np/hauntology ▶
YouTube URL hauntology bookmarklet Name / label / descriptive title

Coca-Cola 'New Coke' + Stranger Things S3 (2019)
Context: "The launch of 'New Coke' [Wikipedia] 40 years ago, in 1985, is one of the most famous case studies in the world of branding and marketing. It is also one of the biggest mistakes made by a big consumer brand, with many lessons to learn from. On April 23 of that year, The Coca-Cola Company decided to change the formula of its most popular drink for the first time in 99 years and launch it as 'New Coke'. The objective was to regain market share in the US and in the cola category – especially against Pepsi – but things didn’t go as planned. The backlash from consumers was so huge that the company had to go back to the original Coca-Cola formula" (Andrivet, M., 2025).
Concept: "Personal nostalgia encompasses a longing for the lived past (Merchant, LaTour, Ford, and LaTour, forthcoming). Vicarious nostalgia on the other hand, 'deals with nostalgia for a period outside of the individual's living memory' (Goulding, 2002, page 542) that was never directly experienced by the consumer (Baker and Kennedy, 1994). Vicarious nostalgia, also referred to as historical nostalgia, examines the experience of emotionally connecting to and fantasizing about experiences and associations from past eras (Stern, 1992)" (Merchant, A. and G. M. Rose, 2013, p.2620).
More: Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin) defends 'New Coke' in Stranger Things S3E7 ('Chapter Seven: The Bite') [imdb] https://www.youtube.com/embed/xe3GjCgVUdM [commentary]
Related: crossover/cross-promotion [Wikipedia] between Stranger Things + 'Hawkins Fried Chicken' (KFC) https://newpractices.co.uk/messaging/#v08-dcdQGjE
Bibliography: Merchant, A. and G. M. Rose (2013). "Effects of advertising-evoked vicarious nostalgia on brand heritage." Journal of Business Research 66(12): 2619–2625. [academic source] None, D. T. J., None, D. V. K. M. & None, M. D. K. (2025). 'Digital Nostalgia Marketing: How Past-Centric Ads Affect Gen Z Consumption'. Advances in Consumer Research, 2(4), 4279-4291. https://acr-journal.com/article/digital-nostalgia-marketing-how-past-centric-ads-affect-gen-z-consumption-1527/ [pdf] Andrivet, M. (2025). 'New Coke: A Classic Branding Case Study on a Major Product Change Failure'. The Branding Journal. https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2025/02/new-coke/

'80s vaporwave aesthetic commercials compilation'
Context: "We can find amid this nexus key ingredients that would come to define vaporwave as it emerged and proliferated on the subcultural web during the early 2010s: piracy and recirculation of audio-visual fragments; an obsession with the period from roughly 1980 to the mid-1990s, encompassing the childhoods of Generation X and early Millennials; the combination of analog media such as cassette tapes with outmoded high-end consumer technology and home computing software; deliberately crude looping, echo effects, and speed shifting; pseudonyms, aliases, and anonymity with oblique references to Japanese tech corporations; incipient 3D videogame graphics and synthesizers; TV commercials; playful irony seamlessly imbricated with sincerity; and a fascination with hollowness, simulation, and ubiquitous music. In addition, we find an intriguing premonition of how users of the Reddit r/Vaporwave forum would later choose to depict the genre: 'music optimized for abandoned malls.'... The vaporwave [commentary] nexus attracted a surprising degree of critical attention as it crystallized into a recognizable genre. In 2010, Mark Fisher depicted Lopatin’s 'nobody here' video as a paradigm of what Evan Calder Williams has termed 'salvagepunk'—the 'post-apocalyptic vision of a broken and dead world, strewn with both the dream residues and real junk of the world that was, and shot through with the hard work of salvaging, repurposing, détourning, and scrapping.' For Fisher, such work was not merely a flat pastiche or montage of signs but rather an act that 'retains the specificity of cultural objects, even as it bolts them together into new assemblages.' Although Fisher would later reject vaporwave as a signal of 'diminished expectations,' his writing on hauntology effectively set the terms for the genre’s reception through a distinctive feedback loop amplified by Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism and Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. In this reading, present society is haunted by successive failures to deliver on past promises such as those implicit in postwar social democracy (Fisher’s focus is on Britain): hauntology was therefore a musical call-to-arms, the last frail memory of progressive possibility. " (pp.300-303).
More: 'Midnight Television 1989 | Vaporwave VHS Nostalgia Mix' https://www.youtube.com/embed/lc5N5swj3LQ?start=123
Bibliography: Cole, R. (2020). 'Vaporwave Aesthetics: Internet Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse'. ASAP/Journal, 5(2), 297–326. [academic source] [pdf]

