Does it seem like a lot of people are playing it safe? I mean even before Covid. Especially in entertainment like Sports and Media. There just isn't any standouts or people taking big chances anymore. Like everything has lost the magic and originality, too.
We keep repeating past trends and fads. Or creating things based on old ideas instead of from scratch. I don't mean that someone should reinvent the wheel. I mean inventing something that isn't a wheel at all.
It's like we stopped trying and now take the easy way out.
Was it safer to have the Stranger Things story set in the 1980s? Rather than today or in the future, or on one of Mars' moons? Someone chose that aesthetic for a reason. And this is coming from someone who digs the retro synth music in Stranger Things and still loves the 80s too.
I don't think it was done for kicks or just to put on our Nostalgia goggles. This goes deeper than that. It has to do with all of us. And what we have become. I'm talking about general aesthetics and the western philosophy.
A branch of Philosophy known as Metaphysics contains a sub category called Ontology.
That's just a weird word for studying the nature or essence of our existence. Hauntology is a play on words and a reference to it. Because if the H is silent then even though it's there, it sounds the same as Ontology. (It's a meta-reference, if you're wondering)
Hauntology is about how the past haunts us and we can't move on from it or perhaps the past can't move on and sticks around as ghosts. We keep seeing the same references again and again.
I could go back to politics for examples like how everyone a person doesn't like is literally Hitler or exactly like a pre-60s racist, but I promised I wouldn't. 😁
Or I could ask you this:
How many times have you seen references to a Delorean or Back to the Future?
Now I loved that movie and the sequel. I was even there at Universal while they were filming Part 2. But seeing the Delorean in modern commercials is a bit weird.
Especially, seeing a CGI version of that car in the movie Ready Player One. I expected to be excited about it, but something didn't feel right to me.
Because it's done without proper homage. The movie was a hodge podge of virtual reality visuals and quick cut edits. They drop an Avatar in a Delorean into a blender with King Kong, a Bigfoot monster truck, and a T-Rex flying by like a hurricane with so many other retro icons that I didn't care anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I read the book Ready Player One and was thoroughly entertained! That virtual arcade of every game being available to play for free would have been a dream come true, when I was 10. The book was awesome, but seeing the BTTF Delorean in the movie wasn't.
I think about today and wonder where are the automatic self-tying Nike shoes and real hoverboards? Or flying Deloreans? It's like the future never came.
Instead, we're stuck and haunted with the past. The only promises for our future is to have Virtual Reality headsets where you can relive all the past just like Ready Player One and live out fake Futures that never came. It seems like a real Future isn't going to happen.
"It became a Lost Future." ~Mark Fisher
I didn't coin the word Hauntology. That was Jacques Derrida. But there's a part of me coming to realize the idea might have something to it. He thought that we never encounter things as fully present, fully there. Like that old saying about Oakland, California.
There's no there, there.
The past is mixed up with the present and the future. Today is more about what was and doesn't exist anymore. And not until the future can we fully make sense of today. Did I confuse you yet? 😆
Ok how about this...
The present is sort of in the background, unable to stand out in front on it's own. Or maybe we're too afraid to let it!?
I know who gets the blame for this. But it isn't just nostalgia nerds. It isn't just grown men not growing up. Though both have played a part. I think most people in the Western World are too scared to actually create something new, something that isn’t a sure and already tested thing. And maybe there's even more to it than that!
Imagine playing a video game with only a freeze frame.
It has no meaning, no movement. Same could be said about video games in general, if you're not a gamer. But think about it. One frozen frame doesn't have the same impact and meaning as knowing what frames came before and counting on what frames might come after.
The entire experience of an interactive video game is never actually present. We only have an understanding of a game by the relationship of past frames, present frame, and frames in the future.
Things which are no longer present haunt us because of the step-by-step way we experience existence.
