“Death” (1926) | Hein von Essen / CC0 1.0
Ghosting: when someone just stops replying to messages, stops returning calls, and for all intents and purposes vanishes without warning from your life. The term names the sudden ending of a relationship, through disappearance rather than a clear confrontation or closing act: It describes a mode of withdrawal by absence or avoidance. Often, it is understood as an eminently contemporary affliction, a function of life lived through screens. Media theorist Dominic Pettman’s new book, Ghosting: On Disappearance (Polity, 2025), examines ghosting not only as an epiphenomenon of digital life but also as a practice as old as human relationships themselves.
In Ghosting: On Disappearance, Pettman traces ghosting across romantic, familial, and professional spheres, drawing on media theory, philosophy, and pop cultural examples. His references range from Hamlet and Freud to dating apps, Dolly Parton, Taylor Swift, and even a speculative reading of Socrates ghosting Alcibiades. The book offers one of the first sustained critical approaches to ghosting, inviting readers to reflect on abandonment, disappearance, and detachment as defining conditions of life under contemporary media systems. Recently, Pettman chatted with Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg about how people can be added to and erased from our lives today—a shift that mirrors other broader precarities shaping the social landscapes of our time.
Mariana Giacobbe Golberg: What’s new about today’s ghosting compared with old-fashioned forms of abandonment?
Dominic Pettman: People could always just disappear, of course, but I think one of the key sentences in the book is, “as soon as we invented texting, we invented not texting.” There are many ways to connect, but at the same time, there are many ways to disconnect or let things just drop. People will report anecdotally that they don’t feel great about ghosting someone, but it just seems the easiest option. So the convenience factor: Just as we can order a date through DoorDash almost, we can also say, “No thanks” the same way.
Mariana Giacobbe Golberg: What struck me in the book is this idea that we already live among ghosts—that, for the way we use our devices, we might be bound more closely to disembodied presences online than to the person right next to us on the subway.
Pettman: The idea of proximity is very complicated because the fact that we can speak all day every day to someone in another country means that they feel very close. They are a kind of welcome ghost in your life; while someone who’s physically there can be—this very American phrase—“emotionally unavailable.” You could be effectively ghosted by a partner, but they’re still around. So proximity, closeness, intimacy are not just about geography or location. It’s very much about how you feel about them, how you think about them.
Golberg: As you put it in the book, technology starts blurring the lines between presence and absence.
Pettman: Exactly, because you’re always talking to avatars, to screen bubbles, so it becomes kind of spectral. I think you put it well in the question—we are kind of rendering ourselves into multimedia, virtual presences anyway. So we’re always glitching. We’re never fully there. We know that in ourselves because we feel the beckoning call of the phone or the next thing. No doubt this is why a lot of us try to meditate, to be in the here and now. And the technology, of course, has turned us into squirrels even more so, rewiring ourselves for quick dopamine. It’s very deliberate.
Golberg: You speak about detaching as a necessary skill for citizens of the twenty-first century. Yet it doesn’t feel like we’re dealing with detachment as understood in Buddhist philosophy; there’s no inherent critique of attachment. Rather, it’s a form of detachment that enables one to attach to the next thing.
Pettman: When I say “necessary,” I don’t mean in a moral sense. I just mean that, in order to function in this kind of society, we only have so much bandwidth, as they say. And you see it every day. If you work as a freelancer or something, the people who commission your project will talk to you 24/7. They’re your best friend, and as soon as you deliver the “deliverable,” they ghost you and you never hear from them again. Maybe not even get paid.
I almost see it as a good sign that we can still get offended by being ghosted or hurt, because it still means we have some investment in human relationships beyond just sheer transactions. It’s going to be really game-over when we don’t even feel the ghosting or worry about it.
But we’re in this odd, strange transitional time when it’s becoming normalized. People understand it’s inevitable, but we can still get very offended by it.
Golberg: Why do you think ghosting hurts?
Pettman: It comes with no explanation; then that’s a type of violence, because you’re always left guessing, second-guessing, and you feel guilty without trial. It’s very Kafkaesque. You are left in limbo. And then everything that happened before becomes tainted, and even your memories are poisoned. It’s a very brutal thing to do. And the longer the relationship, the more painful it is.
I think the worst part might be the lack of closure, as they say, because you can’t mourn, you’re trapped in melancholia, to use the Freudian distinction. Because at least with mourning, you can work through, of course, it always hurts, but you then grieve and you move on. Whereas melancholia is again, a form of limbo. You’re trapped.