Rae Gillibrand (31 October 2025). "We're Haunted By An Imagined Past: Folk Horror And Modern Britain With Dr Rae Gillibrand", Advaya

Jonas Čeika 'Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia'
Quote: "Hauntology [Wikipedia] supplants its near-homonym ontology, [Wikipedia] replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive" (Davis, C., 2005).
Transcript: "when talking about Mark Fisher's ideas of lost futures and of the cancellation of the future, it is important to first be familiar with 'hauntology' - a term coined by [Jacques] Derrida. Derrida used the word hauntology to refer to the way in which we never encounter things as fully present, as fully there. In all of our experiences, the present is always mixed up with the past and the future, that which is present is always mixed up with that which is absent. We can only make sense of any present moment by comparing it with the past and anticipating the future. To give a simple example, imagine hearing a simple melody - at any single moment you are only hearing one of the notes, only one of the notes is fully present. On its own this single tone has no melodic qualities, and the only way to make sense of the melody as a melody, is to constantly mix the present note with the notes that you are no longer hearing, on the one hand and the notes that you are anticipating on the other. The melody is never fully present but only arises from an interplay between the past present and future all of our experiences. Like this, we can only make sense of the future through the past and only make sense of the past through the future." https://www.youtube.com/embed/gSvUqhZcbVg?start=78&end=142
Bibliography: Fisher, M. (2012). "What Is Hauntology?" Film Quarterly 66(1): 16–24. [academic source] Gallix, A. (2011, June 17). 'Hauntology: A not-so-new critical manifestation'. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/jun/17/hauntology-critical Fisher, M. (2014). 'Ghosts of my life : writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures'. Winchester, U.K., Zero Books. [pdf] Derrida, J. and P. Kamuf (1994). 'Specters of Marx : the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international'. New York, Routledge. [pdf] Davis, C. (2005). 'Hauntology, spectres and phantoms'. French Studies. [academic source] [academic source] Moon, K., & Blackman, D. (2017, May 2). 'A guide to ontology, epistemology, and philosophical perspectives for interdisciplinary researchers'. Integration and Implementation Insights. https://i2insights.org/2017/05/02/philosophy-for-interdisciplinarity/ University of Warwick. (2017). 'Ontology'. Warwick.ac.uk; Education Studies, University of Warwick. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ces/research/current/socialtheory/maps/ology/

"The early internet is breaking - here’s how the World Wide Web from the 90s on will be saved"
About: Olia Lialina [Wikipedia] and Dragan Espenschied [Wikipedia] are part of a growing group of people who preserve and archive our online digital history. They see the web from the 90s and 2000s as an artifact, at times, even, Net Art.
More: https://net-art.org/jodi [Wikipedia]
More: 'The Useless Web' https://theuselessweb.com/
Point: http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian-ideology-2/
Bibliography: 'One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age | Digging through the Geocities Torrent'. (2025). Geocities.institute. https://blog.geocities.institute/ OneTerabyteOfKilobyteAge. (n.d.). One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op. This Tumblr Accompanies One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, the Geocities Research Blog by Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied. Screenshots Are Automatically Generated from a Stash of Old Geocities Home... Retrieved April 15, 2026, from [blog] Lialina, O. (2005). "The Internet of the 90’s was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction". [folksonomy] Lialina, O. (2026). "Internet Cafés: hybrids involving analogue and digital, virtual and real". [folksonomy] The Awl, & Allen, M. (2012, June 28). "A Suitably Bizarre Interview With The Early Web Provocateurs At Jodi.org". Medium; The Awl. https://medium.com/the-awl/a-suitably-bizarre-interview-with-the-early-web-provocateurs-at-jodi-org-f1035a1d78ac Bourn, C., & Tate, C. (2025). 'Life before Google'. [digital archives]

