Tech Won't Save Us - Can Nostalgia Inspire a Better Future? w/ Grafton Tanner

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Grafton Tanner to discuss how social and environmental crises fuel nostalgia, how companies profit from it, and whether it can be reoriented to inspire a better future.Grafton Tanner is the author of “The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia” from Repeater Books. Follow Grafton on Twitter at @GraftonTanner.🚨 T-shirts are now available!Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Paris reviewed Grafton’s book in Jacobin.TikTok has already gone through a phase of nostalgia for the early pandemic and its lockdowns.Malls have been closing for years, but many people have nostalgia for their heyday.In 1996, Jennifer Light compared emerging digital spaces to shopping malls.Matthew Ball wrote one of the key essays on what the metaverse should look like (from a corporate perspective).A message mentioned in the opening crawl of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was broadcast exclusively in Fortnite.When Amazon bought MGM, it said it wanted to redevelop much of its accumulated intellectual property.At the end of the 2010s, some people questioned what algorithms were doing to our sense of time.The internet doesn’t get properly preserved and its history is being permanently lost.Tim Maughan wrote about how the world is too complex.Nishant Shahani’s “Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return” and Badia Ahad-Legardy’s “Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture.”Support the show

Ultimately, this is still a human emotion, which means that different people can direct it, shape it in a variety of different ways. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Grafton Tanner. Grafton is the author of The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, The Politics of Nostalgia from Repeater Books. You can find out more about that in the show notes and naturally by listening to this week's conversation. Grafton and I talk about a lot of different aspects of nostalgia and how it's kind of observed in the technologies that we use, the entertainment media that we consume, and the politics that have defined the recent past. We discuss how nostalgia is often seen as

this kind of conservative, backward-looking emotion or way of seeing things, and we discuss whether it can also be reoriented toward kind of a positive politics that is future oriented, you know, obviously, with a focus on, you know, making people's lives better. And Grafton argues that's certainly possible. And you know, we can see that most evidently with the Green New Deal very recently, and have that kind of tapped into this nostalgia for the New Deal era in the United States and tried to use that to kind of build a politics and a movement around ambitious climate action. And, you know, naturally, I think you can debate whether that went far enough, you know,

what it has achieved. But it's still a good example of this kind of use of nostalgia for a positive purpose. So I had a great chat with Grafton. I think you're really going to enjoy it. I hope you do. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, like every episode, is provided free to everybody because listeners like you support the work that goes into making the show every single week. So if you want to join the more than 250 people who are supporting the show every single month, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us

and become a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Grafton, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Hey, thanks for having me, Paris. I'm having like nostalgia about our previous conversation. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Back during the pandemic, lockdown, pre-vaccine. Boy, those were the days. Yeah. Yeah. So basically you had this new book out, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, which, you know, deals with some of the topics, I think, of your last book, but also expands on those to look more deeply at some of these ways that nostalgia kind of infects the culture, the ways that we think about the past, the present, even the future, and how that interacts

with nostalgia. And so, you know, naturally, as you said, when you talked about the pandemic, we're in this period where, you know, there are a number of crises, whether it's the pandemic, whether it's the climate crisis that we've seen accelerating through the pandemic, whether it is these issues of affordability, of people being able to earn enough income, of just being able to get by that have also been exacerbated through this period. And so naturally, people are feeling a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety over this. And that creates an environment where they might want something more comforting. And into that comes nostalgia. So can you talk a bit about how all of these crises that we're dealing with fuel this kind of nostalgia that we're seeing in the culture and our politics at present? Definitely. Well, it's been building for many years now. I mean, I'm 31 years old. At this

point, I've lived through multiple kind of like global country shaking crises. And after each one, there's been this outpouring of nostalgic sentiment and yearning, and it ranges from like a patriotic heritage flavor of nostalgia, whether that's after 9-11 or the nostalgia that Trump kind of induced in populations or spread about. Or it's almost a regressive flavor of nostalgia, kind of a retreating inward, backward, retreating back to childhood. This is what happened after the 2008 global economic meltdown. Or it's kind of a combination of all kinds, like in the COVID pandemic, which up to this point, I mean, in my lifetime, I've never seen anything like it. It still is a major global issue that's killed many people. People have lost jobs and lives and loved ones and livelihoods. And out of those crises are a lot of different kinds of emotional reactions, anxiety being one of them, anger, maybe even a little bit of hope. I mean, I think we have to

have hope to sustain us through terrible times. Grief, certainly for those who have directly lost loved ones, or maybe even a grief for a previous way of living. But then also lots of nostalgia to go around as well. And not just internally felt within individuals and groups of people, but also kind of on tap from entertainment media, one reboot after the other kind of thing. I always go back to the early lockdowns in March and April of 2020 when there were no new sporting events, there were no new episodes of any of the shows or whatnot. So there was a lot of old stuff being rebooted and even that sort of like fanned the flames of nostalgia.

So yeah, you've got an emotion here that has traveled widely during this time and hasn't really gone away. As we continue to live in a pandemic, that's that's affecting a lot of people, we still have the crisis, and we still have the nostalgia. Yeah, you know, naturally, in the book, you talk about several kind of periods of nostalgia, you know, going back through, you know, I guess, a couple centuries ago, to a couple decades ago, to even, you know, the post kind of 2008, or the 2010s. And what we saw in that period, I wonder what you make

of the nostalgia that we saw through the pandemic. Obviously, we talked earlier in the pandemic, you know, back in January. But I feel like now we're reaching this place where some people at least, you know, in some Western countries are starting to come out of the pandemic, or at least the feeling of being in like constant lockdown, and seeing people a bit more often, etc, etc. I wonder what you observed about nostalgia in that period, you've talked about it a little bit, you know, and I guess the role that it played throughout the pandemic, as we were thinking back to pre pandemic times, but also, as you say, had that kind of hint of hope as to something that might come out of the pandemic as we were thinking back to pre-pandemic times, but also, as you say, had that kind of hint of hope as to something that might come out of the pandemic as well. I think it remains to be seen a little bit because I was talking with someone else about this

recently, about how we're going to reflect back on this time. Because if history is a guide, and if human emotions are also a guide, then there will be some amount of this time being turned into the good old days, which is kind of really scary. And the same thing with Trump, you know, and that even George W. Bush has had a rehabilitation period under the Trump administration then even afterwards, where we kind of look back, people look back and said, oh, you know, George Bush wasn't that bad in the 2000s, you know, and it is outrageous. We know that's not the case, right? Yeah. You know, the Colin Powell cycle is in play right now, right? It's in play right now. Yeah. Yeah. And so you're going to have that as more of the

war criminals he associated with die, basically. And, you know, you may have crises down the road that could be worse than the COVID pandemic, might be about the same, might not be as bad, but in retrospect, maybe COVID disappeared. And so then what we go through the future seems worse. And so we look back and think, well, at least during lockdown, we got to spend time with family, et cetera, et cetera. That's a very normal thing that people do. They're already doing it. People are already writing articles about people on TikTok posting videos, nostalgic for the early pandemic and early parts of the pandemic and early lockdowns. And it's striking. It seems scary.

It seems wrong to cast a nostalgic light on a really terrible time, but that's actually a pretty human thing to do to make sense of the past in some way. Now, of course, it's not an all or nothing thing. You could cast a warm glow on a terrible time period and also still recognize that it was terrible. The problem is trying to cut through that binary that usually gets set up by political people, political elites who will be very happy to get on a stage in front of lots of people and go one way or the other and say, usually they'll

lean all the way into the nostalgic emotions and say something like, you know, let's make America great again. And oh, things were so great back then. Even Joe Biden and his team did it. Oh, the Obama administration was really, really great. Let's get back there, you know. So you'll see this play out. And that's when the work really begins. We have to kind of constantly remind people that like, hey, one's nostalgia is a legitimate emotion. But we also don't want to just completely go over the edge and say something heinous, like, you know, well, Donald Trump wasn't that bad. We don't want that. Yeah, well, you know, you kind of see the responses on Twitter now, you know, when one of these Trump statements will come out about something or other

that he sends out by email, because he's not allowed on Twitter. And people are like, oh, oh man, like we should have him back on here. Like, you know, it was so fun when we could make fun of him that way. Yeah. And there is definitely, uh, even during his administration, there was a bit of a nostalgia for the days of Trump posting before he was president, where he would just post the most Kanye West adjacent kind of tweets, just totally heinous and insane and sometimes very, very funny. But then, of course, also extremely destructive rhetoric at the same time. So yeah, we are seeing that. Those of us who are stuck on Twitter are seeing that. Yeah, and we're still all stuck on Twitter, I think. Now, you know, there are naturally, you know, a number of really interesting aspects of the book,

but I want to dig into a few of them to try to understand them better and obviously draw them out for the listeners. You know, one of the aspects of this, you know, my master's degree is in geography, you know, looking at how spaces are affected by politics and whatever, right? And one of the things that I found interesting was your relationship between space and nostalgia that you draw out in one of the chapters and talking about how capital kind of creates these non places, you know, these places that are kind of robbed of their kind of locality and diversity, because of capitals need to accumulate, create suburbs, create shopping centers. And then that kind of leaves an opening for nostalgia to come in and fill the emptiness that is created by that. You know, when you take out these kind of local

identifiers of a main street and these kind of small businesses that you associate with a local community and whatnot. So can you talk a little bit about how that kind of corporate transformation of space creates an opening then for nostalgia to come in. Well, I think the first step is that the transformation of a place into a non-place usually involves the penetration of capital. And Marc Auger was writing about this in the 1990s, very obviously one of the great anthropologists of our time. And his book, Nonplaces, is just kind of essential reading. I think it's just great. And he kind of rightly identified what a nonplace is. Of course, we know the examples.

They're like liminal spaces, airports, supermarkets, places that in the 90s were pretty prominent. We still have them today, obviously, but the nonplace is a little different today. It's a virtual space, just about. Amazon itself is kind of its own virtual non-place. It also exists in space. I mean, you could go to a warehouse or you could work at a warehouse. Those are absolutely non-places. But there are places in which people aren't identified.

Usually, it's where people pass through either anonymously or pseudonymously, quasi-anonymously, and identified usually only on entering and exiting. And so what we've witnessed over the past several decades is the transformation of local places with, as you say, identifiers that local communities are able to know and be able to recognize and have built communities around and within, being transformed into like McDonald's and Subway and Walmart's and what have you. And then usually what happens is after capital comes in and uses that place or whatever, and then it's not of any use anymore, it just kind of gets discarded, kind of like a water bottle, single-use plastic, and then that's it. And usually a number

of things happen, people flee, things like white flight happens, and then capital moves out and leaves behind this just like barren wasteland that we all know. You travel through most of the West, and especially I live in the state of Georgia in the United States. Right down the road is a former Kmart shopping center, Kmart being big in the 90s or whatnot, alternative to Walmart. And it's still there, but it's dead. There's nothing in that building, but it's still there. And it's just this place you

pass by and it's extremely eerie. And I love things like that. I love going in places like that because it's almost this haunted location. It becomes kind of a dead zone. And then usually the next step that happens after that is those places perhaps get gentrified and the process kind of cycles over again, except that this time it's done with like fancy tacos and smiley faces and things like this. But what ends up happening is

that each time that location changes drastically, you will have people, local people who live nearby, come to kind of feel a longing for the way the place used to be, whether it's transformation from a place into a non-place or strangely enough, when non-places themselves change or disappear, people will feel a kind of nostalgia for old McDonald's restaurants or like old Walmarts or old retail centers. And especially a good example of this would be like the mall. The indoor mall was a privatized space. It was a suburban kind of invention and certainly not a public space by any means. And a lot of technology and working power was spent, a lot of money was

spent to get the mall to keep you in the doors and keep you walking and strolling and shopping. Douglas Rushkoff has an amazing book from the turn of the 2000s called Coercion. And it's all about this. It's really brilliant. But then of course, we know living now that there is a cultural nostalgia for the indoor mall. I'm reminded, there's plenty of examples you could find, but I'm reminded recently of, it's like the Billie Eilish video from, I think it was about sometime in 2020 when it came out. And she's kind of like roaming through this slightly empty mall, I think. I can't quite remember, but it's really kind of eerie, you know?

So you have this nostalgia for a space that originally was planned to be nothing more than just a site of commerce. And so it's really fascinating what happens with emotions and senses of place, even those places that are just kind of anonymous and corporately derived. Yeah, you know, I think that is a great example. Another kind of example that that comes to mind is kind of how, you know, when stores like Barnes and Noble or Borders or like chapters in Canada were kind of rolling out and kind of killing the local bookstores, they were like evil, right? But now that Amazon is wiping them out, it's the other way. It's like, oh my God,

we need to save our like Barnes and Noble or whatever from Amazon. And it's like, this was once the kind of evil thing, but now because it is the normalized thing that we're used to seeing, it's the new thing that's bad. And that's not to defend Amazon in any way at all. But you see something similar with like Walmarts and the big box stores. And as you say, the shopping malls as well, where like, these were things that once were destroying communities, but now with the advent of e-commerce and whatnot, these are the things that need to be defended because like they're all that's left in physical space.

Yeah, it's certainly a nostalgia for the physical space where you can like walk by and like touch the books on the shelves and stuff, which is just kind of, it's just maddening for people who remember like times when there were local bookshops and not Barnes and Nobles. But, you know, I grew up with a Barnes and Noble down the road. I really didn't have a local, I mean, certainly not a, not an independent bookstore I could walk to, you know, I, I lived in a suburbanized area. And so we, we drove down to the Barnes and Noble and. And I have a nostalgia for those late nights walking around in those spaces getting books.

I mean, that was very formative for me. And yet, all it takes is a little bit of a history lesson to realize just how devastating and destructive something like Barnes & Noble was and continues to be. But yeah, it's very strange. It's the weirdest thing to think about the possibility that perhaps something may come along and make people nostalgic for Amazon. Now, that is strange, but it might be bound to happen. Yeah, absolutely. I wonder if there would be like a nostalgia for the monopolized Amazon, you know, if it's ever broken up. Oh, yeah, that's true.

I think it could definitely happen. But, you know, I think there's also an interesting kind of example or line that could be drawn here from the physical to the digital, right? Because there was a paper in 1996 by Jennifer Light, and she talked about how the internet was becoming like a space that was kind of like a mall. You know, you have these digital communities where there's this idea that, you know, you can have all this freedom and be whoever you want online, etc, etc. But she's kind of explaining that, you know, already in the early stages of the internet, there are things like Prodigy, CompuServe, that are kind of like the malls of the internet, right? That are creating these kind of privatized spaces that we enter, but that the rules are governed not by the public,

like it's not a public space, it's not governed by some elected body, but by this corporation that is creating this kind of space where we can interact, but we interact on their terms, and to create profit for them, you know, like a shopping mall, for example. And so as I was reading what you're writing about nostalgia scapes, and non places, and, you know, the shopping malls and things like that, I was also thinking about something that we talked about last time you were on the show about VR and the role that that can play in nostalgia and how, you know, obviously we have these problems with social media, with social media kind of amplifying this nostalgia, this kind of a conservative reactionary nostalgia. But there are also these proposals coming out now

