There’s a word for that specific kind of longing for an earlier time—when technology held so much promise—a longing that grows from the despair at where technology actually brought us, which, we suspect, is the end of the world. That word is hauntology, and it was coined by Jacques Derrida to describe the yearning for a lost future. Hauntology is a slippery term, a portmanteau of the words haunting and ontology that implies the study of nonbeing but has been used to describe everything from a certain literary critical lens to a British musical genre. With its analog aesthetic, strong grasp of the uncanny, and odd conflation of fictional and actual history, Usborne Ghosts is textbook hauntology.
Jessica Mesman 