[3] During that time, he was a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which were associated with accelerationist political thought and the work of philosophers Sadie Plant and Nick Land.

[5] In the early 1990s, Fisher also made music as part of the breakbeat hardcore group D-Generation, releasing the EPs Entropy in the UK and Concrete Island, and later Isle Of The Dead as The Lower Depths.

[10] Vice magazine later said Fisher's writing on k-punk was "lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets".

[19] In the late 2000s, Fisher re-purposed the term "capitalist realism" to describe "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it".

[20]: 2 He argued that the term best describes the ideological situation since the fall of the Soviet Union, in which the logics of capitalism have come to delineate the limits of political and social life, with significant effects on education, mental illness, pop culture, and methods of resistance.

"[20]: 2  He wrote:[20]: 16 Capitalist realism as I understand it... is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.As a philosophical concept, capitalist realism is influenced by the Althusserian conception of ideology, as well as the work of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.

Fisher popularised the use of Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology to describe a pervasive sense in which contemporary culture is haunted by the "lost futures" of modernity, which failed to occur or were cancelled by postmodernity and neoliberalism.

[22] Fisher and others drew attention to the shift into post-Fordist economies in the late 1970s, which he argued has "gradually and systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new".

[11] The book includes discussion of science-fiction and horror sources like the writing of H. P. Lovecraft, Joan Lindsay's 1967 Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Philip K. Dick, films such as David Lynch's Inland Empire (2006) and Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (2013), and the music of UK post-punk band The Fall and ambient musician Brian Eno.

As he put it himself: From the start, "economy" was the object-cause of a bourgeois "science", which hyperstitionally bootstrapped itself into existence, and then bent and melted the matter of this and every other world to fit its presuppositions–the greatest theocratic achievement in a history that was never human, an immense conjuring trick which works all the better because it came shrouded in that damp grey English and Scottish empiricism which claimed to have seen off all gods.

[36] Fisher died by suicide at his home on King Street, Felixstowe in Suffolk, England on 13 January 2017 at the age of 48, shortly before the publication of his latest book The Weird and the Eerie (2017).

According to Simon Reynolds in The Guardian, Fisher said that "the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.

[41] In The Irish Times Rob Doyle wrote that "a more interesting British writer has not appeared in this century",[42] while The Guardian described Fisher's k-punk blog posts as "required reading for a generation".

[43] He still has a large influence on contemporary Zer0 Books writers, with him being cited extensively in Guy Mankowski's Albion's Secret History: Snapshots of England's Pop Rebels and Outsiders.

The films have unifying visuals and captions by Sweatmother who was influenced through Fisher's work to use "early internet aesthetics and 1990s cyberpunk, merged with reworked empty promises of advertisements.”[48]