The Western perspective: Haunted by the holiday from history

When sledgehammers struck the Berlin Wall, a thousand typebars beat ink to paper, documenting this monumental event. None hit harder than those of Francis Fukuyama, who knew that the wall's destruction heralded the inevitable dissolution of the Soviet Empire. History demanded forward momentum.

Taking cues from Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, Fukuyama argued that history is not an emergent succession of local events. Instead, it unfolds according to a teleological process, divided into major eras of human progress, driven by some guiding principle, and destined to a social end point, satisfying our most fundamental longings. As a philosophical idealist, Hegel believed each stage of history was defined by a dominant ideology (thesis), whose collision with conflicting sets of ideas (antithesis), demanded a resolution that expands the scope of human consciousness (synthesis). These constitute the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist, whose evolution floated towards the absolute spirit, which sublates all dialectic tensions into a comprehensive understanding of reality. Later, Marx took this dialectic engine, but replaced the idealistic fuel for materialism. As such, he argued that we did not merely imagine new ideologies, rather, they arose from the changing conditions of material production, and in particular, from the tensions between those who owned and operated these economic means. In turn, Marx envisaged the absolute spirit as the spectre of communism, summoned by the united workers of the world.

As Eastern Europeans threw off their concrete chains, the ideological contest between capitalism and communism arrived at a resolution, not of synthesis, but of supremacy. Fukuyama seized this moment to settle the meta-dialectical tension between Hegelian idealism and Marxist materialism, but in terms that favoured the thesis over its antithesis (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama1989, p. 4). Here, the Cold War did not deliver a materialist clash of economic classes, but served as a subset of a larger ideological contest between individualism and collectivism. The fall of the Soviet Empire, and its constituent nations’ rush to embrace democracy and capitalism, proved that liberalism was the most ethical and effective method of organising human society. According to Fukuyama, this marked ‘The End of History’ (Reference Fukuyama1989, Reference Fukuyama1992). Although important incidents would continue to emerge and evaporate, nothing could challenge liberalism as the ‘end of mankind's ideological evolution’ (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama1992, p. 4). With the 1990s delivering relative peace and prosperity to the West, many deferred to this utopian delusion.

Vaporwave lends itself to a reading of reflecting on this triumphalism with a postmodern combination of celebration and critique, evident in its imaginative reinterpretation of the signifiers of corporate and consumer culture. On the productive side of this economic equation, artists like LensCorp^TM International and New Dreams Ltd brand themselves as global conglomerates venturing into digital and disassociated worlds. These corporate conventions trickle to concept albums, with the track listing of Internet Club's Redefining the Workplace (2012) filled with managerial newspeak, pushing us to ‘synergize’ our ‘global connections’ on ‘the new digital frontier’. The album cover depicts the architectural space that suffers these buzzwords, a corporate campus, a collision of white boxes sandwiched between greenfield (investments) and blue-sky (thinking). Although Saint Pepsi's Mannequin Challenge (Reference Pepsi2019) delivers one of the funkier strains of the Vaporwave sound, this is juxtaposed by a title evoking the dehumanising effects of office work. Likewise, the album art depicts eight docile employees crushed like battery-hens into impossibly small cubicles, held up as a model by a faceless corporate consultant, as if to say, this is how we should ‘redefine the workplace’.

However, as an escapist reflection on our holiday from history, Vaporwave turns most of its attention away from work, to luxuriate in the consumerist end of capitalism. Pointing to a favoured refuge, the Vaporwave subgenre called Mallsoft recreates the sensory–spatial affects of shopping centres, by having Muzak echo between marbled walls. Elaborating upon this formula, the tracks of Disconscious’ Hologram Plaza (Reference Disconscious2013) list the typical locations in a mall, opening and closing with the titles ‘Elevator Up’ and ‘Elevator Down’, as if to compare the shopping spree with Sisyphus’ absurdist pursuit of happiness. Now that linear history has ended, we must learn to enjoy our eternal ride of cycles, up and down, made efficient by the elevator.

The absence of meaning shifts the mall into the sights of anthropologist Marc Augé's seminal text Non-Place: An Introduction to Supermodernity (Reference Augé and Howe1995). According to Augé, a non-place differs from places in that they are stripped of all cultural and social identity, except those that facilitate the efficient transfer of commodities and customers across a global marketplace. In this way, the mall shares the supermodern genealogy that births the corporate campus and cubicle. However, malls suffer a mutation, as their supermodern typology burst with postmodern stylings, which fetishise the bonds between commodities and customers. In total, the mall has ‘no room for history unless it has been transformed into an element of spectacle’ (Augé Reference Augé and Howe1995, p. 103). The architect Rem Koolhaas arrived at similar conclusions in the essay ‘Junkspace’, stating that malls are ‘pretending histories left and right’ (Koolhaas Reference Koolhaas, Chung, Inaba, Koolhaas and Leong2001, p. 410). With an estimate of ‘13% Roman’, he accuses classical architecture of being the greatest contributor to the deceit (Koolhaas Reference Koolhaas, Chung, Inaba, Koolhaas and Leong2001, p. 409). The Vaporwave aesthetic perpetuates the pretence, especially with its reliance on classical references. In particular, the album art for Macintosh Plus’ Floral Shoppe (2011) features the most recognised and reproduced image of all Vaporwave, a bust of Helios – Greek god of the sun – whose disaffected gaze turns away from a sunset skyline.

Here, Vaporwave looks beyond architectural citations, to draw upon the symbolic potential of cities that ignited the 1980s boom economy. First, after a decade of economic malaise, Miami served as a beacon of a renewed confidence in capitalism, even if it was purchased at a heavy price. When Time magazine described Miami as a ‘Paradise Lost’ (1981), it referred to the cocaine-fuelled vice and violence terrorising South Florida. Vaporwave remains blissfully ignorant of this aggressive history. Instead, it remembers Miami as a symbol of tropical luxuries, of palms and pool parties, soaked in the nostalgic haze of cyan seas and magenta sunsets – a paradise lost to time. Second, Vaporwave turns to Tokyo as the epicentre of a rising economic superpower. Musically, a subgenre called Future Funk revels in the saccharine optimism of Japanese City Pop, left unburst by the more deconstructive tendencies of Vaporwave. This acoustic atmosphere comes enhanced by exotic visual iconography, of advertising models and anime characters, wielding hi-fi technologies, under cherry blossoms and neon signage. Here, we return to the halcyon days of innovation and innocence, before the looming decline of the lost decade.

