Ruins in Reverse: A Fail Ghost Haunting
If a ghost haunts a house in a recently built abandoned city and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
‘Ruins in reverse … this is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.’
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Robert Smithson
Intro: Global Collapse
The first two decades of the new millennium had been replete with images of catastrophe, from natural disasters to war. So much human drama unfolded in many of the abortive attempts to rebuild after what seemed like the revolving doors of collapse. While the 20th century appears from our vantage point as a kind of troubled but steady rise in the quality of life for most of humanity, the 21st century is marked by a chaotic rise and fall of boom and bust cycles, continual crises, conflicts and upheavals – 9/11, Katrina, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Financial Crisis and the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, Ferguson, George Floyd protests and riots – and the list goes on and on, all of it marked by a steady decline in the quality of life for a vast majority of people. Many of these disasters happened fast, but some, like the still ongoing drought in the American West, took years to unfold. From these we got spectacular images of ruins. Ten years of war in Syria had turned most of its cities into rubble, Katrina flooded New Orleans in a single day, but entire neighborhoods are still in shambles. At an even longer time frame we can witness the protracted collapse of Detroit and many other Mid-Western American cities in the wake of deindustrialization and depopulation – Gary, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Saint Luis, Memphis, etc. Disaster and ruin fill our media-saturated world. Reports of extreme weather events, disease, mass migration, incredible suffering everywhere, is on twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Here in California tent cities and caravan enclaves seem to exist under every bridge and underpass. Last year ‘doom scrolling’ on one’s smart phone became a popular morbid activity. It seems that we’ve become accustomed, inured even, to ‘ruin lust,’ a fascination with ruination of every sort, from collapsing buildings to masses of bodies on the brink of existence. But ruin lust is and ageless agent. It has existed alongside ruins themselves. Artists have been turning out images of ruins for centuries and imagining the ruins of the future. The Romantics of the 19th century have perfected the art of the ruin, often depicting people in contemplation against collapsed temples, entire cities and societies, as in Thomas Cole’s famous cycle of paintings. The people depicted were often ghost-like, symbolizing life’s insignificance against the immensity of time. 20th century artists have further eroded the position of the human within the grand narrative of ruination, often eliminating all vestiges of their presence and substituting them with symbolic representations like Anselm Kiefer’s painter palette or Andrei Tarkovsky’s portrayal of social, mental and physical ruins in films like ‘Nostalghia’, ‘Sacrifice’ and ‘Stalker.’  ‘Ruin lust’ writes Brian Dillon, ‘is in fact a thoroughly historical desire, or affliction. It arises at a moment of chronological self-consciousness, and flourishes in times of historical unease.’ The 21st century fits neatly into Dillon’s notion of a global rise of ruin lust, aided in part by the ubiquity of recording devices capable of documenting the minutiae of a society on the brink of failure. Ruination and the fascination with ruins is deeply intertwined with nostalgia, the emotion linked to memory and loss. It is through nostalgia that ruins are most often reconstituted in the guise of the new. Everything old becomes new again in what Mark Fisher coined ‘hauntology,’ combining the notions of a haunting, like ghosts from the past haunting our present, and ontology, the philosophical practice of exploring existence, reality, being and becoming. The past always haunts the present and its ghosts come back in different forms. These are not the ghosts of insipid TV shows, where a group of stupid teens go to haunted houses to provoke spirits so they can gather ‘evidence’ of their existence. The ghosts of today are ideas, concepts, styles, real and imagined. Svetlana Boym wrote that nostalgia is always most strongly felt at a time of greatest progress, when society is undergoing major upheavals. It surfaces because it has the capacity to ameliorate the damaging effects of progress that often results in the uprooting of peoples and traditions. Ruins are a stark reminder that progress, like time, is cyclical and that a regression follows in the footsteps of progress whether we like it or not.
System collapse
In China the second largest real estate developer Evergrande collapsed in October. In what looked like a version of the Lehman collapse in 2008, Evergrande had a cascading effect on other highly leveraged real estate companies. Evergrande’s stock plummeted with no hope of recovery. Now, a few short weeks later, the entire Chinese real estate sector is collapsing. But what is perhaps most ominous about the collapse, are the images of hundreds of empty buildings, many unfinished, in what looks like a haunted cityscape. They look like war zones, with debris strewn about in the streets. These sites of massive construction now show very few signs of human activity, as if everyone just got up and left at the same time. These are the ruins of entire neighborhoods, entire cities. Instead of collapsed buildings, these ruins are not yet finished and the visual effect is eerily familiar. These buildings are ruins in the making. Thousands and thousands of construction laborers built them to look this way, like some bizarre outdoor post-apocalyptic theme park or a Mike Nelson art installation.
