Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia

"If you've seen my Sonic Adventure 2 analysis—" what rabbit hole am i falling into

It disappoints me how many people commenting here seem to have got the idea of hauntology reversed. It's not that we are now nostalgic for the past, and that this is somehow unique to the present situation. Of course cultures of the past also did this. It's that cultures of the recent past also had an eye looking forward, imagining a different, and better, future. The argument Fisher and others are making is that culture today is unable to create a vision for a near future which we or our children may one day exist in that is any different than our world now, that lifestyle, living conditions, etc aren't going to be different, and that this lack of vision and direction for where we collectively want society to go is expressed through our media, art, music etc

I've seen the trend of 80s revival and retrofuturism as less "stuck in a loop" or stagnancy and much more as the result of people realizing we're on a timeline now that we're unsatisfied with. Because of this, culturally, we have decided to go back to a more-optimistic, hopeful, or open-ended point in time to make new choices or corrupt the past timeline in order to escape it into a different present and future. We're using the tools available to us in the present to assert power we didn't have 30 years ago on the shape of culture and the world.

To everyone reading this: pls pls pls read Mark Fisher

RIP Mark. I was in his last class at Goldsmiths. His work is so relevant and eye opening. I recommend "Capitalist Realism" as a must read to anyone interested in philosophy or critical theory.

Remember those movies? Blade, Underworld, Hellboy, Matrix, End of Days...Those late 90s, early 2000s movies has a certain vibe of "dark and pale city life". I call this vibe "Dark Millennium". And it was gone after iPhone and Iron Man became popular. I'm a writer/columnist and interested in such cultural talks. Maybe we can discuss this further.

Just found your channel yesterday, and I'm already treated to a new video. What's amazing to me is the way so many of our works hinge on nostalgia, but are marketed for people who could not possibly be nostalgic for the characters, ideas, or moods presented. I almost feel like we're beyond being haunted, that we are just ghosts. Not just the future, but also the present has been subsumed by the past, and we're just experiencing it eternally, smeared across everything.

This is a fascinating analysis -- it hadn't occurred to me that we have largely ceased to imagine new futures, but are instead trapped to rehash our past visions of what the future might be, or simply try to recapture the past aesthetic itself.

"These 50's diners were really popular in the 80's" There. You made me quote family guy of all things

Ever heard of solarpunk? It's a relatively new aesthetic and cultural movement which attempts to, in a sense, counteract this kind of hauntology; avoiding excessive nostalgia for what's lost by trying to create something genuinely new. Solarpunk is rooted in the idea that bleak and apocalyptic visions of the future gone wrong – which emerge mainly due to the inability to imagine alternatives to the capitalist state system – need to be combated by hopeful and utopian visions of the future gone right. It imagines a post-hierarchical tomorrow based on ecological sustainability (the "solar" comes from solar power), political and economic decentralism, egalitarian cooperation, and cultural unity-in-diversity. It's also premised on the rejection of an opposition between ecology and technology, proposing that tech can be used to enrich both humanity and nature, as long as it's used in a mutualistic way, and not a parasitic way as it's used now.

"the future had been cancelled". i feel reminded of the 2000s and the excitement about the internet. it felt like the first time the word "freedom" made sense to me. my online identities seemed independent from my location. pirating copyrighted material seemed like a trivially normal thing in my generation. i remember an older friend of mine buying weed on eBay. an on the horizon there were projects like Freenet that were promising to cement these freedoms against state attacks. censorship was going to die. nationalism was going to die. religion was going to die. much of it seems like a faint glimmer now, maybe i just lost sight of amazing things happening in this regard. but it feels like, now, posting with your birth name is normal. paying for access to media is normal. censorship is normal. and there come the hordes bringing the dark ages back. okay now it's a slightly hyperbolic. i'm not even that pessimistic, just .. disappointed.

I'm fasscinated by this term, i will go even deeper now, ty for the video man.

This topic articulates a notion I've had about scifi since the start of the 2010s. That is, that the future died in the 90s. The late 90s is the last point in time where culture was able to create and explore the future. After that, sci fi became mostly about the past in relation to the future, instead of the future itself. You can hear it in the experimental music and art forms just prior to and after the new millennium. This desperate last plea for the notion of the future and then... silence; the the processing of culture through remixes. A blended nostalgia smoothie of everything great created in the last 100 years, processed to sell

sometimes I come back to this one and watch it over again cause it's just such a great video

This is an interesting critique of the neoliberal "end of history" phenomenon. Our inability to imagine anything after capitalism serves as both a creator of fundamental apathy and capitalism's greatest defence. If there can be nothing better than capitalism, if imagination about another future cannot exist, then capitalism remains the end state (until it eventually decays or the planet simply become uninhabitable).

The best example of this for me is seeing a nightclubbed absolutely packed with 18/19 year olds dancing to ABBA and the Smiths. They're a cultural sensation.. again.

Of course, '50s nostalgia was rampant throughout the '70s and '80s, as seen in everything from Happy Days, to Back to the Future, to the music of Elton John, Billy Joel, etc.

The 80's actual aesthetic was taken from The Memphis School and Biba and Retro-Art Deco... These ideas were old when they first became general in popular culture!

This is currently the best video essay I've ever watched and I'm grateful for it as it articulated ideas and feelings I've had for a long time. Thanks to you I've discovered the whole aread of hauntology analysis and started reading Fisher (then tumbling down the rabbit whole). Thanks a lot for this

R.I.P Mark Fisher! One of the greatest thinkers of our time !