Sunday I traveled down to Brighton Beach for the afternoon. Maybe not the first place that comes to mind for NYC transplants to visit, but this place has intrigued me for some time. From seeing the name on the subway map on my daily commute in and out of Manhattan, the buzz around this year's Academy Award-winning film Anora, and my personal interests in the Russian-speaking world.

Getting off the train at the Brighton Beach stop, I felt myself step back in time and into a foreign place. The store signs were in Cyrillic, everyone milling about the streets spoke Russian, and the dreary-looking brick apartment blocks lining the seaside felt like they were plucked right out of a Soviet-era city.

This place felt haunted. Not by ghosts, but by a past and possibly a future that never arrived. Hauntology, as Derrida calls this phenomenon. A generation that was promised a utopia, but instead forced to escape persecution and economic collapse at home. Now these retirees live on a couple blocks of beachfront known as "Little Odessa" on the outskirts of the capitalist center of America.

After leaving the subway stop, I walked along the boardwalk. During my walk I observed the different intonations of the locals. The teenagers code-switching between Russian and English, likely kids of first or second generation immigrants navigating the strange convergence of their parents' old world to the melting pot of NYC. I couldn't help but think of the film Anora, which tried to capture those feelings of nostalgia and futures by weaving through the dynamics of post-Soviet diaspora communities together with edgy Gen Z culture.

I had mixed feelings about the film, but it had a certain vibe that resonates with a younger audience. It tied in Zoomer language and references and appeared exotic for someone outside of the Russian American community. But is it based on reality? I personally cannot answer but have seen some critiques online about this. Some claim the film is nothing more than a caricature of typical Russian tropes (sex workers, gangsters, oligarchs, etc.) with cliche dialects, ethnic grievances, and social dynamics of a conservative culture in a liberal city.

Even if it's not true to Brighton Beach's reality, the director successfully created his own reality. A simulacrum as Baudrillard terms this. A copy without an original. A mashup of Russian American cliches, Zoomer language, reactionary (possibly Red Scare influenced) lore, and as a result you get a new hyperreality that is the film Anora.

I continued my walk along the beach until the rain and wind became unbearable. I was happy that I managed to touch sand for the first time this year, which is unlike me as I am very much a beach person. I passed a few old retired couples out for a stroll. I couldn't tell if I should say hello, but none looked inviting, so instead we shared conciliatory nods and a brief hello or привет to a few.

I then sat down for a traditional meal. The small, unassuming Euroasia Cafe was not much to look at from the outside or inside but was filled with locals spending the afternoon with friends and family. The TV in the corner played Russian music videos from the 80s. I ordered borscht, a side of pelmeni, and drank a mug of sweet kompot. It was strangely nostalgic. I had this very meal on many cold and rainy days like today. At one point during my meal, a song I recognized by Rauf & Faik played, bringing slight melancholia over me, as it was one of the first Russian songs I've ever heard.

I finished my meal, and the friendly old Russian waitress thanked me for coming in, and I thanked her for the really tasty food in the few phrases of Russian I knew. She appreciated the attempt.

It was then time to leave. It was best not to overstay my welcome in this foreign place. I rode the Q train back up to Northern Brooklyn and thought about these ghosts we carry with us, whether they are people, places, time periods, or even the physical or digital embodiment of these phenomena.

This is an idea I've been thinking about recently in regards to my online experience. I am too young to remember the blogging era of music or the "indie sleaze" scene that emerged out of the once-arts district of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I grew up idealizing that scene as the cool merger of rock music, electronic music, and avant-garde art. This era rolled into the Tumblr aesthetic of the 2010s with its dark and moody vibes embodied by musicians even outside of NYC such as Arctic Monkeys, The 1975, Lana Del Rey, and others that once filled my high school playlists. Although by this point the economic status of Williamsburg was changing dramatically, I still associated the gritty industrial aesthetic that permeated through online culture and even physical spaces as downstream of the Brooklyn indie era.

Now Williamsburg is nothing like that. It is luxury apartments rented out to tech and finance workers, Whole Foods and other chains, and a few industrial cafes and bars (relics of the past). I never experienced that previous era, but when I visited Williamsburg for the first time, I felt a nostalgia for a time I never experienced nor will. It is hard to discern our living experience between the physical and digital. If we romanticize based on our digital world enough, we create our own idealization of what we think the physical world should be. In a sense we create our own simulacrum that can never be actualized in the physical.

In relation but with a focus on cyberspace, Mark Fisher takes Derrida's concept of hauntology and applies it to 21st century media and technology. A key idea is that we are not nostalgic for the past, but for the futures the past already imagined. For example, the early internet pioneers imagined an open and democratic cyberspace, the cypherpunk and DIY vision for the internet. Musicians and other artists creating their own blogs, leveraging social media and no longer needing to rely on corporate support for distribution. This reality did not come to fruition as we turned towards a platform-dominated cyberspace and new economic models built on surveillance. Therefore many of us are nostalgic for a future cyberspace that was already imagined in the 90s.

When I arrived home from my afternoon at Brighton Beach, I began writing this. On a personal level, I left feeling nostalgic for a time I once recognized, but never felt truly a part of. I romanticized past experiences but I always knew deep down I would have been an outsider, not out of choice, but out of circumstances. Sunday was a nice reminder of this.

Although I'm on the older side of Gen Z, I still associate with this digital native generation that is shaped by the online world. It doesn't matter where you come from geographically, Zoomers have their own style, interests, and slang that transcend physical borders more so than generational divides. We can relate to a fellow Zoomer in other countries better than a Boomer in our own at times. So I wonder what will happen to ethnic enclaves such as Brighton Beach. The teenagers I heard on the boardwalk doing that lingual dance between Russian and English was fun to hear, but will this pass onto the next generation, or will it become lost as generations merge further into the monoculture creeping out from cyberspace?