The Rise of the Post-Dead: Analog Version

In the aftermath of the Digital Revolution the casualties are often the byproducts of too much doing and not enough thinking

I.

The gold rush in Bodie, California began in 1859 when four prospectors struck gold in a valley on a high plateau of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Almost immediately the town was flooded with people and within a few years the town’s population grew to roughly 8000 residents. 1878-1879 alone saw an influx of a thousand new faces ready to get down and dirty in the mines. But decline set in just as quickly. The mines were exhausted within a few years and two major fires, one in 1892 and the second in 1932 sealed Bodie’s fate as a future ghost town. By 1940 there were just 90 people still holding out in the frigid climate with an average of 303 days of below freezing temperatures and no trees in sight.

Centralia, Pennsylvania is home to a coal mine fire that’s been burning since 1962. Before that event started, Centralia was a regular mining town of little note and around 1200 residents. The decision came in 1962 to clean up the town, which was teeming with rats and permeated by foul odors due to its unregulated trash dumping policy. How else should one take care of a problem like an exposed waste dumping site? To set it on fire, naturally. The fact that the decision came from the city council makes Centralia a salient subject in government management, deregulation and policy-making that have long-term and enduring effects.

But this article isn’t about abandoned ghost towns per se, but rather about what one may call the ‘leftovers’ of civilization. As a follow up to my previoustwo posts about digital apparitions, I wanted to write about their analog counterparts and where they seem to intersect. A suggestion came in to write about the digital ghosts by way of houses. Almost immediately the subject of ghost towns came to mind.

A ghost town or a ghost or specter for that matter, is almost always some sort of leftover, abstracted from a previous existence. The abandonment of a town, a home, a culture, or whatever else, is related to the act of dumping, which is what makes Centralia such an appropriate example of ‘dump capitalism’ where a notion, a ghost town, is marked by what it discards, omits, or leaves behind. Centralia is a town literally created out of its own trash. We see this phenomenon everywhere these days, the ‘island’ of microplastic the size of Texas floating in the center of the Pacific ocean, the Mojave airplane boneyard, space trash orbiting our planet, solar and wind farms in a state of half decay, abandonware products, and so on. These are the literal specters of human production, of the dreams and futurist utopias dashed on the rocks of bitter reality. These mark our specific way of life and mode of production in the way that surplus value and exploitation marked the era of industrial revolution. A ghost town may be empty, but still be alive in the sense that we give it a purpose to exist through what it lacks, its living content - population, commerce, etc.

A house, when it is lived-in, will exhibit signs of life. It will be seen by others as alive. As soon as said house is abandoned, it takes very little time for the house to die. Typically, any house is always in a state of protracted decay. What keeps the house from dying is its upkeep by whoever lives inside it. When a house is abandoned, the process of decay speeds up and the house will in no time look to outsiders as literally dead. But a house doesn’t need to have anyone actually living inside for it to look and feel alive. Only the notion, the idea, that someone takes care of the house, is often sufficient. Many people own second homes that remain empty for the majority of the year. These houses do not look dead or abandoned, despite the owner’s prolonged absence. But should one of these second homes get abandoned it would exhibit signs of dying or ‘ghostification’ almost immediately. This is the mark of the weird and eerie.

