The present as an infinite loop

On YouTube, millions of users tune in daily to an animated girl studying while soft, repetitive beats play in the background. She is the Lo-Fi Girl, an icon of a generation that found in low fidelity—in worn-out sounds, in the imperfect and the warm—a form of companionship or emotional refuge. This anxiety-relieving, melancholic, and digital atmosphere seems to halt time, as if it repeats the same rainy afternoon over and over, reminding us, perhaps, of something that was lost.

Lo-fi, born from the aesthetic decision to let the noise breathe, is not just music: it is a way of experiencing the passage of time. It harks back to early video games, Nokia ringtones, and 2000s cartoon channels. It echoes a childhood without shocks, where the future still seemed promising. It is no coincidence that its rise coincided with the pandemic: when time stopped and space was confined to our screens, the world found comfort in melodies that came from a bygone past.

But this loop is not just auditory: it is symbolic. The entire culture seems to spin in that same cycle of repetition. Trends revive the 90s and 2000s, brands relaunch old models, studios recycle films and series from the past. Everything comes back, nothing moves forward. Nostalgia has become the soundtrack of a present that cannot imagine something new.

This seems to indicate that we live surrounded by the remnants of a future that never arrived. Our culture, like the lo-fi beat, repeats itself: a comforting yet stagnant loop. The low fidelity of the sound reflects a low fidelity of the future. The future, once a herald of promises, is now just background noise.

Digital melancholy: from Tumblr to retro revival

Before Instagram and TikTok, there was Tumblr, that liminal space where a generation began to experiment with its emotions on the Internet. There, amidst blurry photos, existential quotes, and sad songs, a sensitivity was born: sadness as an aesthetic, the past as refuge.

Tumblr was, in many ways, the first digital sanctuary of centennial nostalgia. The images did not seek to document the present but to turn it into memory. That desire to transform everyday life into a melancholic object anticipated what would later dominate contemporary visual culture: a fascination for the retro, for the filter, for the texture of time.

Today, that aesthetic reappears everywhere: in lofi, in the Y2K revival, in cinema, in fashion, even in the way we construct our digital profiles. Everything seems to point to the same thing: the attempt to capture a lost emotion, a slower, more habitable, and warmer version of the world around us.

Hauntology: the echoes of an interrupted future

Philosopher Jacques Derrida coined the term hauntology—a fusion of “haunting” and “ontology”—to describe how the ghosts of the past continue to pulse in the present. Mark Fisher took up this concept to think about contemporary culture: we live, he says, surrounded by the ghosts of futures that never transpired.

In his book Ghosts of My Life, Fisher analyzes how current music and art are filled with echoes of the past, because the future—as a horizon of hope or utopia—has evaporated. Our culture is, to a large extent, a melancholic repetition of styles, gestures, and symbols from other eras. And not because of a lack of creativity, but because we no longer believe in the possibility that the future can be better than the present.

Fukuyama, Fisher, and the closure of the horizon

At the end of the 20th century, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history”: the definitive victory of liberal capitalism and Western democracy. In that context, the future ceased to be a contested territory. Progress became routine, and political—and aesthetic—imagination became trapped in an eternal present.

Fisher refers to this climate as capitalist realism: the feeling that there is no alternative to the current system. Not only did the political “outside” of capitalism disappear, but also its “symbolic outside.” Consequently, art lost its real capacity to project new possible worlds. The future ceased to be a horizon of utopias to spread into the pessimism of a climate and social dystopia.

When art looked forward

For much of the 20th century, art believed in the future. The avant-gardes not only experimented with forms but also expressed a collective confidence in progress, in the idea that humanity was moving toward a brighter future.

In architecture, futurism and brutalism dreamed of functional cities, habitats that embodied the spirit of modernity: pure lines, concrete, steel, dynamism. In painting and sculpture, movements like Soviet constructivism, neoplasticism, or Bauhaus sought to order the world under a new aesthetic rationality, where art, technique, and society formed a transformative unity.

That faith in the future also permeated literature and cinema. Science fiction's utopias—from Metropolis by Fritz Lang to the spatial visions of 2001: A Space Odyssey—imagined a tomorrow where technology would be the vehicle of emancipation. Even the dystopias warned about the dangers of progress, but from a conviction: the future existed and was worth thinking about.

In fashion, designers like Pierre Cardin or Paco Rabanne embraced a “spatial” aesthetic, using synthetic materials and metallic silhouettes that aimed to dress humans of the future. In music, early electronics, German krautrock, or British new wave explored unheard sounds, trying to anticipate the future that was coming.

Each avant-garde was, at its core, a proposal for a world. Art wasn't merely reflecting reality; it was designing it. It was assumed as a motor for change, as a symbolic laboratory of what was to come. Time was advancing in a straight line, and creation accompanied that impulse.

But that confidence began to crumble. Today, there are no avant-gardes looking forward with that same ambition. Instead, contemporary culture seems to live off citations and recycling: music covers past styles, cinema repeats franchises, fashion revives decades one after another. Our aesthetic is that of a historical collage, a sum of fragments that do not build a future but orbit around the past. In this way, instead of imagining what could be, we evoke what we once believed it would be.

The present without promises

The 21st century inherited technology but lost hope. If for the last century the future was a territory to conquer, for us it became a space of threat: climate change, economic crisis, wars, precarity, anxiety.

Fisher noted that technological dystopias—those nightmares of the future—no longer serve as warnings because we already partially inhabit them. We live the future, but not the one we imagined: a future without expectations, saturated with screens, hyperstimulation, and isolation.

Faced with that sensation of historical exhaustion, culture finds refuge in the past. Nostalgia works as an emotional antidote: looking back to escape the vertigo. But that gesture also has a symbolic cost. By ceasing to conceive alternative horizons, our artistic productions become paralyzed. We repeat the known because we cannot envision the unknown. The present becomes an interactive museum, where the old is recycled to the point of exhaustion.

Between ruin and possibility

Nostalgia, however, is not inherently negative. It can also be a form of mourning, a way to acknowledge what has been lost. The ghosts described by hauntology are not only shadows of the past; they are signals of something that still demands realization.

Perhaps the contemporary challenge is to transform melancholy into creative impulse. To recover from the past not its aesthetic, but its faith in the future. To reimagine a distinct, possible, shared future. Because if there is one thing Fisher taught us, it is that ghosts do not appear to scare us, but to remind us that there is still something pending. And perhaps there, between ruin and possibility, in that tremor between what was and what could be, the flame of a new horizon will be reignited.

Because the true question, as Fisher posed, is not why we remember so much, but why we stopped imagining. We live surrounded by remakes, fashions that return, songs that sound like those from twenty years ago. And yet, amid those repetitions, there is something that beats. Something that still seeks an exit.

Perhaps lo-fi, with its imperfect sound, broken beats, and warm melancholy, is teaching us just that: that beauty is not in the shining future that never arrived, but in the ability to find harmony in the noise, comfort in imperfection, and hope in the echoes of the past. Because although time may seem frozen, between each loop and every old sample, there is still something that continues to sound. Soft. Persistent. Like a heart beating inside an old tape.