Hauntology

Which future from the past haunts your now?

If you’re alive and watching this in 2026 you are likely haunted by one of two great stories of the future.

The future of the space rocket, the warp drive, the starship. Human technology will take us to the stars, to strange new worlds, to meet the alien.

And the utopian future of communism. Humans will outgrow our greed and violence and make a better, fairer world.

Two futures that could never exist.

It was the communist utopia that the philosopher Jacques Derrida commented on in his book Spectres of Marx.

The Berlin wall had fallen but the future predicted by Karl Marx would continue to haunt humanity.

Derrida called seeing these failed futures Hauntology. A pun on the term Ontology.

Yes, that’s the kind of joke that makes French philosophers laugh.

Ontology is the study of what exists…what is reality?

When we see a ghost we see a visual artefact, perhaps a reflection in a mirror. And we remember a person lost to us. That combination makes the ghost of our father ontologically “real” for us.

So when we see a new technology : a Large Language Model, we combine it with an imagined future from our past, The Terminator perhaps, and the combination makes AI hauntologically real for us.

And makes AI a powerful delusion for the Silicon Valley hype machine.

Mark Fisher resurrected hauntology in his essay Lost Futures and his concept of “the slow cancellation of the future”.

As capitalism enters an ever deeper crisis and our possible futures collapse, we are increasingly haunted by our lost futures.

The hauntology of the space rocket powers the industries of Elon Musk. It’s not any real technological achievement on sale in the SpaceX one trillion dollar IPO. It’s the false promise of a future that never was.

Communist utopian hauntology grows ever stronger as our reality grows more and more dystopian, attracting us back to failed ideologies of the past because there is no future.

We need to let go of lost futures. We need to exorcise the space rocket and the communist utopian futures of our past that haunt our now.

We need a better story. We need an actual viable future. We need a 21st century mythos.