One has to suppose that these ‘ghost cities,’ as they’ve been called for years, never had the chance to acquire a single ghost, because a ghost city or ghost house is predicated on the fact that someone had to have lived and died inside them. So it is perhaps a little presumptuous to call them ghost cities at all. Here, in empty Evergrandia, millions of square feet of real estate stand devoid of human life, past or present. There is nothing to give them the agency of a haunting, but what we can do is imagine what it must be like to walk the empty streets, that are no more than a few years old, inside a city that looks like it is haunted, yet what it is haunted by are ghosts of the future rather than the past. It is nostalgia and ruination in reverse.
We are, in essence, imprinting our own visions of past crises onto this one, from the Great Depression, World War I and II, to the Great Recession. After 2008, books like ‘The City That Never Was’ attempted to narrativize the global financial and real estate collapse by looking at vast abandoned developments around the world. For years after the collapse, one was able to drive into these spaces and see for themselves the large swathes of land sitting and waiting to be developed with cookie cutter housing tracts, those homes built out of ticky tacky, that would surely one day house a ghost of one sort or another. Driving around those endless vistas of half-finished homes and paved roads that meandered around and around, one could see electrical boxes, water mains and cleanouts sticking out of the ground, and developer signs triumphantly extolling the latest development and the architectural drawings of a wonderful place-to-be. It was all sad and tragic for a while. People got wiped out, millions lost their jobs, retirement money gone, while corporate hyenas followed in the footsteps of real estate executors foreclosing on the homes on the thousands of homeowners whose mortgages were underwater, working in sync with local sheriff offices to snap up properties for pennies on the dollar. It was the hellscape that recent films like ‘Nomadland’ try to illustrate today. Remember when Frances McDormand pays a visit to her old home somewhere in the American desert? These places are still out there, on the edges of cities, in the decaying nomanland of the flyover states. McDormand walks through her old town, with abandoned houses lining the streets, then through her home, with its empty, decaying rooms, and out the back porch toward the immense high desert vista. Her emotional state throughout the visit is telling and we can’t be sure how much of it the audience is supposed to share. The whole scene is permeated by a nostalgic longing and depressive silence. As throughout the whole film, here McDormand is emotionally hovering, always just on the brink of tears or on the opposite edge about to explode in rage, but by the time she walks out the back door and into the wilderness, an air of resigned indifference sets in. This is the key moment in the film because it signifies her total disconnection from her former home through the disenchantment with the world-as-is. This was a beautiful house once, but today this place isn’t even fit for a ghost. It is actually hard to imagine any of these houses being haunted. And if they were, who would notice? The moment McDormand leaves her home for the last time, she herself becomes an apparition, a modern ghost, and joins in with the countless other modern nomads, moving from place to place, following the caravans, or venturing out on her own, tracking employment the way that ancient nomadic people’s followed herds of wildebeests.
Social collapse
Evergrande is the most recent foreshadowing of a possible total system collapse and now we’re getting the visual imagery of what that might look like. The recent Zillow debacle is still in the making and is still largely abstract. Thousands of homes that Zillow bought through its AI-driven house flipping program are now underwater and the company is attempting to offload them onto investors for a loss. Billions of dollars lost in a matter of months, while it was Zillow that was one of the culprits of skyrocketing housing prices due to its AI routinely overpaying for homes in bidding wars. It was Zillow, after all, that ‘revolutionized’ the 3D home tour, that turned every single house for sale into a potential hangout for online ghosts and entities, us.
3D technology is in this case an obverse of the Evergrande ghost city, a completely inert non-object, empty of its substance. What is there is a visual representation of the real thing, without any of the human elements that give it life. The ghost city and the 3D visualization are eerie in this respect, because the emptiness, that signifies the lack of anything living, something that could give the object a form of its subjectivity, is indicative of the growing indifference toward human interaction in the wake of the digital revolution, now in hyperdrive due to the pandemic, soon to be endemic. With its psychotic drive to eliminate from the public sphere anything relating to human presence and to human touch, we are all slowly becoming the ghosts we read about in sappy American gothic novels. This is partly due to the slow churning of the ‘contactless’ society being built upon and undergirded by our reliance on smart phones and partly due to the intense anti-cash, pro-crypto and smart contract drive coming from banks, credit corporations, financial institutions and exchanges. Society is being rebuilt in the image of its self-appointed ‘leaders’ at the top of Bank of America, JP Morgan, Google, Facebook (Meta), Tesla, Amazon, each one a particular sort of psychopath, to whom human interaction falls into two categories, it is either personal and therefore icky and undesirable, or business, the preferred form of meeting their fellows. There is an anecdote about Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison that his daily life is so stacked with business engagements, events, and meetings with celebrities and influential people, that he developed a tiered system of who is allowed to talk to him, from his gardener up to Bill Gates. His closest family did not make the top tier.
