Since 1979 Britain has seen the remorseless destruction of the concept of the public.

Evidence

In any case, at their best, Ghost Box conjure a past that never was. Their artwork fuses the look of comprehensive school text books and public service manuals with allusions to weird fiction, a fusion that has more to do with the compressions and conflations of dreamwork than with memory. House himself talks of ‘a strange dream of a school textbook’. The implicit demand for such a space in Ghost Box inevitably reminds us that the period since 1979 in Britain has seen the gradual but remorseless destruction of the very concept of the public. At the same time, Ghost Box also remind us that the people who worked in the Radiophonic Workshop were effectively public servants, that they were employed to produce a weird public space – a public space very different from the bureaucratic dreariness invoked by neoliberal propaganda. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 318

Categorization

• XREF: The Radiophonic Workshop as ‘public servants’ generating weird public space connects to the Ghost-Box-as-public-service theme that recurs across this chapter. — connects to: Neoliberalism decomposed political collectivities through privatising the mind. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 536