By quoting Miami, Tokyo and Helios, Vaporwave basks in the last light of setting suns, as a proxy for pausing time itself. Here, Vaporwave renders our holiday from history in seasonal terms, with albums called Summer Paradise (Architecture in Tokyo, 2013), Summer Love (Dan Mason ダンメイソン, 2016), Last Summer (Lancaster_, 2013) and Endless Summer (幽霊, TOGETHER!, 2016). However, summers must fall. In Floral Shoppe, Helios appears to turn away from a summer sunset framed by Japanese captions and Florida colours, but since the skyline comes with Twin Towers, he refuses the impending fall of New York.

Although some Vaporwave artists venture further in the new millennium, most cap their citations at a date, 11 September 2001. The most potent reflection on this moment comes from 猫シCorp's News at 11, released on the fifteenth anniversary of the attack (猫シCorp 2016). For the first nine tracks, the album presents a vision of America through samples of breakfast television. To this task, the opening track, ‘Goodmorning America!’, begins with two cheery anchors, welcoming us to the broadcast:

The infamous date is severed and smothered in a viscous dose of smooth jazz, setting the acoustic template for the entire album. The third track, ‘8:46 AM’, begins with a field reporter affirming the tranquillity of the Tuesday, ‘I don't know, it's kind of quiet around the country. We like it quiet. It's quiet. It's a good quiet.’ In our world, a plane would interrupt the peace by slamming into the North Tower. As such, we should expect the rest of the album to trace the unfolding events and emotions of the day, from collision to confusion, anguish to anger. Instead, 猫シCorp offers an alternative history, where the towers remain untouched. After nine tracks, we become bored of breakfast television, and tune to 11 tracks of the ‘Weather Channel’, incessantly promising to forecast the future, without delivering. Instead, we stay within the blissful bubble of Muzak, the soundtrack of history on hold. The album continues with its smooth saxophone grooves, the instrument of the Bill Clinton age. Here, we never experience George W. Bush's War on Terror.

The dismantling of the Berlin Wall on 11/9 inspired Fukuyama to declare the End of History. In a cruel trick of history, 9/11 marked the end of the end. On the morning after the attack, the conservative columnist George Will published the article, ‘The end of our holiday from history’ (Reference Will2001). It made no explicit reference to Fukuyama, for nobody needed a lecture on Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. Instead, America wanted someone to make sense of the immediate trauma. Will delivered a demand to wake up, reject ‘appeasement tarted up as reasonableness’ and adopt a ‘proactive policy’ (Will Reference Will2001). Already, the war-hawks were sharpening their talons for foreign intervention. Only a traitor would suggest that the attacks were blowback for previous bouts of interventionism. Still, in conjunction with the obvious allusions in the title, Will sneaks a message about the role of metanarratives at the turn of the millennium:

Here, Will joins forces with the political scientist Samuel Huntington, who long lambasted the triumphalism of his former student, Fukuyama. At first, Huntington framed his critique as a tentative essay, ‘The Clash of Civilisations?’ (Reference Huntington1993), before bestowing a more confident title upon the book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (Reference Huntington1996). Across both texts, he insists that history continues to be driven forwards, but not by a Cold War engine pumping ideologies into dialectic collisions. Rather, the engine runs on an amorphous, multipolar, free-for-all between cultural identities, especially those rendered at the scale of a shared civilisational heritage, such as the Western, Islamic or Orthodox world. Here, we return to a political order simultaneously premodern and postmodern, driven by old ‘tribalism’, but scaled to meet the new realities of an interconnected ‘globalism’ (Huntington Reference Huntington1993, p. 22).

For Huntington, people feel identity more deeply than ideology. Culture and civilisation provide an all-encompassing set of identifications that develop over centuries by all levels of society, institutional to interpersonal. Economic ideology plays only a small part in that larger worldview. Here, Huntington borrows the words of William Lind, to dismiss the Cold War's ideological obsessions as little more than a ‘Western civil war’ (Huntington Reference Huntington1993, p. 23). This conclusion may seem strange, as the actual fighting took place in the jungles and deserts of the Global South. Still, Huntington suggests that only the American and Soviet handlers cared about ideology, while the locals fought for control over their cultural identity, or at least, to align themselves with those who posed the lesser threat to it. Applying this reductivist schema to Cold War proxies, many have argued that the North Vietnamese were motivated more by nationalism than communism, in that their main aim was to unify a country from various regimes of subjugation: French imperialism, American interventionism and Chinese integration. In Afghanistan, God superseded all political priorities, with the Mujahadeen and Taliban being equally dismissive against all powers who dared to play the Great Game with their interpretation of Islamic theocracy, including each other. Furthermore, after the artificial bonds of Communism had fallen, the Balkans returned to genocidal collisions between races and religions.

Those further away from the established neo-conservative and neo-liberal consensus launched more vicious words against the Fukuyama fallacy. The discourse on Vaporwave directs most of its attention to Jacques Derrida's rebuttal in The Specters of Marx (Derrida Reference Derrida1993 [2006]), especially to the feelings of mourning and melancholy embedded within his concept of Hauntology (Tanner Reference Tanner2016, p. 30; Glitsos Reference Glitsos2019, pp. 110–11). A decade later, this term was adopted by cultural theorists Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds to describe an electronic music genre that waxed nostalgic for the ‘spirit of technocratic utopianism that flourished in post-war Britain’, including that summoned by the ‘Festival of Britain’ and ‘Brutalist school of architecture’ (Reynolds Reference Reynolds2012). In yet another decade, Hauntology provided the template by which Vaporwave reflected upon the postmodern phantasmagorias floating within Reagan and Clinton's America.

Conversely, little attention is cast towards Jean Baudrillard, despite offering a consistent critique on the End of History, especially when the fallacy fell with the Twin Towers. As an immediate response, Baudrillard published an anthology called The Illusion of the End. Through multiple essays – like ‘The reversal of history’ and ‘The event strike’ – Baudrillard may not have invented the phantom phrasing that inspired Hauntology and Vaporwave, but he still predicts their obsession with equivocating the End of History with the Cancellation of the Future (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Turner1994b, pp. 10–11). Likewise, Baudrillard anticipates that many will respond to the loss of linear history with endless cycles of mourning and melancholy (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Turner1994b, p. 22). This implies we will ‘rewind modernity like a tape’ whenever we come close to the ‘symbolic term of the year 2000’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Turner1994b, p. 11). However, Baudrillard also contends that we lament a linearity that never existed, since its tensions are ‘indefinitely recyclable’, with ‘the same wars break[ing] out between the same peoples’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Turner1994b, pp. 27 and 11). For Vaporwave, Baudrillard's prediction about the end of its citational period came one year early.

