#most of the chapter talks about how much Capitalist institutions become increasingly risk-averse

[shinobicyrus]

“Nevertheless, the interpassive simulation of participation in postmodern media, the network of narcissism of MySpace and Facebook has, in the main, generated content that is repetitive, parasitic, and conformist. In a seeming irony, the media class’s refusal to be paternalistic has not produced a bottom-up culture of breathtaking diversity, but one that is increasingly infantilized...The reason that focus groups and capitalist feedback systems fail, even when they generate commodities that are immensely popular, is that people do not know what they want. This is not only because people’s desire is already present but concealed from them (although this is often the case). Rather, the most powerful forms of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the weird. These can only be supplied by artists and media professionals who are prepared to give people something different from that which already satisfied them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain kind of risk...to wager on the strange and our appetite for it.”

–Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?