for a metaverse, right? For this kind of digital environment that we would kind of exist in. It's not really addressed in the book, but I wonder what you make of the kind of the proposals for a metaverse and what that would mean if we think of it through the lens of nostalgia and how nostalgia could be used through it. The first thing that comes to mind, and we may have touched on this last time also, is that a lot of the, at least a lot of the discourse of virtual reality and the ways that VR kind of shows up in entertainment media, it's very nostalgia driven. I always cite examples like Ready Player One

and even the episode of Black Mirror, San Junipero, in which characters can exist and literally live within the server, you know, like exist virtually. And the worlds they choose to live in are the past ultimately, but you know, the pop culture of the past. And so in that way, you could certainly see, well, if this was real, if the Ready Player One Oasis VR simulation,

VR world, if it was real, you know, it would be owned by all these corporations. They would make money off the intellectual property. If you want to wear a Mickey Mouse avatar or whatever, Disney makes money off of it, just like speculating here. But certainly, that's already extremely popular and alluring to lots of people. And those movies and TV shows are kind of examples of that. The metaverse is interesting because, as you say, it's kind of this replacement of a, or this is how it's pitched, at least, a virtual space that replaces the physical space that so many of us long for, you know, what have you. And I think it remains to be seen because like a lot of VR, it's a lot of dreaming, a lot of, you know, utopian wonderment. Of course, we know that the metaverse would be extremely exploitative and would certainly, if something like that would ever come along, you would have probably a nostalgia for

the old internet or for at least Web 2.0, which is kind of fascinating. But to me, I'm really, and I didn't explore this too much in the book, and I kind of wish I had ultimately, but I'm really fascinated with the way that VR is talked about and how VR, the way it's represented on screens and movies is always as like this retrotopia, a place where you could kind of just play with the pop culture of the past. I think that's very interesting and strange because one might would have assumed that the way that VR would be represented would be like this flying car, Jetsons kind of thing, but it's not. It's like dancing to Van Halen dressed as a famous Disney character. I think it's fascinating because so much of the conversation around the metaverse, you know, put forward by Matthew Ball,

I think most prominently, is about it being kind of a space where these corporations can further kind of exploit their intellectual property, right? And so naturally, as you discuss in the book, you know, you explain how the kind of mining of this intellectual property in the long kind of copyright periods creates this kind of incentive for this nostalgic media. And so then I feel like you can naturally see how that is going to play into the metaverse if we have this problem with oversaturated nostalgic media in the present, whether it's films, TV shows, things like that, and kind of, I guess, the conservative messaging that comes out through those things, and we can get to that.

But I think you can naturally see how then that would infect a metaverse that is obviously going to be this incredibly commercialized space. Yeah, it's definitely another way for companies to make money off of their intellectual property, probably, you know, if it ever like becomes a thing, that would be how they would do it. And yeah, I mean, to me, I mean, something like the Space Jam reboot or insert whatever the latest thing like that is, you know. It's certainly a film just for intellectual property to be advertised, you know. Very briefly, I mentioned in the book about the film Ralph Breaks the Internet, which I had never heard of before until recently. You know, it's insane. It's just ads.

It's ads for other Disney holdings, ultimately, like Disney princesses, getting to talk with C-3PO. And it's all done in the name of fandom, you know, or perhaps in the name of nostalgic fun. And Disney obviously is aware that nostalgia is a powerful emotion, can shape consumer purchasing and drive consumer behavior. But at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter to them, but it's just them flexing their holdings in a single film by saying, look at all the stuff that we own. And we've got another Star Wars film coming out in three months. And we might even mention that in the movie or what have you, but that would certainly be a development in something like

the metaverse. Yeah. It makes me think about how in Fortnite fortnight they had like a star wars event before i think it was like the final star wars movie in like the disney trilogy and you had like emperor palpatine there was like a message from him and it was like a kind of hint as to what was coming in the movie and then apparently i think it was like in the pre-roll script of the movie because you know the star wars movies have these kind of scripts that come up first, it mentions this message from Emperor Palpatine that you never hear in the movie, but you only hear in Fortnite. And that's wild. And the thing that just kills me about it is to be a good fan of these franchises and of this intellectual property, you've got to do a ton of work. And it's just like a constant consumption and hunting of Easter eggs. And you just can't keep up.