When the Twin Towers fell, the philosopher returned to his two greatest prophecies. First, the terrorist attack allowed him to elaborate upon a trilogy of essays called The Gulf War did not take place. These texts claim that the Gulf War did not seem authentic, for it was a clean war, a surgical war, a soft war, ‘purged of any carnal contamination of warrior's passion’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Patton1995, p. 43). Here, the media did not cover a real war, fought by comparable entities, but constructed a spectacular simulation from sanitised footage of smart bombs, while collateral damage sat outside the frame. Furthermore, the rolling and real-time coverage did not allow audiences to review these spectacles with any critical distance, for ‘At a certain speed, things lose their sense’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Patton1995, p. 49). For Baudrillard, the theatre of war had two directors, ‘The media promotes the war, the war promotes the media’, culminating in a military–media complex (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Patton1995, p. 31).

After 11 September, Baudrillard turned to a new complex between globalism and terrorism, which he describes as born together, both terrible and doomed to clash. This shared genealogy and teleology convinced Baudrillard that if terrorism had not come from the outside, ‘the system would have invented it’, even suggesting that 9/11 could have been a ‘CIA stunt’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Turner2003, pp. 53–4). Baudrillard does not sustain this brief flirtation with what would become known as Trutherism, for it would immediately stifle his theories about the real cause for retaliation. In ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’, Baudrillard rejects Huntington's concerns about the ‘clash of civilizations’, only to restate its postmodern aspects when comparing the identitarian violence to a ‘triumphant globalization battling against itself’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Turner2003, p. 11). Again, he repeats that the victims of globalisation could tolerate economic exploitation, but not a provocation against their cultural identity, which must be avenged, publicly. Here, Baudrillard attaches this new complex to his previous schema about the military and media, arguing that ‘terrorism would be nothing without the media’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Turner2003, p. 31). Still, he maintains a crucial distinction between these two acts. While the American military–media complex staged a sanitised non-event, the terrorists aimed for maximum carnage, thereby creating the ‘absolute event’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Turner2003, p. 4). Finally, with multiple media replays, the terrorist attack devolves into a simulacrum of itself, a retaliatory act with no connection to an inciting cause, leaving the bewildered audience to wonder why they would do this to us.

Second, the fall of the Twin Towers allowed Baudrillard to attack another modernist non-place. Throughout Simulacra and Simulation (published in French in 1981), Baudrillard denigrates the Centre Pompidou as the ‘Beaubourg thing’, which functions as a ‘hypermarket’ advertising the ‘hypercommodity’ of ‘hyperculture’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Glaser1994a, pp. 61 and 67). Here, the fixation on the ‘hyper’ prefix is similar to Augé's use of ‘super’, conveying a shared belief that symbolic exaggerations of an idea will distort and deny its relation to reality. After 11 September, Baudrillard turned to a new target. In a speech called ‘Requiem for the Twin Towers’, he demonstrates a bold disregard for tragedy:

Finally, he concludes, ‘So I set out to produce a Requiem, but also, in a way, a Te Deum’, that is, to offer thanksgiving for their destruction (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Turner2003, p. 48). In these lines, he gradually moves from descriptions of violence to a defence of terrorists who wield it against globalisation, especially its architectural expressions.

Here, Baudrillard offers a toxic reinterpretation of points previously made by Augé, who gave two reasons why terrorist attack non-places like shopping centres and commercial skyscrapers. First, they provide an efficient source of carnage. Second, Augé states, ‘those pursuing new socialization and localization can see the non-place only as a negation of their ideal. The non-place is the opposite utopia’ (Augé Reference Augé and Howe1995, pp. 111–12). In this way, the Twin Towers were not a site of no identity, but of a negative identity projected onto a globe, thereby provoking terrorists who held onto twisted notions of Utopia. In a strange trick of etymology, the non-place and no-place threaten each other.

Vaporwave rewinds the tape to the 1980–1990s, before these opposites collided, so we can bask again in the sentimentalised signifiers of a triumphant capitalism, which include architectural references of shopping malls and the Twin Towers. These served as the utopian non-spaces for the non-time of our Holiday from History. However, beyond the West, these decades were not a holiday, but a haunting, where the long-suppressed ghosts of civilisational and cultural identity vowed to violently restore the historical process.

The ‘Eastern’ perspective: Ghostly and generic geographies

In the essay, ‘Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave!’, Harper evaluates whether the genre suffers the ‘subcultural narrative of an underground scene killed off by outside observers’ (Harper Reference Harper, Cook, Ingalls and Trippett2019, p. 121). As a movement morbidly obsessed with obsolescence, there existed a cultural credibility for purists who were quick to declare that mainstream recognition has attracted pretenders to the scene. These suspicions have culminated in websites like Lucid Archive using the tag ‘Vapormeme’ to describe works that indulge in the aesthetic tropes of the genre, without contributing to its ideology (Lucid Archives 2020). One could argue whether distinctions between purity and parody could be maintained in a movement as postmodern as Vaporwave. As a movement based on cycles of emptiness, it seems counterintuitive to accuse anybody of repeating a formula until it ran out of citations and interpretations. Still, they insist that anything after the initial burst of insight merely slid into more debased orders of simulation, arriving at the terminus of pure pastiche. Here, a subcultural death drive accelerates the purist beyond waiting for Vaporwave's demise, towards wilful acts of self-destruction.

Acting on this impulse, the Vaporwave artist Hong Kong Express adopted a new pseudonym, Sandtimer, a reference to temporality which carries to their concept album, Vaporwave is Dead (Sandtimer 2015). Echoing the movement's obsession with anniversaries, Sandtimer published the work on 9 December 2015, exactly four years after Macintosh Plus released Floral Shoppe, often considered Vaporwave's most iconic album. In its opening salvo, Vaporwave is Dead fires fast and loud layers of acid beats, beeps and discordant drones, hitting harder than anything mustered by its target genre. In this cacophony, various characters interject with mixed messages about sentencing Vaporwave to death, or testifying that it had already died. After a diegetic explosion, a robotic voice, coded as an anime girl, makes a public service announcement, ‘Konicha wa. Attention. Vaporwave is dead. I repeat. Vaporwave is dead. There is nothing to see here anymore’. However, the next few minutes contradict this conclusion with a cyborg, evoking The Terminator, broadcasting its mission in a din of gunfire, ‘Vaporwave must die. Kill all Vaporwave’.

