Amir H. Payberah - 2025-04-23

Mark Fisher has an essay called "Exiting the Vampire Castle", in which he critiques certain strands of online leftist politics that focus on individual shaming and moral condemnation. He argues that this culture drains the energy of radical political movements, causing many people to fall silent out of fear of being attacked or judged. I found this critique closely connected to Payal Arora's recent book "From Pessimism to Hope: Lessons from the Global South for Designing Inclusive Technologies". Although they come from different fields, both texts share a critical stance toward moralizing approaches and call for a deeper structural analysis.

Both authors express concern about the tendency in contemporary critique to blame individuals or technology itself rather than addressing underlying systemic issues. Fisher critiques a leftist culture obsessed with personal purity, one that isolates and punishes rather than builds solidarity, diverting attention from the fight against capitalism and structural power. Arora similarly challenges dominant Western narratives in tech criticism that portray technology as inherently harmful and users, especially in the Global South, as passive victims or powerless consumers. She shows how such views not only obscure structural inequalities but also erase the agency, creativity, and hope present in marginalized communities.

Both authors remind us that approaches based on blame and pessimism not only misidentify the root of problems but also weaken the possibility of meaningful change. Fisher warns that blind moralism not only destroys solidarity but also crushes the political imagination needed to build a shared future. Arora similarly cautions that rising techno-pessimism in Western academia may blind us to the liberatory potential of technology in the Global South, where it can be a means of education, connection, activism, and survival. Ultimately, both texts call for a radical shift: moving beyond shame, guilt, and techno-determinism toward structural awareness, solidarity, and hope.