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Benjamin George Wittenberg Fisher is a social theorist from Washington University in St. Louis. He is an entrepreneur, and magazine publisher who began the popular social commentary magazine The Zeitgeist, a magazine of critical inquiry and social concern encouraging an analytical discourse on society.

Early life

From an early age he began asking large existential questions. He was removed from three different high schools for insubordinate and subversive activities, at one point questioning the existence of God in his strict Catholic High School.

His current concerns

Fisher's current activities include advocating the democratization of the media in order to reduce the level of "Simulacrum" (a term taken from the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard). According to Fisher, the spread of technology will result in the loss of all authentic individuality with the suppression of truly original thought and personal identity. Instead, he envisions a closed-system where all things are reduced to data and nothing outside of that. All creativity will be merely the synthesizing of already existing information. According to Baudrillard, the simulacrum is dangerous because it takes the mind out of the realm of the real and puts it into a hyper-reality. As a result, we become a world of images, of signs whereby the appearance becomes the truth. This is dangerous because all structure itself may be looked at as just a "sign" that can be erased.

Fisher repeatedly warns that by the year 2020, technology will have reached Vinge's Singularity. This is the point when technological progress and societal change accelerate due to the advent of technoloy, changing our environment beyond the ability of pre-Singularity humans to comprehend or reliably predict. This event is named by analogy with the breakdown of modern physics.

According to Fisher,
:"once Singularity is reached, the last enclaves of organic interpersonal relations will be erased and a stage beyond reification will form. This process has already begun. ... a battle will then rage between the forces of the real and unreal."

Family

He is grandson of Charles Miller Fisher, the discoverer of transient ischemic attacks (TIA) and father of modern neurology , and Earl Wittenberg Fisher , the Founder/Director of the New York White Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Education

Fisher's tenure at Wash U, though still not over, has been both blessed and marred with difficulty. In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, Fisher actively campaigned for the invasion around a campus that was nearly unified in its opposition to President Bush and his policies. As a reward for his efforts, Fisher was granted a meeting with President Bush through a close confidant named Adam Brown, of Chesterfield, MO.

Sadly, it soon became clear that Fisher's Nietzchean paradigm had its shortcomings. Perhaps he saw his low-point when a close friend caught him engaging in lascivious acts with this friend's Turkish girlfriend on Valentine's Day. In the fight that followed, Fisher's friend broke through the window and chased Fisher out of town with his tail between his legs.

After a six-month break from school, Fisher returned to Wash U in the fall of 2006 in order to get his degree once and for all. Instead of burning social security cards and rousing people up for ill-fated U.S. military campaigns, Fisher now resigns himself to studying and creating an occasional [Facebook group] on Jewish identity issues.