Within this cast of characters, a voice lectures us on the importance of Harper's canonical text, ‘Comment: Vaporwave and the Pop-Art of the Virtual Plaza’ (2012), for initiating Vaporwave discourse. However, this article serves as one-half of a two-part story he wrote for the music journal Dummymag. Entitled, ‘Comment: “Distroid” – the muscular music of hi-DEF doom’ (2012B), this second article described another emergent electronic genre of the 2010s – marked by its fast and loud onslaught of beats, beeps and discordant drones – which failed to gain the same cultural traction. Harper contrasts the twinned genres by anthropomorphising them:

Vaporwave presents us with the listless lo-fi, quenched by Fiji Water and Arizona Iced Tea. Distroid assaults us with a ‘muscular music of hi-DEF doom’, fuelled by a carbonated dose of stimulants. Continuing the contrasts, Harper argues that Vaporwave borrows its name from ‘vaporware’, a term used by the tech-industry to describe innovations that are promoted, but never produced (Harper Reference Harper2012a). Conversely, Distroid was chosen for succinctly evoking words like disturbing, dystopian, android and steroid (Harper Reference Harper2012b). Beyond taking Distroid's musical motifs, these destructive associations consolidate into the Terminator that Sandtimer tasks with assassinating Vaporwave. In this way, Sandtimer returns to 2012 to imagine a retrofuture of retrofutures, which flips the fate between these estranged twins. Now, the aggressive dominates the passive. However, before Distroid can enact vengeance, Sandtimer must bestow it an alter-ego.

Continuing the narrative, the eleventh track, ‘Vaporwave is Dead’, ends with two blasts from a shotgun, before the twelfth track, ‘A Message from Flash Kostovich’, follows a hitman declaring that only ‘pussies’ listened to the murdered genre (Sandtimer 2015). The thirteenth track heralds the rise of the rebranded distroid with the title, ‘Welcome to Hardvapour’. Here, the shift from the Americanised ‘vapor’ to British ‘vapour’ provides another means of distancing the victor from victim.

Looking further back, Hardvapour's move toward acceleration and aggression draws upon similar themes and techniques developed by hardcore electronic music genres of the 1990s in reaction to the Second Summer of Love. Held across 1988–1989, this extended ‘summer’ of rave parties transformed the abandoned warehouses of Britain, gutted by a decade of asset-stripping and off-shoring, into scenes of a new collective consciousness, providing a cultural refutation of Thatcher's claims that society did not exist. The soundtrack for these raves, acid house, produced nothing as slow or soft as anything later offered by Vaporwave, but the hardcore scene of the 1990s still regarded them as a gentle affair, largely because of its association with ecstasy. Although heralded as the love drug, ecstasy typically produced an androgenising effect in its hosts, encouraging feelings of social sensuality without sexuality (Reynolds Reference Reynolds1999). After developing an immunity or indifference to the drug, the working-class youth expressed their growing frustrations by turning to sounds and substances with a greater masculine and militant edge. In Britain, methamphetamines paired with drum-and-bass, typically operating at 160–180 bpm, which Chris Christodoulou argues functioned as a cultural response to Paul Virilio's concept of ‘dromology’, a complex between speed and stratification under capitalism (Christodoulou Reference Christodoulou, Attias, Gavanas and Rietveld2013). In the Netherlands, Gabber combined a heart-pounding 180 bpm with a horror aesthetic, producing what Hildegonda Rietveld and Alexei Monroe describe as an inoculation against the alienation and apocalyptic consequences of rapid deindustrialisation (Rietveld and Monroe Reference Rietveld and Monroe2021). When Hardvapour later rediscovered this schema of aesthetics and associations, they found it grafted easily onto the post-Soviet space, racked by decommunisation and deindustrialisation, accelerated by Western impositions of shock therapy.

Sandtimer may have given the genre its name, but acknowledges its roots with the reference to Flash Kostovich, ostensibly a member of the Kroko Krew, a drug gang based in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. A few days before Sandtimer declared Vaporwave is Dead, the Krew collaborated with a Canadian producer called Wolfenstein osX (wosX), founder of the Antifur label, to release the first Hardvapour album, End of the World Rave (wosX 2015). The album art predicts this apocalyptic affair will occur in Mykolaiv, 2020; history would cast that destruction upon Mariupol, 2022. Still, to cater for this imagined ‘Armageddon’, the track listing provides a parade of party drugs, beginning with ‘Alcohol’, and finishing with ‘Krokodil’ (Crocodile), a synthetic opioid pervasive in the post-Soviet space, and inspiration for the Kroko Krew name.

Within a year, the new movement had attracted its legion of artists, many reporting from Eastern Europe. When reviewing the anthology Hardvapour (DJ Vlad Reference Vlad2016) – compiled by DJ Vlad and published by Antifur – the Kanji and Kana we would expect to see on Vaporwave albums has been mostly replaced with Cyrillic characters. Furthermore, the J-Card for the cassette version includes the flags of each artist's country of origin. From a total of 51, we see two flags of the Soviet Union, two from Russia and nine from Ukraine; these are only outnumbered by the 17 Americans who defected from Vaporwave to Hardvapour.

These Ukrainian connections continue with another label, the Hard Vapour Resistance Front (H.V.R.F.), a collective of anonymous artists who place their central command in Pripyat, an impossible location, having been abandoned since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. The meltdown has mutated into a morbid obsession for the H.V.R.F. label. For instance, their last album, Strato's Chernobyl Hyper-Reactor Meltdown (Statros 2020), comes with explanatory text about the causes and casualties of the nuclear explosion, written in Ukrainian. Musically, the album features a sinister atmosphere of low drones and glitchy beeps, evoking a place between control rooms and arcade machines, both long abandoned. Further back, H.V.R.F.'s second release, Bumgarden's cynically titled ЧОРНОБИЛЬ ЛІТО (Bumgarden Reference Bumgarden2016) – ‘Chernobyl Summer’ – also features Ukrainian text about the long convalescence of contaminated land. Specifically, it tells the story of Shkvyria, a biologist from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, venturing into the exclusion zone to study its wildlife.

