all sides producing some astonishing work. I remember one young woman reduced to a nervous jelly on stage when presenting at a staff-graduate event - she ended up sitting under a desk!
