In science-and-technology studies, we often call this “black boxing,” which Bruno Latour described as “the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success.” That doesn’t so much mean commercial success; rather, Latour is implying a successful kind of masquerade, an invisibility that’s increasingly key to social encounters with entertaining and surveilling technologies — even though those wielding the technologies often strive to balance the objective veiling of their apparatus with a subjective desire to show off its marvels.

This has been evident throughout my historical and ethnographic studies of traditional and digital holograms, back to the development of the Pepper’s Ghost stage illusion. In its original analog design, projecting ghosts as visual aids for scientific demonstrations in Victorian London, or in its 21st-century iteration (with minimal digital tweaks) resurrecting rapper Tupac Shakur at Coachella, the success of this illusion system depends utterly on the invisibility of its apparatus — hiding the image source, making sure the frame of the screen is out of sight, etc. We’re supposed to marvel at the constructed imagery, not the machine presenting it. The encounter is purposely idolatrous.
 
Wimbledon's tech-forward posturing walks the same path just off Church Road. We’re supposed to admire the flowers, relax on The Hill, and savor strawberries and Pimm’s without bumping directly into the hardware underpinning it all. That’s quite a feat, given that lurking beneath the event’s traditional facade is a sophisticated technological complex producing an increasingly industrial social spectacle, which these ads revel in revealing for our (modern) astonishment and (marketing) appreciation.

• For instance, while we sit and watch the volleys in the stands or at home, the action is also viewed by more than 120 broadcast cameras hidden throughout the grounds — in courtside duck blinds and overhead rafters, all serviced by a hundred miles of cable — feeding an electronic viewing audience sometimes approaching a billion people.
  
• The on-court movement of the players and the balls is tracked by a bevy of special cameras, capturing data in order to feed continually mounting match statistics, as well as assisting judges with occasional line calls.
  
• Other sensors are concealed throughout the grounds: in the roof to track humidity, around the seats listening to crowd reactions, and even in or on players' rackets to analyze swing mechanics and ball behavior.

Much of this data is made available to fans in real time, and an archive of player stats reaches back to 1877, allowing for all manner of historical perspectives on match play for fans, players, and coaches. 

Demediated books in a Disneyland shop window. (Conner)

In the early 1990s, folk-rocker John Wesley Harding released one of the best B-sides around: “When the Beatles Hit America.” A lengthy narrative about a dreamed-up Fab Four reunion, it envisions both cultural and technological contexts for a new Beatles event — and this is back when only one of them was dead.
 
In Harding’s epic ballad, the Beatles are going to reunite on stage, all “due to a miracle marketing strategy / beyond the realms of reasonable possibility.” The lyrics realistically dramatize the build-up (securing the film rights, sponsorships, talk show scheduling, etc.) and then inject a bit of scifi to make it happen (the manager of the new Beatles is “made up of cloned parts of Col. Tom Parker and Col. Sanders”). Ringo won’t actually play, though, because he’s been replaced by a more accurate drum machine; he’s “disappointed to find that no one / needs him anymore except for the vibe.” Lennon, meanwhile, is substituted with a life-size cardboard cutout, and then — per today’s news, in a way — he speaks to the press, sounding suspiciously like some old recordings:
 
John, who was never the quiet one
makes all his press contributions from his old songs —
in tune, in time, and with the backing track behind him
And when they ask him how it’s been in the studio,
he says, “It’s been a hard day’s night”
And no one understands him, but he always was the cryptic one …
 
Funny stuff, but now prescient. Today marks the release of the Beatles’ latest — and allegedly last — technologically resurrected cast-off, a “new” old song called “Now and Then” that features the two living members and the two dead ones reunited in eerily perfect harmony and time. As a scholar who studies the uncanny properties of media and its inherent constructions of liminal spaces between life and death, well, I have some initial thoughts.

The Beatles were, are, and perhaps always will be the most haunted of pop groups. (Tip of the cap to Joy Division, though.) Even before Lennon’s assassination, the specter of the band’s legacy infused everything the individuals said, recorded, or performed. Once John and then George slipped away, it’s been fascinating to watch how boomer imperialism (to which Paul himself readily and regularly succumbs, when it suits his bank account) refuses to let them rest in anything resembling peace, with ever-increasing technological fidelity aiding the often ghoulish mission to embalm and preserve the players’ every whisper, sneeze, and sigh. A couple of years ago, I wrote about the Get Back documentary in terms of it acting as a séance, calling forth both the living and dead members to once again haunt the drafty spaces of pop culture. This week, here we are again, listening to spectral voices of the dead — this time striking a “new” tune.
 
