Members shared pictures of an England rarely seen in the meticulously filtered world of social media: mundane, unlovely images of broken machinery and canned Christmas dinners, tattered shop signs and CCTV cameras watching over decaying streets. A short description served as a prompt: "Neoliberal England is a boring dystopia. Here's why."

But as the group grew to over 3,000 members, the tone gradually began to change. There were fewer pictures. Shares of clickbaity articles and complaints of 'PC gone mad' proliferated. Then one weekend the group lost thousands of members. Word spread of a cull . Then, just as suddenly, it vanished entirely.

I came across Boring Dystopia at a point where my patience with Facebook had worn thin—my timeline was clogged with political conjecture and clickbait, between pictures of other people's holidays. The group gave me something to look forward to, an oddly defeated sense of solidarity.

It captured a culturally flattened England, one filled with human drones herded along by automated voices. It was an in-joke, the antithesis to Facebook's smarm and kneejerk sentiment, operating from within Facebook itself.

"It wasn't that well thought-out at the start, to be honest," he said. "I'd never done a Facebook group before." I spoke with Fisher a week after Boring Dystopia went offline, to find out the reasons both for its existence and its untimely end.

Its disappearance sealed Boring Dystopia into legend, but the group's origins make it doubly strange: its founder was cultural theorist Mark Fisher , known as the author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, as well as the long-running culture and music blog K-Punk . Fisher currently lectures at Goldsmiths University and is a commissioning editor at Zer0 Books, a publishing imprint dedicated to cultural commentary. Why would he start a Facebook group for sharing pictures of broken ticket machines?

That many of these machines are broken was key: "The point is always made that capitalism is efficient, people say 'You might not like it, but it works.' But Britain is not efficient. Instead it's stuck in a form of frenzied stasis."

"Crap robots" were a common theme for Boring Dystopia: one typical post included a photograph of a broken vending machine, with a note affixed to it reading, "The light inside has broken but I still work." Shortly before the group shut down, I remember holding up a queue at Tesco attempting to make a video on my phone of the checkout machine which wishes you a happy Christmas .

Originally, he had noticed a common theme to pictures he shared on Facebook, and wondered if it could be developed into a group. "It was understood from the start to be a consciousness-raising exercise, encouraging people to perceive the actual state of Britain rather than the PR state," he said. "Which is surprisingly hard, because there's this mixture of Silicon Valley ideology, PR and advertising which distracts us from our own aesthetic poverty, and the reality of what we have. Which is just all these crap robots…"

Although a protest group by nature, Boring Dystopia shunned hot takes and screeds, employing only images in place of language. The fantastically bleak urban landscapes and patronising signs stood apart from the sunsets and holiday vistas we usually see on Facebook, prompting the question of whether social media manipulates how we see places as much as how we view our bodies .

To many members the group was purely entertainment, but it also served to illustrate "hauntology," the term Fisher uses to describe the sense of a lost future—in this case, one where machines actually enhance, rather than hinder, our lives.

A connection was implicit between these scenes and the mental state of their inhabitants. "Boring Dystopia was partly about the fact that no one can care about stuff any more," said Fisher. "It's not that they don't care, but in a city like London, or any intensely pressured urban metropolis—add to that the pressures of capitalist cyberspace and people just feel like they perpetually have no time." Fisher credits the mundane ugliness captured in the group's pictures to this all-purpose apathy: "Our resources for caring are depleted, and that has aesthetic consequences."

People mourn the loss of Boring Dystopia still; tribute groups Boring Dystopia II and More Boring Dystopia have sprung up in its wake, though they're not quite the same. Why did Fisher feel compelled to shut his community down?

Fisher sees Facebook as a microcosm of "capitalist cyberspace," perhaps even of capitalism as a whole