Grafton Tanner is an American author and academic. His work focuses on Big Tech, nostalgia, neoliberalism, and education.
Career
Babbling Corpse
Tanner's first book,
Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, was written in 2016 for
Collective Ink Publishers. Tanner analyzed
vaporwave, a genre of
Lo-fi music music based on internet aesthetics and 1980s
consumerism, through the lens of
Mark Fisher's capitalist realism as a response to capitalism in a post-September 11th world saturated with culture.
Babbling Corpse was generally well received by reviewers.
Writing for
Broken Pencil, Joel Vaughan claimed the book is best when dealing with aesthetics, but "loses a little steam when diving into the mud of theory,"
and vaporwave magazine
Private Suite Magazine featured a review of the book as a cover issue.
Following the English release of Tanner's third book, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Babbling Corpse received a 2022 Spanish translation by Cristóbal Durán for Ediciones Holobionte, titled Un cadáver balbuceante. El Vaporwave y los fantasmas electrónicos.
Views
In an interview with Enrique Zamorano of
El Confidencial, Tanner states that artificial intelligence models like
ChatGPT embody the cultural malaise of
hauntology as machines can only artificially replicate human nostalgia and societal attitudes.
Books
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Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, 2016. Zer0 Books. .
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The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech, 2020. Zer0 Books. .
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The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia, 2021. Repeater Books. .
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Foreverism, 2024. Polity. .
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External links
