Timeline of Critique

When Solutions Arrive Before the Diagnosis

What if our most dangerous insights came too early to be taken seriously?

Critique doesn't always arrive in the order we need it to.

We imagine progress in thought as linear: Intuition → Theory → Diagnosis → Solution. But in the case of our entanglement with capitalist domination, the order was reversed. We got the solutions first, dismissed them as fantasy, then spent centuries arriving at increasingly sophisticated ways to describe our entrapment.

Consider this abbreviated genealogy—not comprehensive, but revealing. Patterns emerge in what we choose to take seriously and what we dismiss as fantasy. This isn't a complete history - it's a diagnostic pattern.

1577

Étienne de La Boétie

Gave us the answer: "Tyranny exists only because we allow it to." The spell of domination is maintained by our consent. It manipulates our desire, making us believe we need it. Capitalism understood this well once it had the means to propagate fake dreams through the spells of advertisement and stories.

1854

Henry David Thoreau

Echoed La Boétie: "The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right." But his refusal was cushioned by privilege, making it easy to dismiss as romantic individualism instead of prefigurative withdrawal.

2005

Stengers & Pignarre

Gave us the sorcery: Capitalism is not a machine. It is an enchantment. A sorcery without sorcery. A shimmering illusion that disarms alternatives before they speak.

2009

Mark Fisher

Gave us the pragmatic diagnosis: Capitalist realism is the belief that there is no alternative. The cage doesn't need guards. It just needs imagination to atrophy. Fisher was widely read — we made podcasts and t-shirts — but often, it was just beautifully rendered despair.

The Trouble with Palatable Critique

Fisher told us capitalism absorbs critique and turns it into fuel. Instead of changing strategy, we created a genre of sophisticated fatalism. We felt better because we understood — not because we changed.

  • "Here is why you feel numb, exhausted, incapable of change."
  • "Here is a clever way to articulate what you already know."
  • "Here is another framework for your doom."

It became a brand. A vibe. Radical only in its refusal to hope.

Meanwhile, the Fantasists Were Thinking Elsewhere

While palatable critique was aestheticized, others were dismissed as too speculative:

  • Donna Haraway: "Stay with the trouble."
  • Anna Tsing: "Notice."
  • Adrienne Maree Brown: "Emergent strategy."

They were feminine. Fantastical. Dismissed. Fisher was memed — masculine, melancholic, knowable.

We elevated diagnosticians over practitioners of alternatives. Maybe because they felt safer, more acceptable, less human.

The Real Spell

The real enchantment wasn't capitalism. It was believing that only rational, pessimistic critique could be legitimate. That hope was childish. That imagination was unserious.

What if all of them were doing what Fisher couldn't: not just describing the trap, but reawakening our capacity to imagine otherwise?

What This Reveals

We had keys all along. But we dismissed them because they looked like myth. Like fantasy. Like a call for regression. We only took critique seriously when it stopped pointing toward escape.

I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.
— Étienne de La Boétie

Fisher told us the cage had no door.

Stengers told us the cage was just a shimmer.

La Boétie told us the shimmer is afraid of us.

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