Vaporwave has always been obsessed with exploring the obsolete non-places of capitalism, especially its abandoned shopping centres, with Dan Bell's ‘Dead Mall Series’ providing the best incidents of this impulse (Bell Reference Bell2015). Since 2015, this documentarian has combined the flânerie and funerary modes by strolling through malls in various stages of decline, providing a stream-of-consciousness eulogy for empty food courts and retail spaces, over the muted sounds of Mallsoft.

In its quest for more extreme experiences, Hardvapour finds its non-places in the industrial ruins of communism. It imagines itself as ‘Stalkers’, smuggling clients into ‘Zones’ altered by alien contact and sanctioned by state power, as described in the Strugatsky brothers’ science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic (1972) and Andrei Tarkovsky's cinematic adaptation Stalker (1979). Directly referencing this motif, H.V.R.F.'s first album was produced by an artist calling themselves Стaалкер (‘Stalker’), who claimed to conduct field recordings of the ‘deserted hydro power plants on the Jägala river near Tallinn, Estonia’ (Стaалкер, 2016) – a main shooting location for Tarkovsky's film.

Since 1986, the Stalker franchise has gained a special significance for Ukraine, with the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation providing an uncanny resemblance to the fictional Zone of alien contact. For instance, when writing ‘Une Citta Fantasma’ (Fiorenza Reference Fiorenza1989) – ‘The Ghost City’ – the architect Dante Fiorenze did not venture with a Virgil, but referred to the photographer Igor Kostin as a Stalker. After independence, the Ukrainian game developers at GSC Game World amplified the association with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R survival-horror franchise of the late 2000s.

Although it does not specifically fall within Augé's critique of capitalist alienation, the Chernobyl ‘Zone of Alienation’ is projected to remain uninhabitable for 20,000 years, making it a greater symbol of a communist non-place than any iteration of anonymous Krushchevkas and Breznevkas. It offers another subversion of Augé's agenda. While terrorists deliberately strike at the non-places of a global capitalism – like the Twin Towers – for having impinged on their ideals of ‘localization’, nobody wanted the Chernobyl meltdown, yet it reignited the old Ukrainian struggle for national identity, long supressed by Russian rule over International Communism. Here, we find the familiar components of identity and violence, but the Chernobyl non-place reverses the direction of its cause and consequence.

With these references to Stalkers, we could assume that Hardvapour is populated by informed insiders of the post-Soviet space. However, many of these anonymous artists have admitted or alluded to faking this identity. For instance, a mere month before the anticipated apocalypse of 2020, Flash Kostivich [sic] released Midwinter (Reference Kostivich2019), which concluded, ‘This will be the last Antifur release … Everyone at this point has realized that most of the aliases throughout this entire project were made by myself, that being wosX’. Long before the final revelation, Hardvapour left many clues about their constructed character. In 2017, when Massage Magazine asked the H.V.R.F. why they chose Pripyat as a command centre, an anonymous agent responded:

In the next breath, they mention ‘a number of Hardvapour artists who are actually from Ukraine’, while another interview with Vice insists that ‘several Hardvapour artists have also been displaced because of the wars in Ukraine’ (Yusuke Reference Yusuke2017; Joyce Reference Joyce2017). These assurances do little to cancel the confession about the real reasons for collectively assuming this post-Soviet identity: it countered the ‘escapist and nostalgic mindset’ of Vaporwave (Yusuke Reference Yusuke2017). To elaborate on this explanation, the H.V.R.F. recited Sandtimer's description of Hardvapour:

Hardvapour's appropriation of an Eastern European identity also counters Vaporwave's obsession with East Asia, which joined America in the holiday from history. Writing for Pitchfork, Patrick St. Michel described Vaporwave as a ‘niche corner of Internet music populated by Westerners goofing around with Japanese music, samples and language’ (St. Michel Reference St. Michel2014). To revise this formula for Hardvapour, we must do more than substitute the target and tone of these citations. We must also adjust the type of pretension. When Vaporwave artists appropriate the symbols of Japanese culture, they maintain their position as external imitators. Conversely, many elements of the Hardvapour genre actually assert Ukrainian origins, precisely when Russia had weaponised this identity.

When annexing Crimea in February 2014, the Kremlin instructed its soldiers to shed their insignia, and pretend to be a citizen militia – ‘the polite people’ – ostensibly protecting ethnic Russians against Ukrainian Banderites. The appetite grew with eating. In April, the Russians took their teeth to the Donbas. Although these ventures involved many Ukrainian-born separatists, they were bolstered by a Russian confederation of Kremlin agencies (FSB), private military corporations (Wagner) and far-right ultranationalist groups (Russian Imperial Movement, Russian National Unity; Shekhovtsov Reference Shekhovtsov, Bassin and Pozo2017). With this confusing cloud of combatants both emerging and evaporating across two civilian populations, Russia followed a doctrine of asymmetric warfare, once described by Lawrence of Arabia as ‘drifting about like a gas… a vapour, blowing where we listed’ (Lawrence Reference Lawrence1967, p. 195). We find this ambiguous approach to provenance when the Vkontakte account associated with FSB agent Igor Girkin, codename Strelkov (‘Shooter’), boasted about downing a Ukrainian AN-26 with a Russian BUK surface-to-air missile (Toler Reference Toler2015). After discovering the MH17 passenger plane at the crash site – and after taking selfies in the wreckage – the Russians erased all evidence of their early enthusiasm, before compiling photomontages blaming a Ukrainian SU-25 (Higgins Reference Higgins2015).

Before listing across Ukrainian soil, these vapours had long obscured the Russian media landscape. Since Putin came to power, the political-technologist Vladislav Surkov has restructured state media to operate according to the narrative strategies of postmodern theatre (Pomerantsev Reference Pomerantsev2014b). Here, we move beyond the manufacture of consent, where the state feeds a consistent representation of events to generate support for political actions, towards the manufacture of confusion, which drowns the citizenry in contradictory messages, leading to political apathy. In Baudrillardian terms, the former method floats in the lower orders of simulation, which distort or disguise the truth, while the latter slides into pure simulacra, which deny any meaningful distinction between fact and fiction.