The basic backstory: Lennon left behind some unfinished demos, which wife Yoko Ono preserved and gave to the other three Beatles in the early ’90s. Using the technology of the time (a statement that reeks of primitivism, given how fast audio quality tech has progressed), two songs were spiffed up and released as singles, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” in 1995 and 1996, respectively, each one a marketing tool for the two editions of the Anthology CD series. The third, “Now and Then,” written in 1978, suffered from poor recording quality and was dismissed (most colorfully by George). Fast forward to 2020, when Peter Jackson has created impressive software to isolate instruments and voices from muddy mono tracks in order to freshen up the mixes for Get Back. The same app is applied anew to “Now and Then,” pulling Lennon’s voice away from the murky piano part and allowing it to be manipulated as the piece of a new construction.
 
Manipulated is the key term here. I described the Get Back film as one of the most computed films of all time, “perhaps the first movie many have seen with such dramatic and artistic contributions by an algorithm … to the point that the documentary’s rotoscopic computation of imagery and sound can be seen as the construction of a kind of virtual reality.” The same could be said of the new song (which features an accompanying video assembled by Jackson, natch). Lennon’s vocal is stitched into a patchwork quilt of tracks recorded for the tune back in 1995 — including guitars played by then-alive George, seen doing so in the new video — plus new parts recorded last year by Paul & Ringo, as well as additional strings. They even exhumed a few Beatles classics, digging up “Here, There and Everywhere” and “Eleanor Rigby” and extracting their oohs and ahhs. An explainer on the official video describes this all as a “remarkable story of musical archaeology.” One could just as easily call it pop-cultural grave-robbing or necrophilia.
 
Make no mistake — these are not pejoratives to me. I view popular culture as a glorious global practice of ongoing, creative cannibalization. Some cynical perspectives on this project are justified, though. These dead horses only get flogged into shape as poster children for the latest package rushed to market (Harding sang it this way: “the whole thing’s been a big insurance scam / to get the reissues selling again”), and sure enough, “Now and Then” is the bellwether of newly remixed versions of the Blue and Red anthologies, out next week.
 
In addition, as Get Back did, this case makes for a splendid way to discuss the trademark ghostliness of modern media. Jeffrey Sconce wrote about Haunted Media in terms of the medium more than its messaging — radio makes it seem like disembodied voices are in your room, cinema makes it seem like phantoms are dancing in front of you. This is primarily based on the way each medium produces its effect, within what Columbia scholar Noam Elcott calls the “phantasmagoric dispositif.” When you use modern media to convey actually uncanny content, however, its essential haunted qualities become more individually vivid and socially impactful.
 
Multi-track recording was incredibly uncanny when Les Paul pioneered it, and it remains one of the weirdest communication techniques available that is routinely taken to be routine. (Jacob Smith wrote a great paper detailing how ye olde panics about “backmasking” highlighted this quality.) In “Now and Then,” the audio construction is remarkably seamless and inconspicuous — more fluid than “Free as a Bird,” perhaps not surprisingly (and certainly moreso than the video, which is all kinds of clunky and unsettling, looking like it was edited not with Jackson’s cutting-edge tech but maybe an old Mac Performa). Lennon’s voice is thin — almost too delicate to carry the song — but refreshingly sweet. All in all, if this really is the last recording to carry the name Beatles, it’s no rousing finale (“A Day in the Afterlife,” anyone?) but it is a convincing capstone. As critic Jon Pareles wrote today in The New York Times, “It’s not a grand finale. It’s a wistful postscript.”
 
Beyond the technical spectacle, though, what does a Frankenstein creation like this actually say to the world? Again, cynicism easily rears its snarl here: it says, “Buy the old albums again!” But as society has begun wrestling with the implications of emerging artificial intelligence — which Jackson’s software has been ubiquitously labeled — and its capacity to increase pop culture’s cannibalism of its own archives exponentially, the unease some are expressing about “Now and Then” has less to do with this band’s legacy and more to do with anyone’s. Will nothing rest anymore? Is everything fair game for exhumation and reconstitution, in digital perpetuity? Can we no longer appreciate cultural achievements without occasionally tarting them up? (Were we ever able to let sleeping catalogs lie, as it were?) A friend of mine texted today, “I can’t even decide if [the song] makes me smile or makes me nauseous. It’s like one of those creepy mourning art pieces made from human hair. ‘Morbid’ is the word that comes to mind.” FWIW, this is from a guy and a horror fan who's already inclined to think about the morbid and the maudlin to an advanced degree. If the Beatles latest Frankenstein creeps him out a little, how remarkably uncanny is the age of AI going to be?

