Most cinema today is an illustration of 19th century novels. A lot of it is disastrous, formulaic and predictable. The sense of pluralism has been curtailed.

Actionists, beatniks, hippies, and serial killers were all pure libertarians who advanced the rights of the individual against social norms and against what they believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice, and pity. Having exhausted the possibilities of sexual pleasure, it was reasonable that individuals should turn their attention to the wider pleasure of cruelty.

As capitalism exemplifies and outstrips Marx’s most horrified descriptions of it, the Gothic escapes codification as a generic, psychological or fantastic mode to become the most persuasive materialist account of the contemporary socioeconomic scene. For cyberpunk, Marx’s most Gothic language has become his most realistic, whereas his organicist protestations against capital look like antique sentimentalities. “What Marx only thought [...] as ‘fantasy’ recodes and reassembles reality: as capital becomes the DNA of determinant technology, living labour is retrofitted as mere ‘conscious linkages’, reacting to digital stimuli, in ‘an automated system of machinery ... set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself.’”