And there are people who, you know, they're going to make their living off YouTube, doing podcasts and just endlessly talking about these movies. And they're kind of, they're playing part of this, the game ultimately. And it's maddening to me. I don't see how in the world anyone could ever keep up with it it makes sense to constantly have to build canons and like know it and and then you know two years from now something comes along and says well all of that canon is not canon anymore here's the new canon and i have all this knowledge what do i do with it it's it's maddening yeah you

know in the book you talk about how you you know, the kind of entertainment sphere that we have today is kind of fueled by needing to mine all this intellectual property that has been built up over a number of years, you know, and, and we see it with the streamers and, you know, the tech companies wanting to do the same where Amazon bought MGM recently and said, one of the driving incentives behind that was to get all of MGM's intellectual property in its vast library, blah, blah, blah, right? So what do you see as the effect of, you know, having a culture and an entertainment media that is so focused on mining these stories and ideas from the past and like constantly recycling them in the present? Well, I think there is this direct correlation

between media consolidation and what from our end just looks like you know nostalgia for the past and it is but ultimately what they're doing is you know just trying to make lots of money you know and uh and buying each other up until there's like one corporation left and they've owned it all and it's getting to that point you know i mean other than like just outright frustration at like a monsters remake or something you know just like outrageous why anybody would want to do that even though i i've mentioned this here recently monsters was rebooted like every decade since it came out in the 1960s it's not necessarily a new thing but it's just a more widespread practice and it's

almost just like the standard practice as media companies buy each other up. On the one hand, you've got disgruntled people like myself who would be perhaps nostalgic for a time in which that wasn't the case. We had actually perhaps just a few more options of mainstream cinema other than just the old hat Marvel Cinematic Universe franchises that aren't really films. I don't think they're something else. And then at the same time, creating the same stories, especially stories from the past, Star Wars, Batman, the Munsters, creating more of these stories kind of traps people in these sort of nostalgic loops in the sense that you can't ever really escape that world. You're always supposed to be asked to rejoin the world of Star Wars and

essentially be a good viewer and hunt the Easter eggs and follow the thread and what have you, and talk about it and discuss it. And that's the process. And then the next month, there's another Disney Plus streaming film. And so it's incredibly disheartening on the one hand, and it's kind of unnecessary. I also was reading when Amazon acquired all of MGM and Bezos had this statement about wanting to reboot all the old favorites like Thelma and Louise and Robocop and all this stuff. He just cited all these films. And I had this joke about you're going to have the Mrs. Doubtfire cinematic universe at some point, you know? And it just seems kind of unnecessary. But I do think that it speaks to a kind of a cultural desire to kind of have narrativity, narratives that make sense, storylines that plot themselves out over a long term and that

feel permanent and cozy and stable in a very unstable world. At the end of the day, it's just major tech corporations and media corporations just wanting to make a ton of money. And actually, as you're describing there, I think, you know, maybe the answer is kind of obvious, but what are then the kind of political implications of this, right? If we have this media that is so focused on regurgitating these same kind of stories and narratives and ideas over and over and over again, you know, what kind of how we understand the culture and how things work, is constantly through these narratives that are recycled and reused over and over again. Well, on the one hand, it sort of edges out any kind of diversity of filmmaking or diversity of culture or ideas or stories. It certainly doesn't make space for kind of coming up with new ideas, new stories, new characters. One of the strange political consequences is that as you reboot some of these old pieces of intellectual property, you find that a lot of them are really kind of,

they're offensive, they're politically retrograde, many of them are misogyn parts from the story, or you try to have a more diverse cast or what have you, you'll have one side saying that it's just kind of tokenistic. And then you have another side saying that it's sullying their nostalgia for the original. It really is, you can't win. Ultimately, there's kind of no way out. And that's why I mean, my example in the book is one of the ghostbusters remakes one i think it might have been from just a few years ago not the most not the most recent one the the prequel but you know there was a decision to cast all women in the role as opposed to you know all men and like it was in the original and um when the trailer came out it was like those two sides

going at each other's throats and it just seems sort of like it's a lose-lose situation. Ultimately, the media companies really don't care because they know they could just, they could just crank out another one, you know, whatever. But yeah, that's a weird consequence of these rebooting stories. It's interesting that you say that because it makes me think that, you know, obviously there's this kind of maxim, this kind of idea that, you know, no press is bad press, right? And so if you have all these people arguing over this property that you have recycled from the past and made these changes to, to try to make it better reflect, I guess, the ideas of today, then that kind of fight, you know, completely works and having it reported on

in the media and whatever, it just draws attention to the property, these kind of accusations that now, you know, you're woke, you're too woke, your property is too woke. Yeah, you know, I think it's, I think it's really interesting. And I think that also kind of plays into the role of technology and these social media companies in it, right? Because a lot of those conversations will happen on these platforms, you know, and that's another part of your book, naturally, where you talk

about the way that the algorithms and that these spaces are designed are spaces in which they're not only primed for this kind of nostalgia, I would say, but also to kind of limit the conversation in a way and to constantly recycle the things that the platform knows that you like and to show you more of it. So you have this kind of limited horizon of things that you might see because you're served what the platform knows that you want to see instead of necessarily something that might challenge those sorts of ideas, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. And one doesn't even have to look up an old movie or something that we might even tag

as being nostalgic media. One doesn't even have to look that up to suddenly find themselves in this kind of like nostalgic algorithmic feedback loop or what have you, simply because powerful recommendation algorithms are going to feed you or at least show you information, content, media, TV shows, what have you, that is really kind of only similar to what it is that you're looking up to begin with. It makes adjustments, obviously. It's not totally rigid, but it's enough of a process to keep a person kind of trapped in the loop. And you're right, it does lead to sort of a limited horizon of thought and ideas. And oftentimes the stuff that gets recommended,

the retro kind of stuff that gets recommended is usually pasts that are corporately approved and created by corporate interests and tell certain stories. I mean, the idea that a person could have a deep knowledge of the history of something like Star Wars is essentially just saying that a person has a deep knowledge of a corporately controlled property. It'd be like if a person just knew a lot about the way that Walmart has changed over the years because they were such a fan of Walmart. I mean, it's not to say that there isn't perhaps artistic merit and something like Star Wars, but ultimately we have to ask