'Best Meta Horizon Worlds you Should Visit!'
Comment: "Horizon Worlds struggled to find users as the general public remained skeptical of virtual reality. The social platform has never drawn more than a couple hundred thousand active users a month, CNBC previously reported. The virtual 3D social network where avatars could interact and play games with other users officially launched in late 2021. It operated exclusively on the Quest VR platform until Meta launched a mobile app version in September 2023. The mobile version of Horizon Worlds was built to provide an entry point for users without VR headsets, functioning similarly to Roblox. The metaverse has proved to be a costly bet. The Reality Labs [Wikipedia] unit posted billions in losses each quarter after its launch. In fourth-quarter earnings posted in January, the unit reported an operating loss of [USD] $6.02 billion" (Murti, L., 2026).
Related: Vidyuu Tutorials | 'Meta Horizon Worlds VR closing' https://www.youtube.com/embed/hHy0lvI982Q
Also: [skeet]
Bibliography: Murti, L. (2026, March 18). "Meta is shutting down VR social platform Horizon Worlds in further pivot away from the metaverse". CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/18/meta-horizon-worlds-metaverse-vr.html

"Zuckerberg's Metaverse Ghost Town"
Transcript: "[Mark Zuckerberg] Our northstar is that, you know, by the end of the decade, we hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of of dollars of commerce each um buying, you know, digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves. So whether that's clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or or things to decorate their virtual conference room."
Transcript: "While Meta was constructing virtual corporate boardrooms, the metaverse was actually thriving, just not for Zuckerberg. Fortnite was making millions and even staged live events and concerts. They had a Travis Scott concert that 12 million people attended. Scott appearing as a 200 foot tall giant morphs into a robot. He performs underwater. He performs in outer space. The stage physically transforms around the audience every 60 seconds. At one point, the entire world turns upside down and players float through clouds made of music. A year later, Ariana Grande performed in Fortnite. A butterfly carried her across the sky. Players travelled through different dimensions built around her music catalogue. 78 million people attended across five shows. You can't do that in real life. That's the point. Meanwhile, over in Roblox, if you put aside their awful PDF problems, teenage developers were making millions of dollars building games inside a platform. The top Roblox creators were earning more money annually than most architects, lawyers, and even engineers. Kids weren't being dragged into a digital world. They were choosing it over reality because it gave them creative power, community, and more importantly, income. Minecraft 2, they had been running virtual worlds and economies for over a decade. The metaverse didn't fail. It was already here. Technically, Zuckerberg just looked at it and decided it didn't count because in his version, it couldn't just be games. It had to be everything else. And in trying to build something that could do everything, he missed a thing people were already doing and built the version nobody wanted." https://www.youtube.com/embed/SYHStIMOH4Q?start=645