When Russia released these techniques upon Ukraine, Surkov heralded the rise of ‘non-linear warfare’ (Pomerantsev Reference Pomerantsev2014a). Here, all that is solid melts into air, in that the established contest between enemy combatants dissolves into a vaporous mist of manoeuvres between shifting identities and allegiances. Again, we can read this in Baudrillardian terms. Having argued that the military–media complex had confused our perception of the Gulf War, Baudrillard predicted we would later encounter the inverse consequence, stating, ‘the day there is a real war you will not even be able to tell the difference’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Patton1995, pp. 58–9). This quote serves as the inciting incident for Nazar Kozak's documentation of artistic attempts to make the world realise that the real war began in 2014, thus beginning the Baudrillardian turn in the discourse about the Russo-Ukrainian conflict (Kozak Reference Kozak2022, p. 68). If Baudrillard argued that the American military–media complex constructed a simulation of the Gulf War, then Kozak accuses the Russians of ‘dissimulation’ (Kozak Reference Kozak2022, p. 69) which drowned out the anti-colonial calls of the Ukrainian ‘Cassandra’ (Ukrainka Reference Ukrainka, Bida and Rich1968). Only in 2022, when Putin turned up the temperature of a cold war, and the vapours deposited back into solid matter, did Surkov fall out of favour. Since his arrest, Russian propaganda has slowly regressed from postmodernity to premodernity, with Vladimir Solovyov framing the invasion as a holy war against the Satanic West (Russian Media Monitor 2022).

Instead of listening to the Cassandra calls of their virtual homeland, Hardvapour interjected with its own opinions about who to blame for escalating events. When asked why they called themselves a ‘Resistance Front’, the H.V.R.F. answered, ‘Being based in Ukraine (albeit in an uninhabited zone) during wartime, it made sense to adopt a militant stance’ (Joyce Reference Joyce2017). This posture culminated in 2016, when the H.R.V.F. introduced their politically charged collection World War 2020, which was episodically expanded upon with every twentieth album they released. The first episode comes from an artist called The Soviet Uprising, features Putin's portrait and Red Banner on its album art, and predicts a hot war in 2020:

This prediction suggests that the Russians had bad timing. If Putin had invaded earlier or later, it is likely that Trump's despotic sympathies would have denied support for Ukraine, making for an easy conquest. Within our timeline, Trump's neutrality mutates into self-interest; for during the first months of his second term, he has leveraged the process of negotiating a peace plan – or concept of a plan – to extort Ukraine and appease most of Putin's demands. At the time of writing, it is impossible to know whether any of this chaos will result in a peace plan, and whether its terms will be favourable for the long-term security of Ukraine.

This album description also smuggles a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, which shifts the blame for imperial invasion from Russian militaries to Western media for having criticised Putin's annexation of Crimea. In their interviews, the H.V.R.F. repeats this rhetoric, ‘First off, we don't really know the future, but it seemed like the globalist agenda of the US political machine was marching us straight towards World War 3. Full speed ahead’ (Joyce Reference Joyce2017).

The H.V.R.F. conveys its general distrust for globalisation through PFS’ sarcastically titled album Celebrate Diversity (2017), whose cover art is branded with the liberal logo ‘Coexist’, composed of religious symbols. Vibrating with the same mockery and menace, the eponymous track uses discordant drums and screeching strings to imply that multiculturalism offers only mayhem. Finally, to imagine what happens to those who resist this end of geography and history, the album description attributes an invented quote to Fukuyama:

Adjusting their aim to a more specific target, when asked why the H.V.R.F. symbol resembles a swastika, they compare it with the NATO compass (Joyce Reference Joyce2017). With these accusations and allusions, the H.V.R.F. follows a tradition forged by Russian science-fiction authors, including Fyodor Berezin, who wrote War 2010: The Ukrainian Front (2009) and War 2011: Against NATO (2010), before joining the separatists of the Donetsk People's Republic (Borenstein Reference Borenstein2019).

This article cannot provide a full chronology of the causes of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, or even those immediately related to the Euromaidan protest of 2013–2014, which challenged President Yanukovych's suddenly reneging – at Putin's behest – on the Verkhovna Rada's 315/24 vote to enter an association agreement with the EU. However, when the H.V.R.F. speak as Ukrainians, we find a ventriloquist voice coming from a place of Russian apologetics, especially that produced by the American political scientist, John Mearsheimer. As a proponent of geopolitical realism, Mearsheimer devalues ideological concerns of liberty and justice to focus solely on the balance of power between great nations. As such, Mearsheimer argued that we cannot blame the Ukraine Crisis on Putin's ambitions to reconstruct the Russian Empire or Soviet Union (Mearsheimer Reference Mearsheimer2014, p. 77). Although he predicted this revanchism at the end of the Cold War – based on 200 years of Russian subjugation and a widespread belief that Ukrainian independence is ‘transitional’ (Mearsheimer Reference Mearsheimer1993, p. 55) – Mearsheimer excuses it as a legitimate impulse for a great nation. Conceptually, Mearsheimer believes that once Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal, it joined all other Eastern European nations as ‘Russia's backyard’, rather than its neighbours, thus not deserving nor displaying any political agency (Mearsheimer Reference Mearsheimer2014, p. 77).

According to this framework, we should blame the West for attempting to bring Ukraine into its own empire of liberal democracies, thus destabilising a fragile balance that restrained Russian revanchism. This presumptive bias tends to amplify Western involvement in the Euromaidan, while excluding or excusing similar actions from Russia. For instance, Mearsheimer interprets a leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt as evidence that America had used the protest to push for regime change (Mearsheimer Reference Mearsheimer2014, p. 81), which he asserts is part of a larger plan to bring Ukraine into NATO. It is not explained why France and Germany would not veto this presumptive application, as they had in 2008. Regarding the same phone call, others argue that the content and context suggest that they were merely discussing which oppositional figure America might support joining Yanukovych's conciliatory offer for a united government to temper the escalating turmoil of the Euromaidan, and how they might get the UN involved in this compromise (D'Anieri Reference D'Anieri2023, p. 216). Conversely, there is little concern for threats made by Sergey Glazyev – Putin's advisor on Eurasian integration – before the Euromaidan, that signing an association agreement with Europe would result in separatist uprisings in the south and east of Ukraine (D'Anieri Reference D'Anieri2023, p. 197), which leaked messages later revealed he had organised after the Euromaidan (Hosaka Reference Hosaka2019, p. 755; Plokhy Reference Plokhy2023, p. 112). This contrast does not excuse all Western involvement, but merely recalibrates the excessive bias in Mearsheimer's account.

