Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave And The Commodification Of Ghosts

by Grafton Tanner

With unprecedented access to the Internet, the flattened desert where past, present, and future comingle, we find ourselves living in a state of atemporality, yearning for a time before the present. In the West, the time for which we pine is one before the twenty-first century, which arrived violently on September 11, 2001, and before the rise of the Internet. Capitalism knows this and exploits our collective nostalgia for economic gain, commodifying the very ghosts we clutch earnestly.