'I Explored Abandoned Virtual World Games from the Past'
Note: Seminar Task (today only) The purpose of this first seminar is to get you to explore a number of concepts, which central to both the assignment coursework and lecture series (which will be fully detailed next week). In doing so, the aim is for you to explore these as a type of 'praxis' [Wikipedia] - where such concepts are 'enacted' through practice. And so, the exercise requires that you are initially 'analytical' (to consider the theory, which you have been introduced to) and 'synthetic' - through imaginatively developing possible solutions. Get into your assignment groups to develop the concept for an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). [Wikipedia] In doing so, note that this is a phenomenon which developed significant interest and excitement (as seemingly the logical direction-of-travel for emerging immersive/cross-platform media around 2010-15) and so is strongly linked to earlier developments in online media. And in this way, now evokes a sense of nostalgia as well as a sense of a 'lost future' - what Colin Davis describes as a 'hauntology' i.e. "Hauntology supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive" (Davis, C., 2005). http://newpractices.co.uk/StoryWorlds/#gSvUqhZcbVg And in doing so, I want you to somewhat assume the role of the cyber archaeologist/anthropologist - metaphorically digging through the remains/residue [Wikipedia] of abandoned virtual worlds and analysing cultural practices [Wikipedia] of those inhabitants who have remained. In doing so, drawing inspiration from this: http://newpractices.co.uk/StoryWorlds/#Dg2rDUKRbgM - where a once thriving 'multiverse' has been left all but abandoned - a virtual world of 'link rot' [Wikipedia] - a world, which has become all but zombify, which has now woken up and is suddenly 'phoning home'... perhaps in a way similar to the parallel realities of Dorian Gray and his painted likeness in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) [Wikipedia] The Picture of Dorian Gray (1973) [imdb] https://www.youtube.com/embed/OarqLAchU0E?start=6460&end=6507 or perhaps, the parallel realities of the utopian 'Barbieland' (and patriarchal 'Real World' counterpart) in Barbie (2023) or The Substance (2024) [imdb] [Wikipedia] (as per below) or even The Truman Show (1998) or its namesake illness the 'Truman Show Delusion' (TSD) (as per below). In doing so, consider the following: You're seeking to create a rule-based narrative, which is understood in terms of series of 'webisodes', which are unlocked through successfully solving puzzles/riddles etc. In this sense, the story unfolds non-linearly - like a jigsaw puzzle, which requires that you jump backwards and forwards in the storyline. It is a multiple-player game, which might target a particular group (especially, if the game-play was part of a marketing and promotion campaign). See - the creator of the ARG 'Aurelia: Edge of Darkness' - Lisa England's advice here: http://newpractices.co.uk/StoryWorlds/#ZgrtQpg9KVg The game will be 'event-based' and so, has a definite beginning and definite end date - possibly, tied in with/running parallel with existing events in the calendar. And importantly, the game must involve interaction in both real and virtual spaces - across multiple platforms - where players interact and share media content across for example, Bluesky + TikTok/YouTube + Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp + interactive billboards + BBC Radio 6 Music + cultural institution e.g. Hengistbury Head Visitor Centre. And finally, the game must seek to pique the interest of mainstream media (resulting in newspaper articles and news items) + ideally, leave some sort of lasting record.
Quote: 'Truman Show Delusion' (TSD): "We present five patients in whom the ideas of celebrity and exposure take centre stage in the presentation of their psychosis. They developed the delusional belief that they were the 'star' of a reality television show secretly broadcasting their daily life, much like the main character in Peter Weir's film The Truman Show (Gold, J. and I. Gold, 2012, p.456). ... Mr D. was working on a reality television show when he was hospitalised after causing a public disturbance. While working on the production of the show, he came to believe that he was the one who was actually being broadcast:'I thought I was a secret contestant on a reality show. I thought I was being filmed. I was convinced I was a contestant and later the TV show would reveal me.' He believed his thoughts were being controlled by a film crew paid for by his family (Gold, J. and I. Gold, 2012, p.458). ... In 2009, Antony Waterlow, a Sydney man, murdered his father and sister while in a psychotic state. A news report stated that'Mr Waterlow believed his family was behind a‘world wide game' to murder him or force him to commit suicide.' A doctor who interviewed the man is reported to have said that'Mr Waterlow told her in a consultation in February that he believed computers were accessing his brain through brainwaves and satellites. He said his family was screening his life on the Internet for the world to watch, akin to the film The Truman Show'" (Gold, J. and I. Gold, 2012, p.460).
Quote: "It's a potent metaphor for the vicissitudes of celebrity, and a smart explanation for Elisabeth's decision to experiment with ‘The Substance': a sinister product that promises a better version of herself (provided it's properly administered, which of course it won't be). Elisabeth is still gorgeous but exhausted by the upkeep involved in maintaining her looks in middle age: little wonder she wants a quick fix. Rather than an Ozempic-style makeover, though, Elisabeth gets Sue (a radiant Margaret Qualley) – a younger, more beautiful incarnation of the actress who rips her way out of a gaping wound in Elisabeth's back and immediately replaces her at work. And as Sue pushes at the limits of the rules governing The Substance's use, Elisabeth begins to age at a horrifying rate" (Wheatley, C., 2024).
Bibliography: Matlin, J. (2010, December). '10 things to keep in mind for producing cross-platform media'. NFB Blog. https://blog.nfb.ca/blog/2010/12/01/10-things-to-keep-in-mind-for-producing-cross-platform-media/ Gold, J. and I. Gold (2012). "The 'Truman Show' delusion: psychosis in the global village." Cogn Neuropsychiatry 17(6): 455–472. [Government] [pdf] Wheatley, C. (2024). 'Coralie Fargeat on The Substance'. Sight and Sound, 34(8). https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/news/sight-sound-october-2024-issue