Our reliance on technology has made even the use of the phrase itself into a cliché. Everything has become a pastiche of everything else, a parody of a parody, an endless string of nostalgia and cartoons, feeding back into each other in a never-ending film strip of horrors and fantasies due in great part by the overuse of technology and social media. The supply of information is a poisoned well. It is often impossible to distinguish between the source and the supply of the information, making both highly toxic. The only way out of this loop seems to be to willfully become a living ghost, to make a path for oneself, unique from everyone else. Take for example Werner Herzog’s approach, which is to travel on foot wherever possible and to forego the mobile phone entirely. His take on the internet in 2016’s ‘Lo and Behold, Reveries of a Connected World’ is poignant and crucial, because it is channeled through the point of view of someone unencumbered by technology, able to critique it from the outside. We’re slowly but surely losing that point of view as more and more of us become part of the globalized (imperialist) techno-market. It absolutely makes sense that in this world our newly socialized and preferred mode of getting around will be in electric vehicles that sound eerily like ghosts when driving.
But let’s go back to ‘Nomadland’ for a bit. Lots had been said and written about this film and its romantic, almost nostalgic portrayal of the main characters, especially Frances McDormand. Even Slavoj Zizek provides a pretty bland critique, saying that he does not like the film because of its portrayal, a quasi-celebration of poverty in its particular difference. Yes, these people are poor, living on the edge of society, but ultimately they are happy, perhaps actually enjoying their fringe existence. Yes, it is true that we should be wary of a film about the poor that receives the highest honors from one of the preeminent industries of personal and social exploitation, the way ‘Nomadland’ did when it received six Academy Award wins in 2021. And yes, Zizek is right when he writes that the characters in the film ‘are shown as decent people, full of spontaneous goodness and solidarity with each other, inhabiting their own world of small customs and rituals, enjoying their modest happiness – even the occasional work in an Amazon packaging center goes quite well… That’s how our hegemonic ideology likes to see workers.’ And that is precisely how Hollywood likes to present them and how the IMF and the World Economic Forum like to identify with them to play up their image among the world’s elite community so they can be free to continue to exploit them. These are obvious critiques of the film and they’re not wrong. The problem is that they are missing the substance by focusing too much on the political implications, ramifications and entanglements between the exploiter and the exploited and thus missing what the film is really about. ‘Nomadland’ is about ghosts and the empty landscapes they occupy. While it is about the slow depopulation of the American hinterlands, it is an imagination of the existential emptiness at the heart of a slowly dying civilization and the specters replacing the living. These are ghosts 2.0, the newly undead who have not yet passed over to the other side. Kept barely alive by Amazon they are mirroring themselves into existence through their technological extremities. Most of them are still in some way ‘connected’ to the digital realm via phones and their jobs. Their former homes are not yet haunted, because they are themselves doing the haunting. They are ghosts because they have not yet realized it. To paraphrase Adorno, these ghosts must go on living because the chance they got at an afterlife was effectively missed.
Ideological Collapse
At the core of the ruin is a fascination with failure. Systemic, social, political, even personal collapse, are all subsets of the failure of civilization. They are the specters haunting all ruins. Ghosts are the transcendental transfigurations of being, in which the failure of the body is in direct anxious dislocation from the mind. Ghosts of this type are rudimentarily analogous to all deep fascination and revulsion felt while confronting different types of body horror, because death constitutes the final and ultimate splitting of the mind with the body in which the mind loses whatever control it had left over the body. The corpse is the final ruin of the lifeless being. Ideological collapse is sustained in much the same way, in that the body of the state is violently disassociated from its sustaining core, its mind so to speak, congealed from the many parts of its most abstract notions, from politics to philosophy. In the most obvious case of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, it is ideological failure and collapse that sustains our endless fascination with the ruins that are to this day experienced in the social and political spheres, not to mention architecture, art, artifacts, literature, philosophy, science, technology and so on. Less obvious are the digital ruins through which avatars and digital ghosts, facsimiles of real people alive or dead, move via lines of code.