I’ve stopped actively contributing to Twitter, which sucks because the platform previously provided a wealth of valuable information and dialogue (especially for a scholar currently on the academic job market!). I’m late to the lifeboats, per usual. I shoulda fled after the union busting, the sheer (willful?) incompetence of his leadership, the reneging on small things like ending world hunger (which he, and any other billionaire, could accomplish tomorrow), or the sexism and the misogyny, both of which now poison the site. (He is the embodiment of 9 to 5’s “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.”) The consistent transphobia (which also extends to his own daughter) is the last straw for this little birdie.

The absence of my mild and occasional presence there won’t dent the algorithm or lighten Musk’s coffers, of course, but I must hold my own, personal strike. I encourage others to consider their role and contributions on Twitter, as well. As a recent UC grad student and former union member, I can tell you: If we all take our labor away, things change. Social-media services exist solely on the free labor of those of us posting, liking, and volunteering our data to advertisers. Without our labor, collapse. Strikes work. That’s why capitalists work so very hard to prevent them.
 
I’m not deleting my account altogether, because I’m still hopeful things will turn around for Twitter someday. That’s foolishly optimistic, I know, and perhaps irresponsible in its own way. However, I, as a former newspaper journalist, have seen these end-is-nigh convulsions and dire circumstances evaporate before. The Chicago Sun-Times, where I was last an editor and a columnist, as well as the Chicago Tribune both went through a variety of owners during my Windy City tenure — some solid and well-meaning, others bonkers and willfully destructive. The Sun-Times is now somewhat settled as a member of Chicago Public Media, hopefully helping to pave the non-profit way for all American journalism. Why not hope for a similar best with these whiny digital babes in the media woods?
 
Ewon, however, misunderstands free speech absolutely (or at least performs this) and has admitted a clear intention to sully the platform, if not openly dismantle it on behalf of fellow dumb thugs who are threatened by it. So, as the great seer Wil Wheaton recently shared, if you like a particular bar, but a bunch of Nazis start hanging out there, it’s no longer your favorite bar; it’s a Nazi bar. You find another bar.
 
I’ll redirect my public digital face to LinkedIn, where a thousand former colleagues of mine seem to be quite active. I’ve only logged on there once a year to update my CV; it’ll be slow going as I master the new learning curve. My resumé, CV & more remains, as ever, right here at thomashconner.info. (Dig those publications and quarter-century of significant teaching experience, you prospective PhD employers you!) When I’m settled more permanently in a university community, I’ll activate my comm-theory podcast plans (first episode: the phantasmagoric dispositif!) and revive my radio DJ persona.

Till then, hey, maybe you could just call…?
 

As far back as the 1300s, dead people who continued mixing with the living were represented with a shroud, though these usually wrapped around a skeleton. The Psalter of Robert de Lisle shows three such spooks in various states of undress as they attempt to advise three nobles to be goodfellas (a la Jacob Marley warning ol’ Scrooge to mend his miserly ways).

By the next century, the idea of the walking dead assigned to a specific fashion choice was common enough that British thieves seized on the imagery, dressing in white sheets in order to scare the bejesus out of people just long enough to grab their money. (The use of the white sheet to scare commoners would be revived after the U.S. Civil War by the Ku Klux Klan, which used white robes and hat with eye holes both to mask the identity of their members and to tap into spectral fears. It’s also why bedsheet ghosts aren’t depicted much anymore with pointy tops.)

On stages, into the 1500s and beyond, ghosts were signified by actors’ costumes (flowing robes or often armor) and makeup (perhaps a distinct pallor). Hamlet’s father, for instance, was and still is usually portrayed by an actor in chain and helmet. The visuals communicated individual identity; the dialogue communicated corporeal state. Some argue that ghosts appearing in more human form drew greater sympathy from audiences.

