CGI simulations of future parks act as negative hauntology that reorganises present space

Evidence

The CGI simulations that ringfence the Lea Valley project forward fake futures which will never arrive but which are immediately effective, already re-organising space in East London, already diverting resources from public to private. What this constitutes is a kind of negative hauntology, operating according to the familiar hype-dynamics of corporate capital. (Cybercapital relies on its own ethereal entities, of course.) We are not dealing with the spectres of lost possibilities, the ghosts of things that never happened, or the traces of forgotten events photoshopped out of the end of history. Instead, we are confronting the CGI-signs of a massive pseudo-event. A pre-scripted PR initiative disguised as an authentic happening. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2416

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverting hauntology: instead of the past haunting the present, the corporate CGI future haunts — fake futures that ‘will never arrive but which are immediately effective’. A genuinely paradigm-shifting reworking of the concept.
• XREF: Builds on the book’s earlier hauntology/capitalist-realism apparatus (ch34, ch66) and the general theme that capital is constitutively future-stealing (ch106: ‘Debt operates as a capture of the debtor’s future time’).
• SEED: Essay: the architecture-render as political instrument — how visualizations of never-arriving futures (‘CGI-shadow’) are used to rezone land, divert funds, govern the present. Compare with property-development mockups and austerity-era regeneration PR.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the Grafting & Growth piece obliquely via redevelopment of green/industrial wasteland space, but more strongly to the general cultural-decline thread of the book.