Disney whether they would think that because ultimately I think what they're interested in is just, is turning the profit. And then the streaming platforms are part of this ecosystem and that they're the ones who are kind of referring those titles, which are the most popular leading us to also realize that it's only the most popular and engaged with content that gets recommended the most. And actually, I think it's something that's fascinating, you know, this kind of reflection on the effects that these platforms that social media that the way that we communicate online, you know, has this kind of effect on, you know, what we're thinking about what we're liking.

I was curious about your thoughts about what this kind of does to our memory, because you talked about how in the book, how, you know, with social media, because, you know, there's this constant flow of content of memes, that nothing can be kind of effectively historicized, right. And so I wonder what that also does to kind of our memory, of historical events or current affairs, things that are happening in the past decade or more as we have increasingly consumed information in this way, but also our memory of our own lives and what's going on as they're kind of curated through these platforms. I have been thinking about this a lot recently. It might be the next thing I start to really dig into after this is after researching nostalgia and what it has to do with our relationship to digital technology, how it's circulated through networks, how it's a reaction to a network existence. I've been thinking a lot about digital memory,

trying to remember individually, ourselves, our own lives, the past or whatever as like digital subjects, but also like broad scale memory of this time. You know, when the decade ended, there were a few articles that came my way about writers struggling to remember the 2010s. And there was one in particular that said something along the lines of like, it feels like the 2010s just didn't happen. And I think that's kind of fascinating because

I think that's a legitimate experience that a person would feel like that recent history seems to have not happened. And I think it has a lot to do with the viral model of social media, which is sort of doing what the algorithms do when they recommend stuff to us, which is to intensify certain discourses at certain times on social media that we engage with pretty intensely ourselves. And it's travels and everybody knows if you spend enough time on social media and this is how it happens. Something gets talked about and the next day it's kind of gone. And there's varying levels of viral things. You've got either certain discourses that go viral for a day and then that's it. And then you have like the kid

who yodeled in the supermarket or whatever and he went viral for a short time and then disappeared. And I think it's unsustainable for us as remembering individuals and collectively to engage with ideas and discourses like that with such intensity. Because I just think that what ends up happening is when something like that gets so intensified and goes so viral that once it disappears, it kind of like disappears with finality and it gets replaced with the next thing. And after a little while, it just seems like those things that went viral are like a million years old.

They seem like ancient history, like even though they may have just been a conversation topic like the day before. And I think that a decade or more of engaging with and consuming content like that over the 2010s has really made us feel a little kind of shaky when it comes to historicizing recent history. In the long term, you have to think about how people are going to write about this time because so much of what feels very certain and safe and locked away in the vaults in the cloud is really just kind of like an accidental deletion away from disappearing forever. We're having to kind of grapple with this already as like some of the blogs and websites for the early 2010s are buried under dead hyperlinks. You've got games that can't be played anymore because they can't connect to servers. You've got MySpace deleting like 50 million songs uploaded to it after it had this server

migration problem. It's a major problem. And I'm curious to see how it's going to unfold over time. But I do think that a lot of it can be traced back to not just faulty technology like the cloud, but to just the way that social media circulates certain ideas. I think what you're discussing there with the loss of this kind of past of the internet is a serious issue. And I think one that is getting more attention, but whether that's actually solving the problem, I guess we'll see. The internet archive and its

wayback machine is valuable in that way, but I'm sure there needs to be more than that. But another piece that kind of came to mind when I was thinking about the memory aspect of it, and kind of this deluge, this constant deluge of information that we are subject to how, you know, every single day, there's all this news, there are all these happenings that we see. And then I feel like that makes it difficult to constantly remember everything that's happening because there is so much going on. of talks about how, you know, the world is increasingly more complex, you know, our supply chains, the financial system is increasingly managed by algorithms without human input. And humans, you know, find it difficult to actually understand exactly what is going on, because it's happening so fast, because so much is happening, and because they don't really have control, proper control over the process. And so I wonder if, you know, with the kind of huge amount of information that we are expected to consume on a daily, monthly, yearly basis, if that just makes it hard to fully grasp everything that's going on, because, you know, we are dealing with these kind of primitive brains that are still in our heads. And, you know, they're not made to handle all this information, I think. Absolutely. I was just actually talking with Tim a little bit about