Ghosts grew quite busy haunting the Victorian era, in a variety of guises — depending on the source and intent of the depiction. Early in 1804, rumors of a white-sheeted ghost haunting the Hammersmith neighborhood of London led to the death of a bricklayer, shot in the head by a local who mistook his trade’s traditional white garments for the ghost (and somehow thought a bullet would pierce a spirit). The resulting murder trial was sensational and likely firmed up the social concept of ghosts clad in white.
 
In the theater, though, actors were still depicting spirits without sheets. The 1852 premiere of “The Corsican Brothers” by Dion Boucicault instituted a device specially for the manifestation of a ghost; known still as the “Corsican trap,” its hidden ramp and trolly made an actor appear to emerge from the stage floor, as Jeremy Brooker explains, “rising into view on a wheeled trolley running up an inclined ramp through a slot cut from left to right across the stage. The mechanism was concealed by a strip of narrow wooden slats ‘like the flexible surface of a roll top desk’ from which the actor emerged through an oval ring of black bristles.” The appearance stunned and shocked audiences and contributed to enormous success for an otherwise unremarkable play.

Just a decade later, though, John Henry Pepper adapted a common optical illusion into a famous theatrical spectacle that came to be called Pepper’s Ghost. Using hidden mirrors and sheets of glass, he was able to reflect the image of an offstage actor onto a stage as if they were present. Audiences would, at first, assume the image to be a body in the space, but when actors actually on the stage interacted with the image in a way that revealed it as “noncorporeal” — say, running the image through with a sword, or directing the image to walk through a wall — shock and awe ensued. (Pepper’s Ghost is a frequent case in my media-archaeological research related to holograms; Pepper’s original basic arrangement is the basis for contemporary illusions that really do bring back the dead.)
 
The catch: Pepper’s Ghost depicted ghosts not just as corporeal bodies, the way the theater was doing at the time, but upped the ante by projecting the imagery as almost photo-realistic (if the apparatus was “tuned” just right), allowing for actors to not only be displayed as ghosts but to perform spectral functions, as well. The result was a representation of ghosts as human bodies, signified as spectral only by virtue of their revealed insubstantiality. (The concurrent fad of “spirit photography” also upheld the notion that ghosts were simply human bodies in spectral form.)
 
Pepper’s aim was ideological: he not only presented the spectacle, he concluded with an explanation of its production. This was designed to promote ideals of modernity and capitalism at the core of the mission behind the science museum where he developed the illusion, the Royal Polytechnic Institution. Both Pepper and the Polytechnic also sought to counter the spiritualism movement rising at the same time, in which mediums claimed to communicate with the dead, often by manifesting some sign of their presence.
 
In an interview, Lisa Morton, author of Trick or Treat? A History of Halloween and The Halloween Encyclopedia, described some of the practices by unscrupulous mediums,  which often included the easy trick of using materials easily at hand — like sheets. “It was a big deal if they could — quote, unquote — materialize a spirit,” she said. “And they could often do this by rigging up a sheet.”

As the 20th century dawned, pop culture’s shorthand for spirits was widely settled as the floating white sheet. As dressing up for Halloween and trick-or-treating became widespread social activities, a go-to homemade costume for those without the time, energy, or money to spend was easily snatched from the linen closet and doctored with scissors. The depiction was enshrined in animated imagery from Disney to Casper, Charlie Brown to Scooby Doo.
 
Still, in the realm of theater and film, ghosts usually continued to be portrayed by actors. It’s cheaper that way; special effects are very expensive. The girls in The Shining, Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense — these are characters meant to evoke greater emotional sympathy than the mere spook factor of the sheet ghost.
 
Then again, David Lowery’s 2017 film A Ghost Story is a remarkable narrative about a dead musician who haunts the house he shared with his wife. The character is played by Casey Affleck, but the entire posthumous depiction (most of the film) has Affleck underneath an iconic white sheet with eye holes — a death shroud, no less, the sheet his body was covered with following a car accident.
 
Then again, film itself is a ghost story — a ritual experience of haunting. Those flickering phantoms on the screen. Radio, too — those disembodied voices in your room. This is the perspective of Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media, the idea that modern communication technologies produce an inherently spectral experience, that ghostliness is hard-wired into our electronic mediations. Indeed, John Durham Peters writes about how the very terms at the core of media studies (media and communication) derive in part from those earlier attempts to speak with spirits (mediums and communing with the dead). Roland Barthes believed every photo invoked the death of its subject. For media-studies scholars in this frame of mind, every day is Hallowe’en!