Golberg: How does melancholia work?
Pettman: It doesn’t allow you to work through, so you’re always on repeat. You are trapped because there’s no way to resolve the relationship. And, in fact, people can get addicted to melancholia because it’s the only way to keep that lost person close. It’s a negative form of closeness, but they prefer that to nothing. And so melancholia is building a shrine to someone inside and worshiping at it. And that means you’re stuck.
It is your way of holding onto them. Even if it’s dark, it’s still better. It feels better than just to let it go, because you haven’t been given that opportunity.
Golberg: Who is really rendered a ghost in the ghosting? Is it the ghoster, or rather the ghostee, the one that is not seen, who has no agency, who, like a ghost, cannot really move things around?
Pettman: I just wanted to play with those ambiguities because it can be both. And there’s something weird about calling it ghosting because ghosts hang around. The weird thing about ghosts is that they are present, you just can’t see them. So maybe it’s even the wrong word, but it does resonate because we already feel a bit spectral or uncanny and so do other people. So it’s a good question about who actually is the ghost in this scenario. Miss Havisham from [Great Expectations by] Charles Dickens is one of my patient zeroes for this, and she’s very gothic. She was abandoned, and she’s the ghost, actually.
Golberg:You speak also about the “zombie relationships” as a flip side of ghosting. Can you speak a little bit about what that is?
Pettman: You could almost do a separate book about this. As we were saying, because you can communicate with someone so easily now; a hundred years ago, if you left to another country, it was very difficult, it would take a long time, even with letters. The temporality was very different. Today, because it’s so easy, you might stay in touch with people who maybe you don’t have much in common with anymore.Or maybe that relationship has run its course, but you still feel in the habit of checking in; or for whatever reason, you don’t want to finish it. These relationships can go on longer than their “natural life”, as they used to say. And so I think there are also zombie relationships because no one’s been willing to break up, whether it could be family, even it could be a sibling you don’t know very well because they’ve got a whole other family, or who knows. There are so many versions of this, not just romantic, but anyone you’re just checking in with at the bare minimum to keep it alive. You may have all the best intentions of doing more, but because we’re pulled in so many directions, you could call some of those zombie relationships. That does sound harsh, but…
Golberg: What role does technology play here, when it comes to the precarity of today’s social bonds? Where does AI stand in this allegorical media landscape?
Pettman: Well, they’re always trying to come up with technical solutions to the problems that technology created five years ago. And so the whole AI friend thing for people who are so isolated, et cetera. The bigger point is that it’s very much a holistic social problem. Precarity is absolutely the default mode for most people now, and that’s why I didn’t just focus on romantic ghosting but professional and social ghosting because it’s almost like we can’t trust any relationship to be there the next day. And what kind of society can you found on that? So no wonder people feel like they have to be completely self-reliant.
I guess we fear AI because if it’s potentially “thinking” for us, then we’ve even lost our raison d’être as a species, as we are supposed to be the most intelligent creature; if we’ve invented a smarter one, or if we’ve just become lazy and just outsource our thinking through machines, then the AI is some weird mirror image of who we thought we might become when we were Promethean and ambitious, but now we’re happy to just prompt it and follow its instruction.
Specifically in terms of ghosting, you might be able to feed in all the texts or emails you got from someone who ghosted you, and then speak with the avatar the rest of your life, and it might be a simulation that’s close enough to what you were looking for. That’s a kind of Black Mirror scenario. We’ve seen people falling in love with Chat GPT or becoming obsessed with LLMs—it’s almost because we’re being trained to communicate so much indirectly, we can fall in love with something that doesn’t have a body, and that just seems to listen to us and be interested in us. We are pretty narcissistic—anything that shows interest, we’re happy to flatter and be flattered by. So I worry. Of course. And as soon as they manage to have them in sexy holograms, or whatever, it’s going to be even worse!
Golberg: I really enjoyed the book. It really seems that you were having fun while you wrote it.
Pettman: It’s not a pleasant topic, so it was also a bit therapeutic maybe. I think I try to always bring humor to things, even if it’s a dark humor, or a wounded humor. But because we’ve all felt it or we’ve all done it [ghosting] and then felt guilty about it. So it did strike me as strange that nobody had really thought about it in terms of media. I’m not trying to have the last word. But just to meditate on this new twist on a very old theme: abandonment, disappearance.