The internet is body horror lite. During the heyday of internet 1.0 some twenty years ago, websites like Stile Project and Murman, became the early avatars for humanity’s fascination with death, decay and destruction at the heart of civilization. The internet was the perfect mirror through which to view all that is ugly, repulsive and hideous and feel good about it. Today’s postmodern internet sanitizes the ideological death drive with an endless array of denialism and propaganda in the service of the most crass capital exploitation. Here the dislocation of the mind from the body functions as a positive attribute and is often sought out as a means to one day translocate the soul or mind into a state of permanence. Who wouldn’t want to live forever in cyberspace, perhaps charging rent on Decentraland, purchasing digital real estate next to Snoop Dogg or buying land on the moon using NFTs? Solving the problem of eternal life or the fountain of youth will essentially be done by finding a way to upload oneself into the ‘metaverse’ while the body is destroyed. The problem with this is obvious. While online who will have control once the body is gone and the mind is left to freely float anywhere? Will it be the individual or will it be the multinationals, the platforms, the metaverses, the banks, that provide the virtual space within which all of us participate? It seems that those who have the power to keep the lights on and keep things running also have the power to shut them down for any reason - financial, political, or ideological. The way that the internet had recently been cornered by corporations and mass media that have in turn made participation in online culture almost entirely dependent on the individual’s ability to conform to specific political and ideological structures through the deployment of various algorithms that trace, redact, censor, and clean up the space from undesirable elements, should give us pause to think about the efficacy of our willingness to turn ourselves into digital ghosts. I wrote about the various ghosts that are haunting the hallways of the internet in ‘Post-dead Apocalypse’ and it seems that the last year and a half this haunting had moved into hyperdrive. Aided by the social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, thousands of people have been eliminated from the platforms for various political reasons, turning them into digital nonentities.
In the Grayzone’s reporting by Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal, we read that in Nicaragua during the lead-up to their presidential elections, hundreds, perhaps thousands of Sandinista activists have been ‘eliminated,’ first through a campaign of doxxing and then the erasing of their online social media presence. The platforms’ moderators and AI have falsely identified, or should we say, have been instructed to identify the activists’ profiles as bots, a non-human form of the digital ghost, and to take them down, an activity that recalls something similar that happened in the United States in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, when Facebook users were ‘delegated’ with the power to identify ‘disinformation’ with similar predictable results. Hundreds of thousands of posts were flagged and erased creating a chaotic mess of dead links, empty profiles and stoking the smoldering coals of an ideological civil war by instigating and supporting the censorious nature hibernating deep within each and every one of us. In Nicaragua the Sandinista activists have been turning to the same social media platforms, posting videos of themselves to give proof that they are indeed real human beings, only to have their profiles shut down anyway. It is a tactic used routinely by Google and Facebook to censor and sterilize modern political debate and one has to suspect that it will only get worse from here.
It has not been that long ago that one’s online presence was simply a supplement, an added component, to one’s fully realized personal being. To be a citizen of a state meant to exist, to have personal documents and identification, to pay taxes and ideally a place of residence. Today, only decade or two after the introduction of the internet and social media, our online selves are in effect more important than our real living selves. When one aspect of our selves, the offline or the online, gets eliminated, the other aspect becomes its ghostly apparition. In ‘Post-Dead Apocalypse’ I wrote about the ways people get turned into online ghosts. Their online selves continue to ‘live’ often years after they die, people continue to send them messages on Facebook, their bank accounts set to auto-pay get regular withdrawals for things like rent and mortgages, and so on. Couldn’t the reverse also be true? What if by eliminating someone’s entire online presence, makes a living ghost out of the person? And with the creation of the Metaverse, Decentraland or Sandbox, places where people are ‘moving’ to and paying huge sums of money to become their first online citizens, even getting married there, are we to assume that these places will one day also be abandoned and become digital ruins, the beautiful corpses of a new ideology?
Post Script
In China the property developer Evergrande had finally defaulted on all of its debts and the outlook on the global real estate and general economy is grim. But time will tell. For now we will have the strange pleasure of looking at massive ghost towers where nobody lives, the emptying corridors of human progress and speculate how after the lessons of the Financial Crisis and the Great Recession, we’ve essentially learned nothing.
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