Although the discourse has produced more nuanced accounts of the internal contradictions and external pressures, east and west, leading up to the conflicts of 2014 and 2022, Russia continues to hide its aggression under the kind of intellectual cover provided by Mearsheimer. Still, this is a recent phenomenon. For most of the post-Soviet period, Russia relied on Carl Schmitt to chart its geopolitical interests. Mearsheimer euphemistically calls Schmitt a ‘political philosopher’ (Mearsheimer Reference Mearsheimer2018, p. 43), ignoring his position as the chief jurist of Nazi Germany, responsible for articulating the legal justification for Hitler's rise to power. Although this provenance bars him from popular recognition in Russia, its academics find value in Schmitt's promotion of a strong leader that would cure their Weimer syndrome, as imposed on them by foreign liberals throughout the 1990s, and return them to former glory.

In particular, they gravitate to his theories of Großraum (‘Great Space’), a variant of Lebensraum (‘Living Space’), released from the exclusive domain of the Master Race, and distributed to a few global hegemons, or Great Powers (Lewis Reference Lewis2020, p. 162). Any nation caught within a Großraum cannot exercise a political agency outside the hegemon's ideology or interests. Furthermore, no hegemon should infringe upon a rival's sphere of influence. Consequently, the United States is right to force its politics onto North and South America. Likewise, the Soviet Union, now Russia, should rule Eurasia. Schmitt made these concessions not to justify liberalism or communism, but to contain their internationalist impulses from challenging Nazi Germany's hold over Europe, its Großraum.

Realism has recently attracted many admirers, right and left, who oppose US hegemony. Here, the right holds a consistent position, for their worldview shares the same might-is-right formula as realism, which is just imperialism drawn as Voronoi cells around nuclear silos. Conversely, the left plays dumb or dishonest when it cites Mearsheimer to chastise the West while ignoring the imperial implications that would legitimise the oppression of South America, which sits within America's sphere of influence. While many theorists contributed to realism – from Halford Mackinder to Hans Morgenthau – its best practitioner was Henry Kissinger, whom the left has spent 50 years condemning as a uniquely evil being.

However, Schmitt does not only provide realist notions of space. In 1942, he argued that the psychic geography of these Great Powers is largely determined on whether they cast their Großraum ambitions across Land and Sea. In 1997, the Eurasianist and ‘National Bolshevik’ Aleksandr Dugin recited this opposition in Foundations of Geopolitics (Dugin Reference Dugin1997), to distinguish the Russian civilisation and colonialism from the West.

According to this shared schema, the maritime empires – Thalassocracies – surfaced in the small landmasses of Western Europe, so cast their ambitions across the seas, and consequently, the globe. As with all empires, they relied on exploitation, delivering us to the depths of race-based slavery, where people became liquid assets, a legacy that still haunts us today. These ventures were also entangled with other values, exploration and entrepreneurship, which evolved into a socio-economic order of progressivism and liberalism. Poetically, these empires resemble the ‘Leviathan’ (Schmitt Reference Schmitt and Draghici1997, p. 6). Politically, they now represent Atlanticism and NATO, led by America.

Conversely, grounded empires – Tellurocracies – roam across the vast landmasses of Eastern Europe, but possess few ports, thus channelling their ambitions to a near-abroad. Again, these empires engaged in exploitation, but they typically relied on more medieval modes of domination, of the church and crown binding serfs to land. These physical and psychic realities ensured a more grounded approach to power, rooted in the consolidation of traditionalism and authoritarianism. This is the ‘Behemoth’ (Schmitt Reference Schmitt and Draghici1997, p. 6). In current terms, it begets Eurasianism and the CSTO, led by Russia.

We find similar rhetoric beyond Russia, with Baudrillard contrasting the ‘ultra-fluidity’ of the West against the ‘ultra-freezing’ East (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard and Turner1994b, p. 29). Vaporwave and Hardvapour repeats these allusions. The former basks in the warm waters of an Endless Summer, desperately denying the inevitable autumn fall of the Twin Towers. Conversely, the latter braces against a frigid Midwinter, awaiting the springtime meltdown of Chernobyl. When looking at the distinct climatic and cultural temperaments of each space, it is understandable how these disparate discourses converge upon similar metaphors.

When Schmitt first devised these distinctions, he claimed that the ‘universalism of Anglo-Saxon sea-based hegemony that transcends, is foreign to the land, and is therefore limitless’ (Hell Reference Hell2009 p. 301; Lewis Reference Lewis2020, p. 164). These statements explode Augé's architectural notions of globalised non-places to a geographic scale. Russian textbooks echo Schmitt's warning, claiming that the ‘liquid’ ideology of Western degeneracy seeks to ‘flood the land’, and erode the ‘solid’ foundations of the Orthodox civilisation, turning it into another non-place (Kotkina Reference Kotkina, Bassin and Pozo2017, p. 66; Lewis Reference Lewis2020, p. 168).

As if to mock these fears of Atlantic globalism, the internet created NATOwave. The aesthetic existed prior to 2022, functioning as a defence of the current world order against the radical revisionism of Sovietwave and Fashwave. All these variants draw upon the aesthetic template of Vaporwave and Synthwave, whilst substituting their implied social commentary with explicitly political movements. Here, NATOwave gained new significance for pro-Ukrainian users after the Russian invasion. As a meme, rather than an artistic movement, NATOwave does not compose its own music. Instead, it merely splices the pounding basslines and soaring riffs of Synthwave's uncritical celebration of 1980s America, with training footage of NATO's vast arsenal, sanitised of any mention of its application in places like Serbia or Libya. It does not disentangle the messy ethics of liberalism and interventionism, but revels in how quickly they can be delivered through the barrels of an A-10 Warthog. For instance, the YouTube channel Latvian Gopnik pairs Perturber's Venger (2016) with a montage of NATO's airpower, beginning with the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy and Boeing E-3 Sentry, revelling in the global reach of the alliance's transportation and surveillance capabilities (Latvian Gopnik Reference Gopnik2022). This reminds us that the only force more pervasive than liquid is gas.

Through all these instances, we have outsiders drawing memes and maps, whose connection to the territory is ambiguous. Responding to this Baudrillardian condition, the Ukrainian media theorist Roman Horbyk delivered a lecture in April 2022, entitled ‘The Territory Resists the Map: Geolocating Reality and Hyperreality in the Russo-Ukrainian War’ (ArtsUnimelb 2022). Here, Horbyk elaborates on the claim that the Russo-Ukrainian conflict subverts the postmodernity of the Gulf War, by inspecting the various maps produced by the invaders, which he puts into two categories. In the first instance, he speaks of descriptivist maps, which attempt to accurately represent battlefield conditions, despite the fog-of-war, operational secrecy, psychological operations, and cultures of misreporting performance (враньё).