this, about complexity and trying to keep up with it all. And even in some of Marc Auger's work in the 1990s, he argued that it wasn't that there's just a ton of meaning, that there's more meaning than there used to be, or the opposite, there isn't as much meaning. He said there's this sort of pressure for us to assign meaning to things that happen. And so I think it's certainly, I mean, he was writing a few decades ago, I do think that one of our problems with trying to keep up is just being overloaded with information on a daily basis. But it's also that next step of having a lot of information hitting us at one time and feeling the pressure to kind of like comment on it, whether that means like make a post about it or what have you, or just to try to like establish some kind of meaning as like grounding to say like,

well, this is what this means. And I think that some of that comes from a desire to have some stakes in the ground or like a buoy to hold on to in a time that feels very tumultuous in terms of past, present, and future, which we've kind of lost the thread a little bit on how to historicize and what constitutes past. I mean, the thing that, again, went viral last week is that how far in the past really is that? It doesn't seem like it was last week. It seems like it was much longer. But so I think we're having to try to reorient ourselves to time a little bit. And one way that we might be doing that is to assign meaning to all this information that we really, you're right, we really just can't make sense of it all. And it's already a problem. We're running short on time. So I have two more questions for you that are kind of more future oriented, I guess. You know, you talk about the positive futures, and I'm going to get to that in just a second. But I think there are also kind of negative futures here. And, you know, naturally, you've talked about Trump in the book, you talk

about Brexit and these other kind of right wing politicians that draw on this kind of nostalgic nationalism and things like that, right. But I want to put that to the side, because we kind of touched on it briefly, at least. But I feel like nostalgia also drives these other futures that come out of the tech industry. And the one that comes to mind most of all, is the space billionaires, and their kind of desire to push us into space and have so many of their ideas about space are based on this kind of longing for this kind of past of space travel, the kind of moon landings and stuff like that. But also these ideas about space that come from the past as well. You know, the books that they read as kids about space, the science fiction novels that they read as teenagers. You know, Jeff Bezos, as he was in

college, one of his college professors was the guy who made these ideas about these big space colonies. George O'Neill, I believe his name was, that's why they're called, you know, the O'Neill cylinders. So I wonder what you think about these kind of visions for the future that come from the tech industry that I think we would both recognize as being really bad, but how they are kind of infused with nostalgia as well. That's brilliant. I wish that I had written a little bit more about this in the chapter on escape, because it's such an escapist impulse for the corporate maven to get off the planet. And not only that, but show the rest of the world how we're all going to get off the planet, you know, and not only that, but like, you know, show the rest of the world

how we're all going to get off the planet because we've destroyed it with our pollution or whatever. It's a strange like accepting publicly that global warming is a problem, but then having the most heinous solutions, you know, that just are totally not feasible. And so it's an escapist impulse, number one. And of course, you course, escape and nostalgia sometimes go hand in hand. We see nostalgia sometimes as a kind of a way to escape from the present, its problems and the anxiety and all the information we have to keep up with. And escape is a very normal thing for people to do. People need breaks, obviously. Nobody wants to just work all the time and be faced with the problems of the world all the time but yeah the space billionaire is trying to leave the planet as a as a similar thing to like the well-off able-bodied white guy who builds the cabin in the woods and leaves society behind to go and live off the land of pure existence or more true existence but then yeah there's also uh this weird kind of nostalgia for like the days of going to space, you know, like the late 1960s or even the 1950s and dreaming of going to space, Ray Bradbury kind of look at the sky and feel like how small you are in the face of it all. But it's at what cost, ultimately, with these billionaires?

And also, how flimsy for them to... When Bezos left the planet and came back down, I was just like, give me a break. We've already done this. And we did it with NASA in 1969, without smartphones. And certainly without the existence of Amazon. It's almost like, let's do it one more time, second time around, this time corporately done. And it seems self-serving. I mean, obviously it is. So an escapist impulse, absolutely. And just kind of sickening ultimately. Yeah. You know, there's so much I could say about that. The links to the past, you know, how that was also kind of like the early days of Silicon Valley,

this really kind of conservative culture as they're working on the aviation and all this stuff as well. You know, I think I think it's fascinating. But anyway, you know, besides that kind of negative, I think use of nostalgia to think about the future, there's also a potential positive use, right? I think we often associate nostalgia with conservatism, with backward thinking, with this kind of desire for this idealized past that is actually a really negative past. Like, you know, when we think about the kind of ideal past of, say, Donald Trump, or this kind of thinking about, you know, as you talk about in the book, you know, this kind of Southern past as what it was like, you know, during slave times or whatnot, kind of brushing off the negatives of that. But there's also the potential to use nostalgia in a positive way to kind of create

a hope for the future for a better future. That kind of escapes the kind of negativity of the present, the crises of the present, as we talked about earlier. So how do you see that positive nostalgia and its kind of use to encourage this kind of different vision of the future, this kind of hope for the future? Well, when you look at the history of nostalgia, you could see that there are a number of groups of people who use it in different ways. And that you're right, I argue this in the book, that what we tend to think of as nostalgia and what we think of it as being reactionary and stuck in the past and even destructive, nationalistic perhaps, is really just a product of how it's been used at least very recently as well. Nostalgia way back in the