Ghost towns are said to be in a state of ‘arrested decay.’ They get a chance to live vicariously through the content of human attention and interaction, not by being lived-in, but through constant visits and engagement, perhaps even maintenance of the specific ‘look’ of the ghost town. Ghost towns are in some sense the ‘second homes’ of entire cultures because they are the byproducts of those very cultures. They are uncanny, or unheimlich (unhomely) in German. And just like the word undead, unhomely signifies a life despite or within death, though not an opposition to life. Some modern thinking on this most Gothic of subjects can be found in Mark Fisher’s discourse on ‘the weird and the eerie.’ To Fisher the existence of the weird and eerie meant that the notion of the strange is somehow included within that which is familiar and that is what gives the weird its potency and its eerie quality. In the Czech language the word weird is podivny. It has its root in the Czech word for awe, but it is qualified with a prefix, its negation. We are certainly awed by ghost towns, but in a very different way that we may be awed by the latest 3D film. Ghost towns inspire awe in the way they sublimate feelings of horror and dread into nostalgia and enclose fear of our own mortality into strange commodities like souvenirs and Instagram posts. The robots made by Boston Dynamics are another perfect example of this kind of weird and eerie contained in something that should be aweinspiring. The dancing robot was total science fiction just twenty years ago, but unless one is an absolutely ideologically committed futurist or cult capitalist like Elon Musk, seeing an inanimate jumble of metal and plastic imitating human movements or walking on all fours like a dog while shouting orders at passersby to keep their social distance, raises in most of us a strange and creepy feeling. Questions of our own mortality bubble up with the knowledge that one day there will be little difference between robots and humans. The BD robots imitate life, but they are not alive in the proper sense, they are in the truest sense of the word, undead ghosts in a shell. No wonder that George Romero gave his version of the zombie a machine or robot-like quality. He understood that humans were beginning to resemble machines when caught in the inhumanity of capital reproduction, while today the twist on the zombie flick is that machines are beginning to resemble humans. Each notion, that of the human and that of the robotic, is contained within the other and that is why the BD robots will continue to be weird and eerie, no matter how sophisticated and ‘life-like’ they will get.

II.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, commercial real estate had been hit especially hard, as large office buildings were evacuated, with thousands of office workers swapping their cubicles and desks for home offices and laptops. Thousands of square feet of commercial real estate and office space had thus been converted into empty corridors fit for post-modern ghost stories. San Francisco, being one of the cities most affected by the flight of the white collar workers to suburbia and the still-cheap middle of the country, is now the site of vast amounts of empty office space, large glassed tombstones, still watched over by skeleton crews of private guards. Vacancy rates are part of the built-in calculation of commercial real estate investors, but the present rates across large cities is alarming. As more and more commerce moves to the hallways of the internet, spaces like large conference centers, monumental buildings that house annual art fairs, car shows, and so on, will or have already become obsolete. Many large cities have thus been turned into partial ghost towns, cities within cities, empty downtowns with overflowing suburbs. The endless cycles of population movement from country to city and back to the country continues. The hope it seems is that one day the pandemic shall pass, the way that pandemics and plagues of the past have and that things will return to some sort of primordial notion of normality. The ghost towns of the present however are a stern reminder that often things do not return to normal at all.

The move online had been producing ghosts since the internet’s inception. The first internet websites are now cleanly archived, as are countless videos, games, chatrooms, etc. It is now possible to visit these sites in their former lo fidelity, early internet glory. These are the first internet ghost towns, living off the energy (clicks, ad revenue, memberships, etc) of their visitors who continue to browse these storefronts. A look at the design changes to YouTube, is enough to understand how ‘ghostification’ works. In some sense, ghosts can be thought of as ‘recordings,’ whether it be recordings of life, voice, thought forms, and the like. In this sense, digital and analog ghosts are literally the same. Houses can be thought of as large recording devices for analog ghosts. The alchemist Jean Dubuis once proposed a theory in which all material in the known world (perhaps universe) is alive and thus capable of a type of ‘thought’ or memory recording, even inanimate and inert stuff like stone was in a sense alive. A stone’s life, compared to that of a human, is infinitely longer and slower, but is nonetheless subject to the same forces and exists within the world inextricably tied to everything else. Wood, in its previous incarnation as a tree, is very much alive and when cut down undergoes a protracted process of dying and drying out. The memory recording capability of this material is thus much greater than that of stone. If we are to take the theory of ghosts (leftovers) as beings or forms, possibly produced by the reaction of magnetic or electrical forces, the idea is that as long as materials are capable of conducting and reproducing them, they will be able to record and replay them, given that the materials are in some way designed and placed together so as to be able to do this. Analog recording devices are just this kind of technology. In whatever shape technology exists, acoustic, electrical, magnetic or digital, it will always be able to capture ghosts, because it will always produce an excess of itself, the leftover that becomes the specter. A house, though not typically thought of in technological terms, is just another kind of recording device. A house can therefore be thought of as reluctant technology.