Our present experiences are connected to Specters of the Past, which no longer exist and Specters of the Future, which can't exist yet. But we exist today and that's real, yet we are stuck in between those two ghosts and it's spooky. That's Hauntology.
Mark Fisher took that idea and projected it out into our culture.
One of his conclusions was: Maybe we go back to the past because we like the ideas about the future people had then. And since those futures never happened, maybe people feel safe or hopeful by going back to the fads and cultural icons that were created when we still thought those lost futures were coming.
And here's where I think he has an even better point: He said we’ve reached a cultural impasse because of...
wait...close your eyes for this one because it's political.
…Neo-Liberalism.
Okay it's safe now. 😉
What he means is…
Not enough people are trying to anticipate the future or even trying to think of new worlds anymore. We want instant gratification, simple solutions, reductionist thinking, quickly getting our way, or else!
Therefore, old ideas are brought back and remade. Since it would take a lot of imagination, creativity, and hard work making something actually innovative and completely new.
Before anyone disagrees, I should specify I'm not talking about technology. Of course, that's moving forward, albeit very slowly in the public sphere. The major cutting edge advances are only accessible to elites, governments, and the military.
But it happens even in that realm. Computer programming is still terrible. No offense, but programmers still lag behind and use old models, old thinking. Most of them don't even understand new hardware they're programming for. Software is extremely inefficient and far behind the capabilities of modern hardware. Even the stuff the public gets access to. But again, it would take lots of brain power, innovation, effort, and testing to come up with a better way of programming. And A.I. relies on existing models, so that might not improve things either.
Technology is hampered by being set in our old ways and so it doesn't form new ideas or cultures anymore.
The opposite happens. The stagnant culture forms and limits our new technologies. Our culture might be like a poorly written program. With a recursive algorithm that causes an infinite loop. Look at social media.
Everything today is a downgrade from My Space. With My Space you had your own web page on the internet for free. You could CREATE anything you wanted! You could personalize it completely, as well as do everything social media does now: advertise, socialize, share links, etc. But you had more freedom than Social Media today, which locks you into "News Feeds" and voting (likes, dislikes, hand-picked reaction emojis).
*And we wonder why everything is polarized and political now! And why haters emerged.* LMAO
Okay, okay, I apologize. Life just isn't worth living, if you can't post pictures on the feed of what you had for lunch or the 1,000th selfie of you and your boyfriend. 😆
But check this out...
Repetitive cultural revivalism has made a lot of people unable to help us create a truly new future. The wonders and hope of creating something otherworldly have been replaced with laziness, impatience, and fear. Or maybe something else altogether I haven't even thought about yet. But I do know it sometimes seems like...
The future has been canceled.
It's not easy to get away from this. Everything can be digitized and archived. The past is artificially preserved and carrying forward indefinitely into the future, where it can be referenced at any time or at all times. It doesn’t wither away or fall apart like an old building.
Mark Fisher compares our experiences today to the movie Memento. The story of a guy who writes notes to himself because he only has memories up to a certain point and is incapable of creating new memories. He refers to past drawings, pictures, tattoos, and memos in order to understand his place in the world in the present and to hopefully anticipate the future.
A lot like our culture, where people refer to memes and nostalgia in order to be happy or make sense of things because we're no longer busy creating brand new things instead. Or better things. More helpful things, etc. Instead, we repeat the same ideas, redo the same stories, Hollywood remakes ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
And here I am doing just that. By repeating what Derrida and Fisher already explored. ROFL
So I'll end this post and go listen to some Vaporwave... or maybe find a way to try something actually new.
See you next time, Peace be with you!
UPDATE:
Over the weekend, I met two different guys in their 20s who don't even know each other. In talking with each, I found out that BOTH are looking for items from the 1980s. Is that funny or what?
The timing was serendipitous. Anyway, one collects clothes, mostly T-shirts from the 80s. The other collects 80s toys, comic books, and collectible cards.
Quite a confirmation for the Hauntology post. 🤣