The problem is that Business Ontology has no place for anything like ‘the public’. Business Ontology as I understood it was simply the idea that everything is folded inside a business reality system, that the only goals and purposes which count are those that are translatable into business terms. Mark Fisher: Well, I wasn’t thinking of anything too sophisticated with the idea of Business Ontology, and I’d certainly like to hear more about how the concept could be related to a computing ontology. One can imagine that this is something that combines both the classical understanding of an ontology and the more technical description of the ordering of relations in a computing ontology, one is flattened into the other. Matthew Fuller: One figure that you come up with that I think is particularly useful is the idea of a business ontology, something that crops up early and towards the end of the book. This interview, following some of the themes from Capitalist Realism, was carried out via email in the second week of December 2009. In doing so, it takes the reader through a lively argument about education, film, socialism and the compulsory stupidity of quality control mechanisms. After skewering the marketisation of everything, the privatisation of stress, and the triumphalism of moronic bureaucracy as the guiding principles of governance, the book goes on to speculate about new forms of politics and culture.

Capitalist Realism is one of the most acute diagnoses of contemporary politics as it is played out in one small island off the coast of Europe.

Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? out recently from Zer0 Books.

How to fail by elizabeth day