However, Horbyk directs most of his attention to the second instance, to prescriptivist maps, coded by politics as an ‘algorithm to be enacted by the army’. When predicting all potential sites of civilisational clashes, Huntington singles out Ukraine as a ‘cleft country’, with the Dnipro River approximating the fractures between ethnic identities and electoral interests (Huntington Reference Huntington1996, p. 166). Consolidating long held positions, Putin wrote the essay, ‘On the Historic Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians’ (Reference Putin2021), which claims the two countries are eternally bound by their connection to the Kyivan Rus’ – a millennia ago – and that any delusions of a separate Ukrainian identity was invented by the Bolsheviks and Western conspiracies against the All-Russian empire. This indicates that the idealism of ethnogenesis – not geopolitical realism – serves as the impetus for invasion. By these accounts, Ukraine swings between zero to two identities, but never settles on one (Borenstein Reference Borenstein2019, p. 208). In his talk, Horbyk presents a scene from Russian state media, where panellists carve up the country for a television audience. Here, Ukraine withers into a landlocked buffer state between Novorossiya, which is returned to Russia just as Galicia is gifted to Poland, thereby producing three identities (ArtsUnimelb 2022).

Horbyk contrasts this with photographs, taken from the territory, of a boulevard clogged by a column of burnt and beheaded tanks. Speaking after the Russian retreat from Kyiv, when Ukrainian morale was high, Horbyk argues that they have shattered the ‘postmodernist hall of mirrors’ installed by Baudrillard's philosophy. While the 2014 conflict had already subverted the patterns of simulation with its dissimulation, it still possessed the Gulf War's condition of imbalance, with Russia bullying an unprepared Ukraine. Now weaponised and wary, the Ukrainians have ensured that the Russians face a comparable opponent in 2022, thus cutting another connection to the Gulf War. In the words of Horbyk, ‘For the first time, we saw the reality fight back against the hyperreality. The reality itself became the ultimate and best possible fact-checking of Putin's speeches and the map he handed out to his nation. And what a surprise, we got to see that the real is still real’. We should not read this to mean that Ukraine will act entirely honestly in this war, as they share many of the same operational incentives as the Russians to keep secrets and tell lies. However, it does claim that Ukraine has exposed the big lie that they would welcome Russian territorial expansion with flowers.

Soft and hard rejections of liberalism

Hardvapour attacked Vaporwave not only through its fast and loud aesthetics, but by shifting its political perspective on the 1980–1990s. Vaporwave floats in a cloud of ambiguous longings, haunted both by the vanquished spectre of the welfare state, and by the neo-liberal phantasmagoria that guided our Holiday from History; each marking its own version of Utopia. Although these lamentations often come coded in Japanese aesthetics, they ultimately convey a Western perspective of these lost decades. Conversely, Hardvapour conducts séances with different ghosts. Instead of Raegan and Clinton's gift of a peaceful and prosperous holiday, they look to the perestroika and shock therapy that racked the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years. To this task, Hardvapour not only adopts the ruinous aesthetics of the post-Soviet period, but often asserts that it comes from these places.

The leitmotif of destruction runs through both genres. Vaporwave takes its vacation between two acts of destruction, beginning with sledgehammers slamming into the Berlin Wall and ending with the fall of the Twin Towers. Hardvapour looks at the temporal space between the ruin and return of the Soviet Empire, beginning with the meltdown of Chernobyl and ending with predictions of a nuclear World War III. Furthermore, these historical moments come coded in seasonal terms, of Endless Summers and Midwinters.

These references to Ground Zero and Alienation Zones remind us that both genres engage with varieties of non-places. Here, Vaporwave looks to architectural expressions of the concept, especially the mall, both when it was in its halcyon days and after it fell into obsolescence. Hardvapour expands the scope of non-places to geography, where the liquid ideology of Atlanticism threatens to flood the solid civilisations of Eurasia.

Here, we find two great enemies of liberalism. Dominated by leftists, the discourse of Vaporwave has often been paired with Fukuyama's triumphalist declarations about The End of History, with the passive defeatism implied by Fisher's the ‘Cancellation of the Future’. With this text, Fisher combines the sentiments of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, stating, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’ (Fisher Reference Fisher2009, p. 2). Flirting with the anti-hegemonic impulses of the far-left and far-right, Hardvapour chooses the active option in this set. Instead of softly retreating into nostalgia, it drives hard into the apocalypse, while hiding behind the mask of meta-irony as to whether they want or warn against these ends.

Again, not all Hardvapour artists directly sign up to the collective claims of Ukrainian origins. Conversely, others may actually come from this country. When dealing with a movement built on anonymity and ambiguity, it is difficult to determine the identities of all individual parties, even with collective admissions and allusions of Hardvapour's constructed origins. Indeed, it is this obfuscation of Ukrainian identity that precisely parallels the strategies used in the Russian invasions of 2014. After 2022, we stand beyond the brink of their predicted apocalypse, and finally see real Ukrainians refute the alternate temporalities and territorialities that some outsiders have placed upon them.

Ironically, their military and diplomatic struggle for independence is dependent on Western resolve, which falters. To some extent, these hesitancies emerge from realist accounts of national interests and capabilities, and a drive to remain on the safe side of nuclear blackmail. However, there are also growing doubts about whether multinational networks of liberal democracies are delivering for their citizens, and consequently, worth protecting and projecting further into the globe, especially through military intervention. Here, it is critical not to sentimentalise the past as a place without division. As a precursor to our own times, the sociologist Daniel Bell once declared that postwar liberalism represented The End of Ideology (Reference Bell1988[1960]), mere moments before the radical turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, which ultimately ended in a crisis of confidence in the welfare state. Still, the current waves of economic stress, culture wars, and other geopolitical tensions – past and present – have crashed upon a uniquely fractured media landscape, leading to a political polarisation that sweeps people away from established institutions, and towards populist demagogues. Despite their positions as niche cultural phenomena, Vaporwave, Hardvapour, and other retrowave movements demonstrate the shifting political agendas, alliances and methods for manufacturing consent and confusion in this new media complex. This has pulled us out of the false utopianism promised by Fukuyama's End of History – as celebrated and critiqued by Vaporwave – and pushed us towards the strange synthesis of premodernity and postmodernity described by Huntington and Hardvapour. Once imagined as an international Clash of Civilizations, these tensions have now infected the intranational culture, rendering us all cleft countries. We have returned from our Holiday from History to a house divided.