What else can be done with a recording but to replay it? It is this repeatability that also undergirds the idea of the ghost. A ghost is said to repeat certain actions until it can be ‘released.’ A recording is released when it is cut up, transformed, erased. But recording devices are specifically designed and meant to do the one thing, to record and to do so for as long as they do not break. A house is also designed, with its roof, gables, staircases, walls, interstitial spaces, living areas, storage areas, and so on, to perform the function of living and recording memories. The function of a recording or a memory was for Gaston Bachelard something that occurred in the minds of those that lived in the houses, not the houses themselves. In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard goes to great lengths to explain houses in terms of memory spaces and the specific functions that each floor has in relation to the psychological make up of the human psyche. But it is here that Bachelard lays the groundwork for houses as possible recording devices, not just for individuals, but for entire cultures, in terms of gestalt and thought forms. Kristen Gallerneux’s High Static, Dead Lines sheds a little more light on the spectral nature of technology, especially early recording devices. The technological capability to capture and transmit sound for example, meant that technology was capable to accidentally capture that which wasn’t meant to be captured. These ‘artifacts’ are then left to be interpreted and when not fully understood slip into the realm of ghosts and specters.

What are we to make of humanity’s preoccupation with digitizing our world? To some, the endeavor to export or outsource our lives, online commerce and social interaction, signal a quantum leap in technological development, a brighter future, a new source of ‘wealth’ and knowledge. To others, the move online is a necessary step in a constant game of catching up. The ‘third world’ or ‘global South’ can be in some sense defined by this kind of perpetual catching up to the industrialized ‘West.’ To others still, the move online portents a kind of doing away with the ghosts of the analog world by substituting everything with a new, augmented, ‘better’ digital world. To these people, leaving the real world behind to stagnate or degrade, is simply a step in further, human-centered and human-conducted evolution, one that is as irreversible as extinction. The internet is usually thought of in terms of simulation, pastiche, staging, fakeness, and though these terms do define the internet to a degree, what the internet is really doing is attempting to reassemble those parts of the real world which we have ultimately left behind in the digital world and to build on it, in perpetuity. The project of perfecting the online world seems like a much more viable option than it is to perfect or fix our real environment in which we actually live.

In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin wrote - “Virtual reality has about it the character of unreality, of transcending the ordinary world and its common smells and sights, its limiting rhythms of birth, growth, decline, death, and renewal.” The digital world thus has the capability of immortality because it is superficially designed to always develop, grow, innovate, never to decline or grow old the way that the real world, on which it is modeled, does. The mere fact that the digital world is still capable of producing ghosts as remnants of its past versions, should give us insight into its possible future. In the virtual reality in which everything is seemingly switchable, repeatable but above all constant, things like outmoded or abandoned spaces tend to actually disappear without a trace. The Adobe software Flash for example, which has been the primary digital software to run all forms of streaming and gaming, was officially abandoned on January 1, 2021 after more than twenty years of service. The undergirding product of the internet, dispensed with like yesterday’s laundry, a ruin without its ruinous trace, perfectly supplanted with another product, keeping the experience of the digital world seamlessly unaltered. The sudden switch to ‘everything online’ during 2020 meant that the analog and digital worlds have collided in strange and unforeseen ways. The ‘need’ for such things as house staging were fully digitized so that buyers could still ‘visit’ their potential new homes, that were now being ‘filled’ with virtual furniture, art and objects, to get the ‘full’ experience of the real house, while the real house itself stands totally empty. Both places are in essence empty, but are in turn filled up with ghosts and fantasy projections.

End

This was the third and final installment in the Post-Dead Apocalypse ‘trilogy.’ If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing, commenting and sharing. Thank you!