Grafton Tanner

In the age of global capitalism, vaporwave celebrates and undermines the electronic ghosts haunting the nostalgia industry. Ours is a time of ghosts in machines, killing meaning and exposing the gaps inherent in the electronic media that pervade our lives. Vaporwave is an infant musical micro-genre that foregrounds the horror of electronic media's ability to appear - as media theorist Jeffrey Sconce terms it - "haunted." Experimental musicians such as INTERNET CLUB and MACINTOSH PLUS manipulate Muzak and commercial music to undermine the commodification of nostalgia in the age of global capitalism while accentuating the uncanny properties of electronic music production. Babbling Corpse reveals vaporwave's many intersections with politics, media theory, and our present fascination with uncanny, co(s)mic horror. The book is aimed at those interested in global capitalism's effect on art, musical raids on mainstream "indie" and popular music, and anyone intrigued by the changing relationship between art and commerce.

Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts

Babbling Corpse

The Hours Have Lost Their Clock charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. Nostalgia has broken out across the world. Political leaders promise a return to yesteryear. Remakes and reboots dominate the box office. Some use the emotion to resist oppressive regimes. Others induce it to manipulate populations. With little faith in a future of global warming and economic anxiety, many turn to this centuries-old emotion to weather the present. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Grafton Tanner argues that nostalgia is the defining emotion of our time. Moving from the fight over racist monuments to the collective mourning of species extinction, he traces nostalgia's ascent in the twenty-first century, revealing its power as both a consequence of our unstable time and a defense against it. The longer we live with endless wars, technological determinism, and economic austerity, he writes, the more nostalgic we will be. From biased algorithms to the birth of homeland security, and from the rise of far-right extremism to the gentrification of memory itself, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock argues for a resistance against nostalgia. Our very future depends on it.

The Hours Have Lost Their Clock

Shocked by 9/11, the Great Recession, digital anxiety, and ecological collapse, the West suffers from nostalgia. People everywhere yearn for a utopian version of the past that never existed. Desperate for relief, many long to escape from the present. Some will stop at nothing to achieve it. In his essential new book, Grafton Tanner, author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, argues that our nostalgia today is partly a consequence of the attention economy. At a time when historical literacy is crucial, and old prejudices are percolating into the present, Big Tech’s predictive algorithms are locking us into nostalgic feedback loops. The result is a precarious society with its gaze fixed on the good old days. Spanning from the ancient Sophists to Black Mirror, The Circle of the Snake is at once a reckoning with the myth of digital utopia and an incisive analysis of nostalgia as a weapon to spread fascism.

Grafton Tanner

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