From Hua Hsu’s 2018 article in The New Yorker:

Blogging, in those days, at its best, seemed like a distinct genre of writing and thinking. [Mark] Fisher’s posts were adventurous and idiosyncratic, chasing allusions across his bookshelf, record collection, and multiple screens — a riff on Ronald Reagan, for instance, might be routed through Jonathan Swift, the Dadaists, and Fredric Jameson. K-Punk gave Fisher space to revisit past enthusiasms: the hyperactive dance singles, experimental filmmakers, and pulp novels that had rewired his outlook when he was growing up in Margaret Thatcher’s nineteen-eighties. He revisited some of these influences — the author J. G. Ballard, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek — frequently enough that, if you were a regular reader of the blog, they became a part of your world view, too.

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The operative word is revisited. Ballard and Žižek don’t appear once for effect; they recur across years of posts, so a reader learns to expect them the way you learn to expect a friend’s recurring arguments. Repetition is what does the converting. A single allusion can be a flourish, cheap to produce and easy to forget; a structure you keep returning to, because it keeps explaining new problems, stops being a citation and starts being how you actually see. That’s the difference between a reading list and a mind: the reading list is everything you’ve encountered, the mind is the small set of things you never managed to get past.