day was considered a disease when people were feeling normal, like bouts of homesickness for leaving home, whether that meant they were drafted into service and these giant armies or whatnot, and naturally like were homesick, they didn't want to go fight, they didn't want to die for their country. You had like the medical establishment of the 18th and 19th century, essentially trying to medicalize away these feelings and to sort of, in a way, kind of illegitimize them as being just a natural human response to coercion or something like that. And so it's been experienced in a variety of different ways by different people, but it's only really in the past several decades that it's been taken up in marketing and advertising circles by corporate

entities and, of course, also by politicians. And on our end, watching years and years of nostalgia kind of being thrown in our face over and over again by things like Disney or like Donald Trump makes us very skeptical of it. But ultimately, this is still a human emotion. And I think that I have to start there with defining it as an emotion because other people might not. They may see it as a trick or a gimmick or what have your advertising principle, advertising strategy maybe. But I see it as an emotion, which means that different people can

direct it, shape it in a variety of different ways. I do think that nostalgia for a past that may not even be real, but one that we can imagine as being egalitarian, democratic, not nearly as penetrated by capital, is actually one way that we can orient ourselves to a future where these things, we might be able to fight for them to come into being. So I'm hesitant when people say like, yeah, we should forget the nostalgia for the past. It's all about moving towards the future. Well, yeah, that's true. But I also don't want to get caught in this like blatant progress narrative trap because that's the same thing that Silicon Valley and big tech loves to do. They want to be future oriented in the way that they talk we might do that is to think about an alternative to the present. It might not even have really existed. It might be a past that only exists

in our mind because plenty of people know the past was a terrible time. So I think that that's an important emotional resource. And I think that's one that actually pairs well with hope. I don't know anymore if we can think about the future without having a little bit of longing for a time that wasn't, but that was, especially when we're facing the problems of the future that seem every year to get worse and more grim. It would be very hard for me to muster up the hope. I mean, be very hard for me to muster up the hope. I mean, it is hard for me to muster up the hope for a future without having to rely or pull from some other kinds of emotional resources. And I think that that's kind of what we're going to have to learn how to do over the next several years, especially as whatever reactionary leader is

waiting in the wings to show up for, at least in the United States, the 2024 election, but before then even. And that person is probably also going to speak the language of nostalgia. And you know what? Honestly, the emotion is too strong. We shouldn't let them get away with that. Are there any examples of the positive nostalgia or kind of the hope from the past that stand out to you? I'll say for me, I find hope in thinking back to the Paris Commune and the Spanish Revolution and times like that, even though they were both brutally crushed. But in the present, I think we also see a really good example of that through the Green New Deal and kind of the hearkening back to the New Deal times, right? So are there any examples that stand out for you? The Green New Deal is a great example. We know that conservatives, especially in the West

and in the United States, tend to speak the language of nostalgia. And yet even the Green New Deal, which is a blatant nostalgic appeal to the New Deal era, hasn't really worked. And of course, there are also plenty of liberals who also are not down with the Green New Deal. But that is a nostalgic appeal. You're absolutely right. I think having nostalgia for collective action and for organization, organized protest, I mean, nobody would, and I certainly wouldn't do this, obviously, nobody would advocate for longing for the conditions that caused those groups to get together to protest. But the collective spirit of coming together and daring to do something about it, even when it gets crushed, there's certainly a lot of nostalgia for Occupy Wall Street.

There's even perhaps a nostalgia for a year ago during the protests after George Floyd was murdered, where people came together and signaled their support and hit the streets and fought in ways that we just haven't really seen in recent memory, in a pandemic, no less, right? Logging for that kind of collective action, I think is crucial. Absolutely. And there are a number of scholars who have written about this as well. Nishat Shahani has also argued about, you know, they wrote this book called queer retro sexualities and it's great.

It's about how for a lot of queer folks, the past is traumatic. It's like marked by persecution, but it's also this shared past. And it's got all these examples of like queer collectives coming together to like subvert and encounter like normative powers that be. You know, also Bidia Ahad-Lagarde has got this excellent book on Afro nostalgia about black communities and their experience of like nostalgic good feelings for times of community in their own past. And there's plenty of examples of different groups who use this emotion in ways that are completely opposite of something like Disney or Donald Trump.

And yet, because that stuff just is really provocative and it rides the algorithmic waves well, it's just in our face. And I'm just determined to, or at least I hope the book will try to spread this idea that this is a legitimate emotion, often weaponized, but not essentially reactionary. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I think the examples that you're providing there also illustrate kind of a point that you made earlier about how these histories that are recycled through the nostalgia are often kind of the official histories, the ones that are accepted, the ones that don't challenge power. But then you

can also use nostalgia to kind of bring back these histories from the past that do have that kind of the official histories, the ones that are accepted, the ones that don't challenge power. But then you can also use nostalgia to kind of bring back these histories from the past that do have that kind of effect. Right. So Grafton, it was great to speak to you again to talk about how, you know, nostalgia is everywhere. It's not necessarily bad or good. We can use it for both. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, Paris. Grafton Tanner is the author of The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, The Politics of Nostalgia,

and you can find out more information about that in the show notes. You can follow Grafton on Twitter at at Grafton Tanner. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.