“Because of late capitalism, we have reached a condition that Bifo has called ‘the slow cancellation of the future,’ where life continues but time has somehow stopped. The innovating times of popular modernism are dead and it seems like no one knows. They have been replaced with the long dark night of neoliberal capitalist realism where the future no longer seems possible.”

“It seems like everyone has been forced to accommodate to this neoliberal culture where the possibility of something new has died out, but what if some did not? There are some people that struggle with this new reality, refusing to yield to the fact that popular modernism has been crushed by the exhaustion of neoliberal capitalism. This is where hauntology comes in.”

“It is essentially a culture haunted by what Fisher called ‘lost futures’, the futures, possibilities, and dreams promised by popular modernist culture that never arrived, that were crushed by neoliberalism’s disappointment. ‘What’s at stake in 21st-century hauntology,’ says Fisher, ‘is not the disappearance of a particular object. What has vanished is a tendency, a visual trajectory. The name for this tendency is popular modernism.’”

"Burial is haunted by what once was, what could have been, and — most keeningly — what could still happen."

“In conclusion, neoliberal capitalism has stripped us of our ability to create a future, essentially cancelling it. The tendency of popular modernism with its nature of innovation, creativity, and possibility has been eroded by ‘the slow cancellation of the future,’ the postmodern culture of nostalgia and pastiche. There are those, however, who refuse to accommodate to this reality, melancholically longing for this tendency of popular modernism and its lost futures, the possibilities it created that were never materialized.”

“What should haunt us today are the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never arrived. “These specters — the specters of lost futures — reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world.” It is through engaging with and reviving these lost futures that we can finally imagine a world free from the chains of contemporary capitalism. As stated before, it is imperative that we reject postmodern culture and instead focus on these lost futures. ‘When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.’ This is the relevance and the promise of hauntology.”

“'Everything that exists is possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences, which precede and surround it, allowing it to possess such consistency and intelligibility that it does,'' writes Fisher, 'But hauntology explicitly brings into play the question of time in a way that had not been the case with the trace or différance.'"