Our economic situation, political discourse, and future prospects have gotten much worse since a guy brought a sign that said “Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” to the Occupy Wall Street protests. We all knew what he meant then . . . but where are we now? And how has so much happened since the so-called end of history?

Malcolm Harris, one of our sharpest and most versatile critics, tackles these questions in over 30 new and selected pieces, examining everything from the lowering of wages to the rise of fascism—and the maddening cultural landscape in between. Along the way, he cops to being the guy who tricked protestors into thinking Radiohead was playing Occupy Wall Street; investigates why the robots that will replace us so often look like sex objects; and, most comfortingly, assures us that Marx saw the necessity of a crisis moment just like the one we’re in.

Rarely does a writer come along who can turn our world so thoroughly upside-down that we can finally understand it for what it really is, but Harris’s wry and biting essays do just that, and help us laugh at what we see. 

Praise for Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit

“Shit is indeed fucked up and bullshit. But rather than retreat into indiscriminate rage or existential despair, Malcolm Harris takes the near and distant past as an object lesson whose ultimate effect is bracing. The provocations in these essays add up to something we sorely need: a diagnosis of the present that hasn’t given up on the future.” —Jenny Odell, author of How To Do Nothing

“The guy with the sign was right in 2011. Malcolm Harris is even more right in 2020. His book is a vivid, illuminating, and prescient history of the tragic recent political past, the maddening strangeness of the oppressive present, and the disorienting disarray of the near future, which seems to always outpace even our fears for it.” —David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth