Tech Won't Save Us - How Nostalgia Serves Corporate Power w/ Grafton Tanner

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Grafton Tanner to discuss how social media constantly resurfaces the past, why film and television uses nostalgia to keep us engaged, and whether there’s a way to wield nostalgia in pursuit of a better world.Grafton Tanner is the author of “The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech” and “Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts.” Grafton is also writing  “The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia” for Repeater Books, due out in October 2021. Follow Grafton on Twitter as @GraftonTanner.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 wrote about consolidation in the film and television industries.Disney lobbied to extend copyright terms and what it might mean when Mickey Mouse goes into the public domain.George Lucas describes how commercialism limits what kind of movies can be made (17:18-18:40).Hollywood is using AI to help decide which films get made.A Harry Potter television series is in early development at HBO Max.Books mentioned in this episode: “The Future of Nostalgia” by Svetlana Boym, “New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future” by James Bridle, “Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization” by Alexander Galloway, “The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media” by Kate Eichhorn, “Radical Nostalgia: Spanish Civil War Commemoration in America” by Peter Glazer, and “Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia” by Alastair Bonnett.Movies and shows mentioned in this episode: Ready Player One, San Junipero (Black Mirror), eXistenZ, The Matrix, and The Merchants of Cool.Support the show

That idea of going back and finally being able to reach that utopia in the past actually helps to sell products and ideas very well. Buy this thing and you too might be able to go back to the past. 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 Circle of the Snake, Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech, and Babbling Corpse, Vaporwave, and the Commodification of Ghosts. He's also writing another book for Repeater Books that will come out in October 2021 called The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, The Politics of Nostalgia. And you can obviously find links for more information in the show notes.

Our conversation today is guided by Grafton's latest book, The Circle of the Snake. nostalgia seems more and more common in modern society, in our politics, and in particular how technology and social media, streaming services, things like that are presenting us with content that will make us nostalgic more often and kind of trigger that emotional nostalgic response. We dive into how that works, but also the implications of that, what it means for our society and how we think about the technologies that we use and whether they are producing the kind of outcomes that we want to see. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find more information about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like the show, please 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 enjoy it. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show every week, you can join supporters like Christopher Tialve, Chris Newfield, and John Rudnick by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter. I recently put in the order for the stickers

for five and $10 patrons. So hopefully I'll receive those in early February and then I can prepare them to ship out. But just keep in mind that the posts in the United States and Canada have been delayed very frequently because of COVID-19. So if they don't arrive until mid-February, don't be surprised about that. But I'll keep you updated with posts on the Patreon page to let you know when they arrive and when they're going to ship out. So thanks for listening and enjoy the conversation. Grafton, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It's great to chat. You have this great new book out looking at nostalgia and its relationship to

technology, you know, particularly the new digital technologies, the social media, the streaming services that we're all dealing with today. To start, I want us to get an idea of why nostalgia seems to be so ever-present today. You know, we live in an era where nostalgia seems to be on overdrive. We have political movements that want to revive aspects of an idealized past. Our media is full of franchises that have been revived or new tales that are set in particular parts of history that we consider to be interesting or appealing. And there's this general idea that it's difficult to imagine some kind of future beyond what we live in right now.

So what is driving this nostalgia for the past in your view? Well, nostalgia tends to show up during unstable periods and shows up in the body during unstable periods in your life. I mean, that could be anything from going to school and not wanting to be in school as a young person or like having a really dead-end job or having a particularly excruciating stay in a hospital or incarcerated or any time when you are undergoing a stressful period and enduring some kind of trauma. Scaled to the social level, nostalgia shows up in traumatic and unstable periods. So before the COVID-19 pandemic, and really before Trump too, the last time we saw a major, you might consider like outbreak, if you will, of nostalgia was in the wake of like the

2008 economic collapse, Great Recession. But then also that sort of gets weaponized by Trump with Make America Great Again. And it hasn't really seemed to go away, really. It has stuck around since. But it's not like this is the only nostalgia outbreak we've ever had. Nostalgia showed up in the wake of mass industrialization, showed up after World War II. But it only really showed up for the first time. Technically, the name nostalgia shows up in 1688. And before then, there's no name for it. We cannot say with any certainty whether anyone before 1688 actually felt nostalgic because there was no word. And we know emotions as not only things that we feel, but things that we give a name to.

And without the name, it just stays locked up in the body, if you will. But since then, yeah, we've had these moments in history where nostalgia tends to peak. And it's almost kind of like a snowball down a hill at this point. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger in the 21st century. And in my view, there are a few major 21st century crises that all kind of concatenate and have seemed to just gotten worse over time. I like to trace it back to 9-11. It's like all roads lead back to September 11th, that being a major moment when nostalgia not only shows up in the aftermath of something like that, but almost a patriotic kind of nostalgia in the United States, at least, but also the West,

sort of coming together against terror. And then Zizek calls it the one-two punch of history. You've got 9-11 and then the Great Recession a few years later. And then, like I said, Trump, and now the COVID-19 pandemic, just even a few weeks into the lockdowns in March 2020, you've got all these articles coming out about how people were immediately nostalgic for a time before lockdown and were indulging in watching old movies and things like this. And so anytime you're going to be living through major traumas, major historical moments that make a lot of people suffer in the process, you're bound to have a lot of nostalgia showing up and it'll show up in politics. You'll have different leaders, some of them who maybe don't have the best interests in

mind, maybe have ideals that don't align with democracy, try to utilize it to garner votes. You'll see it show up in advertisement campaigns, try to get people to buy things. So it ends up being this tricky emotion that's both like an ailment of society, if you will, and also like the ally that gets you through the bad times. Outlining it in that way you through the bad times. Outlining it in that way and identifying the different aspects of it that are making nostalgia so much more common, I guess, today or something that people are reaching for so much more really helps to illustrate just some of the broader issues that we're dealing with here, right?

And again, before we get into the tech side of this i just want to illustrate what the potential negative implications of all this nostalgia are because one of the things that stood out to me was how you described that these visions of the past are not accurate reflections of these past times right a lot of the dark aspects are kind of whitewashed out of there. In some cases, the kind of visions that we have of different eras of the past or different times in the past are the result of media that are made by corporations that want us to see the past in a certain way that works in their interest. So can you expand on how that works, how our visions of the past are not actually how the past works and how by desiring them so much, we're actually missing the potential dark sides and how what we want so much wasn't all great.

And not only missing the darker chapters of history, but also missing the possibilities that the past can give us to help imagine a better future. The negative implications of nostalgia are kind of the negative implications for any emotion. I like to compare it with anger, which is something that it's an emotion that's a little simpler. We sort of know the step-by-step process a little better of nostalgia, how it shows up in the body and how it's acted out, what the circuit looks like when you feel anger and then how you act on it. And nostalgia is a little trickier. But both of them, they're two emotions that we're familiar with today in a mediated world

of a lot of division and what have you. But like anger, for example, negative implications of anger would be using it in an antisocial, like an unproductive way. So like if I were to suddenly get mad at you or anybody and just like blow up at someone, a partner or a friend or family member in a way that's totally uncalled for and mean, that could be the end of the relationship, right? And that would not be what we need, you know? But then like a productive usage of anger is like, I always use my own work as an example. Like A lot of my writing comes from a

position of dissatisfaction. You could even call it anger at status quo, what capitalism has wrought, all of this stuff. And so we don't want to get rid of anger necessarily. We just want to kind of direct its flows a little better. We don't want to suppress emotion at all. It's not like you want to get rid of it out of politics. You just want to ask the question, are these the right emotions for people or are we being manipulated in some way? Same thing with nostalgia. Svetlana Boim, she was a scholar of nostalgia, wrote a book, came out in 2000 called The Future of Nostalgia, probably the book to read to understand this emotion. I think she got it right. She split nostalgia into two different kinds. She said there's restorative nostalgia, which is trying to restore the past as it was, I

say in quotation marks, trying to restore a version of the past that might buttress some kind of interests. Going back to an origin point that's been hidden in the past, it's bound up with images of the homeland and trying to protect that. Then there's reflective nostalgia, which is a little more ironic, a little more playful, interested more in the ache side of nostalgia than the home side. And over the past 20 years, really since the start of the 21st century, the more ironic, reflective, I shouldn't say totally ironic because irony can even show up in the restorative strain

if you will but just the more like you know aware of itself nostalgia has kind of been edged out by this this restorative variant of it that has made people desire a return to the past by any means necessary one because things are kind of so unbearable in the present. But two, because that idea of going back and finally being able to reach that utopia in the past. Endorse this candidate. Now we can go back to the past. But that restorative strain tends to misrepresent the past as it was. And we can't ever remember the past. It's always a misrepresentation. Remembering is misremembering, essentially. But we also have to understand that what's, I guess, like the mechanisms behind the nostalgic rhetoric might not have people's best interest in mind. I feel like one interesting aspect of that as well is that when we look back at the past in these ways, it's not even like we're looking at one particular point in history that is kind of interesting to everyone or that everyone wants to go back to, right? Like, as you say, with

political candidates, you know, what we've seen recently is kind of Donald Trump hearkening back pretty far, I guess we would say maybe like 1950s or something like that, this time where America is great. Whereas, say, a Joe Biden is saying, we just want to go back to like pre-Trump, right? When everything was great before then. But then we look at our media, and we have things like Stranger Things or whatever, going back to like the 1980s. And the 1980s is like this great time that we are really interested in apparently. And then, you know, we just have other ones that are looking for like a pre 9-11 time. Or I've even seen that apparently like Gen Z or whatever is interested in like the early 2000s when, you know, people didn't have phones as much or the phones were much more basic. So it's not even like everyone has the same reference point. There's all of these different periods that people can be nostalgic for and all of these different things that they're pulling from them that ignores so much more of what was going on in those times. My favorite punching bag with this is Ready Player One, like a film like this where they recognize that everybody's looking back, but we're not always, we're not looking at the same history. So we'll put all of it

in one movie, and then you can kind of take your pick. That's the fantasy of the Oasis, the technology in the film, the virtual technology. That's the fantasy of it is that, you know, anyone can play the game, put the headset on and go into the VR world and live in whatever way they want. Same thing shows up in the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror, which is great in a lot of ways, but also buttresses this idea that VR is the answer. It answers all the questions, including the human desire to just escape into whatever popular culture of the past they want to. And yes, all those ones you just mentioned, those examples, you know,

one thing they all have in common, no smartphones. Pre the technology that is making everything so bad today. Obviously I want to get further into technology, but you did bring up VR. So I feel like digging into that briefly before we get to, you know, the bigger picture of what technologies and smartphones and social media and all that are doing. And one thing I find really interesting about that is how

even when all of these issues with social media is kind of blowing up and coming to the fore, virtual reality, I feel like is still kind of being presented as the way out of that where more authentic communities will be able to be formed in the digital space or whatnot, that can potentially avoid some of these issues that we've seen with like social media, like websites like Facebook and Twitter and whatnot, because there will be more kind of interaction through the digital. But I wonder what you make of that, because it seems like there are always these narratives about how technology is going to allow us to have these kind of really idealized experiences. But then over time, because we're relying on corporations to deliver these things,

and we're just believing that they will, for some reason, deliver them in a positive way that is socially beneficial rather than beneficial to themselves and their profit margins and their shareholders, that what actually ends up being produced by those systems and those structures never actually reflects the kind of idealized visions that are put forward in the early days of these technologies or whatever. I always think about the films about virtual reality that critique it, you know, and that like Existence by Cronenberg or even The Matrix, you know, and I always ask, do these technocrats, have they seen these movies? Because they seem to run counter to that ideology that we're all kind of waiting for that virtual reality technology that is sort

of like the smartphone version of VR where it's relatively affordable and easy to use. And then once we have it, then now we're living in the future. And I'm like, read some Philip K. Dick. Don't you understand that it doesn't work like that? But that isn't to say that human beings are just like, you know, greedy, nasty, brutish, brutish, whatever, and we're given this technology, we don't know how to use it. It's not necessarily that. It is also the case that virtual reality, a VR kind of invention that would be affordable and easy to use, can only really exist with the help of exploited workers. Who's going to moderate these things? We have problems with moderators now on Facebook. Can you imagine Ready Player One? What's the environmental cost? At the end of San Junipero, there's this shot of the server farms or wherever where people get to live forever their consciousness. That has an impact on the environment. I love James Bridle's book, New Dark Age, because he refuses to give up his critique of the cloud,

which is nothing like a cloud. It's made up of cables and they run under the ocean and whatever. Understanding that material reality behind the dream of virtual reality also means understanding the materiality of human beings. In Catherine Hales' writing about this in the 90s, she said, you can't just separate the data of humans from the body of humans and take that data and just insert it into a computer somewhere because the data is the body and the body is the data. There's no soul you can just kind of peel off and put in the machine. So it'll never be like that. But I fear that with greater deregulation of these tech companies, they'll try to create something that at the very least will make them very wealthy at the expense of a lot of people. Every so often this news will come out that one of the big tech companies, they've got a new proto virtual reality or augmented reality device. And I always say like, look, it's clunky now and it's probably super expensive, but my fear is, you know, if you give it time

that they'll just get better at it. Absolutely. I think it's a real worry. Like VR and AR are presented as like providing these kinds of enhancements. AR in particular, I think is really worrying to me, especially when you think about how it can be positioned as kind of like offering this like

different layer or these different layers on the city and the personal experience. That's something that's worrying to me. And I find it interesting that you talked about the environmental costs and kind of the material impacts of all of these technologies that are so often dismissed and ignored and don't make it into kind of the public discourse about everything that's going on here. You talk about the potential impact of VR if that becomes like a major thing. But I think we already see that today with how the potential impact of like game streaming, which is just coming on stream could be really huge, and how it's already ignored with things like Netflix, Amazon Prime,

like these video streaming services that have massive footprints. But that aspect of it is kind of downplayed because the convenience is so much more attractive, right? Yeah. And then you've got a decade plus of this sort of marketing by way of ideological dissemination that technology is the gift from above and it gets reinforced in certain metaphors like the cloud. But also it got reinforced early on with figures like Steve Jobs dressing up in a certain way, getting on a stage, presenting himself almost as this kind of like wizard of sorts and this all-knowing superhuman or whatnot, and speaking in a way that was like, we've now reached a revelation in technology,

and here it is, the great gift. And that's spawning the model of the TED Talk, which these kinds of speeches all operate in the same way. And years and years of that, especially when they talk about tech, ends up teaching society certain things. And so absolutely that the stuff that's hard sometimes to talk about and can itself sort of contribute to a kind of gentrification of the environment by showing people what it might be like to go out in an area of the city and have a good time. But really, it's an area of the city that's been sort of left behind by capitalism sort of draining everything out of it or whatever. But in an augmented reality sort of way, you could go and have a good time and everything looks nice and neat instead of like it's been beat up by capitalism. Absolutely. And I think what you're talking about there with Steve Jobs

and these kind of ideas of technology that have kind of filtered into the public consciousness over a long time now also make it more difficult to see those kind of downsides, right? And so in your book, you talk about how technology is one of the aspects that is causing this resurgence in nostalgia. So what role do you see technology playing in kind of encouraging this nostalgia? There's a few ways that nostalgia is connected to digital technology. One of those ways is that in the kind of neoliberal control society that we're in, these devices function well as things that keep us always on. Always on the clock, always working, whether we're actually working for a company or we're doing the unpaid labor of social media networking or whatnot, always working. And nostalgia as an emotion tends to show up in people who are always on in a sense and have lost, seem to have like lost control of their lives, if you will. Like if you feel like you have lost some

kind of control over your life, then nostalgia tends to show up. Okay. So if you're always on, always marketing, always working, nostalgia is a byproduct of that. The internet is also a giant archive. And with just a few clicks, we could pretty much look up anything we want. We don't even have to look anything up. I could be scrolling through Instagram and then suddenly come across a post about something from my childhood. I don't know, like an old commercial from my childhood or a toy or something that I had. If it just happens to show up on Twitter or Instagram, suddenly I feel nostalgia. It's there. I wasn't even looking for it. But if I wanted to go looking for it, it's pretty easy to do. You could pretty much look up any kind of pop culture from the

past few decades. It don't matter how ephemeral it might have been, you could pretty much find it. So that's the other way that nostalgia gets connected to tech. And then the final connection between nostalgia and tech is that increasingly, the content that we consume, that we're recommended to consume through Spotify, Netflix, all these streaming services, the way that they work to try to predict your taste, if you will, is to compare a taste profile that you build up by constantly interacting with these platforms, and they scrape the data from what you look up and what you search. And then they compare that information to other people who are looking up similar things and then recommend you pretty much the same thing.

And Alex Galloway wrote about this probably like in the mid 2000s in a book called Protocol, which I think is an excellent introduction to understanding kind of how this process works. And he says, you know, in this system of comparing in order to predict what your taste might be, there's no new information that really gets added. It's really all just kind of like information that's bouncing around in this closed system, creating this sort of feedback loop. Well, within that system, the same stuff sort of gets recommended over and over again. If you're already stressed and anxious from living in the world that we live in, and you want to just check out and listen to some 80s music, and you happen

to look up some 80s music, well, Spotify is going to start recommending more 80s music to you. Not only going to recommend that, but they're going to recommend new music that sounds like the 80s. Algorithms are able to pick up on certain musical objects associated with that sound, and then they find it over here. It might have been made last year, but then suddenly it gets recommended to you. Well, if I'm a musician, for example, and I want to get my music heard and possibly picked up by these algorithms, I may make music that kind of sounds like that. So there's this process between content creation and recommendation that ends up trapping listeners and consumers in a kind of feedback loop. And from that process is a continual thirst for kind of derivatives of the same thing.

That's a perfect recipe for nostalgia. So that's sort of the connection points. And there's also stuff with like Easter eggs, which sort of Easter egg marketing that kind of works in the very same way. Because it's all about getting your attention. If I could grab your attention and hold it, and nostalgia tends to hold people's attention well, and if I could show you a Google Doodle or a movie or a TV show that's got tons of little references in it, then I know that you're going to

be watching it and you're going to want more of it. So those are kind of a few of the ways that nostalgia and digital technology are sort of connected. Yeah, I think there are so many fascinating points in there. One thing that came to mind as you were describing how the algorithms just kind of keep recommending the same sort of things that you're interested in and can have that effect to kind of narrow the scope then of what gets created. I remember a clip, I think it was on a show with Charlie Rose, that kind of like interviewer, I can't remember what network he was on. I'm pretty sure he was taken down by me to a few years ago. He was talking with George Lucas, and asking about kind of like the process of filmmaking, right. And George Lucas was saying

that, like, there was this idea that in the USSR, filmmakers or artists were really restricted in terms of what they could make, right? But his argument was actually he knew a number of Russian filmmakers. And while they were constrained in terms of their ability to criticize the government, other than that, things were open and they could kind of do what they wanted with their films. And so George Lucas said that what was different in the United States was that you could criticize

the government, but there was this line of commercialism that you had to stick to. Your film had to be able to generate revenue. And he said that over time, that window of commercialism continually narrows. And so he said the Russian filmmakers that he knew at the time had like already a wider range of kind of artistic opportunity available to them. They couldn't criticize the government, but other than that, things were good to go. But in the United States at the time, he was talking about, you know, when he made his first film, it was already limited. But then as he made his future films, it was limited even further. And what it sounds like is that, you know, this trend has continued to the point where as long as we're relying on algorithms and technology to determine what films or art

might be commercial and might produce a return, that window is even further narrowing. So, you know, the kind of possibilities for what can be made or funded, obviously, you know, people can make things independently or, you know, not be interested in turning a profit. But, you know, the big media industries are interested in those things. And so that means that the range of opportunity, the range of artistic creation, it seems like is further limited by these incentives. Absolutely. And before the rise of, you rise of outsourcing pretty much everything, including the creation of art and content to digital algorithms, we had what you might consider broader cultural algorithms. A movie in the 1970s with a certain budget is only going to

get made if there's an understanding that it's going to sell well. And it started this process of trying to figure out what was cool and what was in and what people would respond to. And this was something I think Doug Rushkoff wrote about years and years ago, the merchants of cool, like trying to figure out what is going to sell. Well, instead of doing that kind of human labor, suddenly now we have these algorithms that could kind of, maybe not do it entirely, but they could kind of work with humans and relieve of some of that burden. There's that company, what's it called? Epigogix, I think, that uses an algorithm to determine whether or not certain scripts are going to, certain film scripts are going to be really successful. And they'll run some old classic films that we all know and love and

are nostalgic for, and they'll run it through the algorithm and we all know and love and are nostalgic for, and they'll run it through the algorithm and it's like, will not be successful. Well, that was Casablanca and it's obviously like one of the American titans of film. And so there's an idea that these processes can better model what is going to work and what's going to be a hit and what's not. And the more that that process gets outsourced to them, then yes, Lucas is right. Those constraints get tighter. And it sort of ends up foreclosing the possibility of having these unpredictable hits that you never really... Maybe you wagered on it, you made the bet that this artist was going to get big, and then they did, or they had a number one hit and some money got made. But you would have never really known that if you compared it to a bunch of data that existed in the past about certain music or songs or whatnot.

And then the end result is that we have definitely a narrowing window of options at the mainstream level. You're right. I make music and it's nowhere near that mainstream level. Of course, I'd love to make a profit off it, but that's just not the way it is. But if you wanted to get into that upper echelon of music creation, for example, where that's your full-time job, the options are limited. There isn't much you can do, even though it might feel like you can't. I can hire it a digital audio workstation and I can get some recording gear and make music in my house. And suddenly it feels like, wow, don't you remember the old days when you had to get signed to a major label? Now we don't have to do that anymore. Well, yes, you do. It's still that exact same thing. Just because you're able to make it

at home in a home studio doesn't mean that you're ever going to make a living. At the very least, you won't have any kind of stable income, any sort of stability with your music creation as independent artists. Your only hope is really to go viral. And that's sort of the model that we're working with now with most, at least in terms of music, is trying to ride an algorithmic wave for a little while and hoping that might generate income. Beyond that, it's tightening constraints. Absolutely. I think the kind of desire for or need for virality is kind of baked into so much of just so much of like the media properties that are being produced. And they're even kind of designed in a way to kind of drive that conversation. So for a while, they can be viral, right. And I think one other aspect

of what you described, you know, in relation to media, and what these processes are doing to media is, you know, there's already this trend when we're looking at what streaming is doing, where these media companies are increasingly further consolidating, further moving into monopolies and putting more money into major intellectual property, major franchises that people are already familiar with, and then just trying to keep them within those worlds. So naturally, Marvel is, I think, the best example of this. We've had more than a decade now of these films coming continually. And now there's television shows and things as well. And now Disney is trying to replicate this process with Star Wars, again, pulling from

that nostalgia from the 70s, from George Lucas, and now trying to really profit from that in a major way by just kind of surrounding you by this world. It looks like HBO is bringing back Harry Potter, like a television series, and they already have the film series that's coming out. So I feel like when we look at what's happening with media, obviously there is stuff being made that's not part of these franchises that is just designed to kind of keep people watching on these streaming services. But it seems like there's also this kind of incentive to kind of enclose people within these major franchises and just keep people's attention focused on those, I guess, to distract from what's going on in the real world and how difficult the actual conditions of material reality are today? Well, you know, I have this theory that this kind of like Marvel, Harry Potter,

I didn't know that about the Harry Potter series, by the way. That's, oh my gosh, well, here we are. Marvel, Star Wars, whatever. The franchise building is essentially world building. It is already itself a kind of virtual reality. It's dizzying the amount of information that you could learn about the Star Wars universe. And it was like this before. It was like this in the 90s. There were all the novelizations. It was already hard to keep up with back then. But it's even more so now. And it's the same way with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There are podcasts that debate and talk about this right now. I'm outside that world. I'm interested in it.

I study it. One of these days, I'm going to sit down and watch all those Marvel films just in order to be able to advance, just to sharpen the critique a little more maybe. But it is itself a kind of world building in a way. It almost is less like creating films and like trying to build a virtual realm without really doing it and to be able to live within it and talk about it. And it has its own laws and politics and what have you. There is a process from consolidation of media to nostalgia. There's an easy line you can draw there. One of the things we can look at

is Disney's constant copyright extension law lobbying in order to keep Mickey Mouse, but the rest of their popular works once they fall out of copyright, to keep them out of the public domain so that they're not remixed, so that they're not appropriated by maybe the public, but so that they don't ever die either. We're going to be entertained by these things possibly forever otherwise. Disney's copyright law, I believe, is up in 2023. They'll probably lobby for an extension again. Old ideas need to die out. They just need to. But Disney is really good at freezing culture by not letting that happen. It'll be the same with Marvel, Star Wars, and what have you.

And all that means is constant nostalgia mining and them knowing that if they keep building the franchise, i.e. keep building the world, then people will continue to consume these ideas. And that's a problem, I think. I think that's a really interesting way to frame it. Because, you know, just for listeners who aren't aware, copyright terms used to be much shorter. Like on published works, it used to be 14 years. And then you could get an extension of another 14 years, and then it would be in the public domain. And, you know, anyone could reproduce it or do whatever they wanted with it, right. And now some of these copyright terms are like on published works, it's the life of the author. So however long the author lives plus

another 75 years after that. And I think on things that are owned by corporations, it's something like 90 years or so. So like these are really long copyright terms. And so naturally, there is a desire to keep kind of exploiting these properties, right? As you say, it's the same reason that Disney has pushed for copyright term extensions to keep Mickey Mouse under copyright, so that couldn't go into the public domain and that other people couldn't use it. profiting off of these characters and worlds that already exist and not needing to invest in or create or imagine new worlds because people are already interested in and invested in these ones and only the corporation can exploit it and make money off of it. So why kind of introduce something new when this is already working? I mean, I feel like they're going to consolidate into like the one last mega corporation, right? Like the final media conglomerate. And unless something is done to stop that, I don't think you'll ever see at the mainstream major streaming service kind of level an end to this kind of nostalgia baiting. And with each year, we see more of these films get

rebooted. And when we say that they get rebooted, they really just are trying to turn them into a franchise. They're trying to turn them into its own world with its rules and what have you. And so unless something is done to sort of stop that from happening, this is how it's going to be, I think, for the foreseeable future. And you know what? People will continue watching. They'll want to consume this stuff because during the worst parts of the pandemic, one thing I wanted to do was just zone out and just watch something dumb and terrible on TV because the world was just really bad. So there again, another feedback loop between hostile climate, collapsed future, and one economic problem after the other. And then this nostalgic media that's offered on tap by these major corporations who are really good at sort of freezing culture. Absolutely. So obviously, that's kind of the media side of this. We've seen consolidation in the film and television industries, in the arts for a long time. And it seems like technology is

just further accelerating that process. But obviously, you talk about social media as well, right? And what that is doing and how that is making us nostalgic and focused on the past and constantly seeing the past, right? Because it keeps bringing the past back into our feeds and our timelines. Remember this. So what do you make of how social media kind of encourages us to be nostalgic and kind of has nostalgia just built into kind of its design, I guess? I like to go back to like the early days of Instagram,

which was sort of like the fount from which the nostalgia kind of flowed. Early Instagram, as you probably remember, was an app in which you could take the terrible photos that you took on your phone. The camera wasn't very good. You could take these photos and bad lighting in the everyday world, and you can put a kind of filter on it that would cover up some of the bad quality with this analog sort of haze. It was an artistic solution to a practical problem, which was that nobody really could take good photos in like 2010 on their phones. So now we have this app to make, not only to make us look good and to make, you know, life that we happen to capture look better,

but also to make the quality look a little better or less bad. Instagram doesn't function that way much anymore. I still follow people who like to coat their stuff in tons of filters and whatnot, but it's not necessarily what it's for. And some of that has to do with the fact that the cameras of quality is a little better now. And so we don't feel like we need to do that. But that early 2010 sort of trend on Instagram dovetailing with a time of intense nostalgia coming from the economic collapse and my generation essentially graduated from college, moving back home with their parents, perhaps, like being out of jobs, feeling kind of adrift. All of that together was a major engine for nostalgia. and in the present day, social media, because it allows people to take moments and fix them in kind of a feed that you can then scroll down and go back in time, so to speak.

It doesn't take very long for a person who may be more prone to nostalgia than others to go back to January 2020 when you posted that photo out with friends and feel the nostalgia for time before COVID just a few months ago. So we could do that. We could go back and see how we used to look, who we used to hang out with, who we used to date. And suddenly things that maybe we could have forgotten are just always here sort of reminding us. This is something Kate Eichhorn has written about. She has a book called The End of Forgetting about growing up with social media and young people who, by the time they maybe get a smartphone at whatever age they get it, 10,

four, whatever, they've got years and years of their parents posting their entire lives on social media. Well, they just pick up where that left off and they then start to document their own lives for years. And it creates this constant past that they then have to sort of carry with them if they want to try to leave that behind and maybe go to college or go and work in a way where they can go, ah, I used to do this in high school when I was young. I'm going to leave that behind. I'm going to experiment and be somebody different. It's increasingly hard to do that when you have this data trail behind you. And so because of that, the past is continually in our face.

And it's not only our individual past, it's also the major historical moments. There were all these articles that came out at the end of the 2010s talking about how it felt like the 2010s didn't happen. What was the narrative? What was the beginning, the middle, and the end? And I do firmly believe that one reason for that is because there was this push to historicize events as soon as they happen. Tiny little micro events, punctuated moments to turn them into capital E events. Something would happen and the news media

would jump in and say, well, how is history going to remember this? Constant obsession with trying to lock in a memory so that we don't have to do the memory work later on if we locked it in incorrectly. And so turning these things into major events did the opposite effect. It didn't make things easier to remember, it made it harder to remember them. Two examples that come to mind, Penguin's decision to release Morrissey's autobiography on its classics imprint was an attempt to try to quickly historicize something, to make it classic. Barack Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize less than a year into his presidency, which later on the Nobel, I think it was the secretary said that he wished they hadn't done that. An immediate historicization, this is history. And when you do

that over and over again for a decade, and you look back, there's nothing to grasp onto. So it's not only nostalgia for some kind of stable temporality, it's also just feeling that something has happened to time and the way that we understand and measure it, thanks to, in part, to social media. It also made me think of what you wrote about canonization and this idea of the canon, right? Because as we were talking about with these media properties, the canon is kind of the official story. So it's the official story of what happened in Star Wars and Disney is writing that, but fans also have their own version of events, which isn't canon, right?

But in the book, you also talk about how there's also kind of this canon of real world history that is kind of set by people in power. And it's a version of our history that kind of serves their interests over our own. And I wonder if we also kind of make our own canon of our own history through the curation of our lives through social media. And then part of the effect of this that you would see with the official history is that then when we look back, we forget a lot that has happened. And then when we take that to the individual level, it's like we're looking back at our own histories and we're just seeing these kind of positive moments, these kind of sanitized moments, and maybe forgetting the difficulties and things that arose around can be easily forgotten, especially with the way that we write and curate our history now in a way that we probably didn't so much in the past,

or maybe I'm just canonizing myself here. You're right, because even in Eichhorn's book, The End of Forgetting, she says that. She said, for most of the 20th century, yeah, I mean, we took photos and things like this, but there was nothing like what we have now, the ability to be able to document everything all the time. So that curation, to the extent that it existed in the last century, it larger social history, is that what ended up happening is the more we tried to do that and control history in the past, the worse it got. It really didn't. It has made things a little more worse. You know, there's all this information and data we have on our past now that, like I

said, we can easily look back and get that dose of nostalgia, but also in trying so hard to get a steady canonical narrative of our life or history, it immediately shuts out all these other alternatives and locks or freezes history without allowing it to be flexible and have multiple interpretations. We already see it happening with George W. Bush. The idea is he's not Trump. So now we will do a nostalgic facelift of George W. Bush and maybe he wasn't that bad. That's sort of, this is a thing that we're seeing now. And somebody posted something a few days ago, I think it was Phoebe Bridgers. She said, are these going to be the good old days in the future? And I said, you know, actually, yes, unfortunately, the onus is on us now to essentially do that memory work to ensure that the past isn't

completely lost to nostalgia. I think that's interesting. And it makes me wonder, like, you know, obviously, we've had this conversation about how nostalgia is kind of limiting our ability to remember what actually happened in the past, you know, and how that's just a common thing. You know, it's not just in periods of heightened nostalgia. But I wonder where you think things will or should go from here. Do you think that, you know, we should be looking to kind of break out of this nostalgia? Do you think that only happens if material conditions improve? Where do you think things go from here? There is a common belief that what the world needs is a reality check to wake everyone up from nostalgia. This is argued by several scholars. I disagree because the earliest

people who suffered from nostalgia were migrants, refugees, soldiers, itinerant laborers, students, anyone who was forced to move, forced to do things against their will. And it was a sort of a natural emotional reaction to the construction of large mega armies and the new kind of imperial warfare of the Napoleonic era and industrialization and what have you. So to tell these people, quit feeling nostalgic, is essentially to tell them to just suck it up. And it just isn't there. I think it is important to ask the question, what emotions serve the public the best? In a given time, if nostalgia is not one of those emotions, then we don't have to use it. If a given time anger isn't useful, then we don't have to use that either. But I believe that nostalgia is an emotion. There's some disagreement there of what it actually is, but I think it is an emotion.

And I think that we can't excise it from our body any more than we can get rid of any other emotion. And so being able to figure out how to direct its flows a little better so that it ends up serving people and not power, I think, is sort of the goal. Whether we like it or not, we draw on nostalgia all the time. We have nostalgia for certain social movements of history that stood up against capitalism. It's important and it's a justified emotion to feel. But the idea that we have to kind of get rid of it and embrace the future because nostalgia is so backwards and gross, well, that's the language of the technocrats who say, well,

embrace the future. Here's this new smart product, and I'm going to exploit the environment and tons of people to sell it to you. I don't think we can work in that mindset anymore. I think that what we've witnessed is two decades plus of a certain kind of nostalgia that tends to buttress power and corporate interests. And that if we are going to be looking backwards, then we ought to be doing it in a way that doesn't do that. Actually, in the book I'm writing for Repeater that's out in October 2021, I talk about trying to come up with a form of

radical nostalgia, which is, I'm not the first one to do this. The term has been around. Alistair Bonnet's written about it, Peter Glazer. And you can even try to look back into history at other times of radical yearning and maybe even retroactively call that radical nostalgia. But I think it's a way to try to look back to the past in a way that allows the present to rethink the future in a way that's more equitable for everybody. Other than that, I think it's just very privileged to tell someone to not feel nostalgic. You're going to feel it. You're going to feel it this week. And the whole public's going to feel it at some point. They're feeling it now. And they're not to blame for it. I think that's a good way to describe it. I guess what I'm taking from what you're saying is it's less about telling people, don't be nostalgic for a different period, but recognizing that the constructions of the past that we have serve certain interests. And what we should be doing is kind of fighting those constructions and offering alternative kind of visions of the past that put to the fore

the kind of values and events that, I guess, kind of help to illustrate a way forward that is not serving the existing power structures, but is challenging them and hinting toward a better future that could be built. Yes. And there has to be a future. I mean, there has to be a livable future. It is not enough just to say there's no future. There has to be, because we are here and we have a commitment to each other and not to mention the other interactants on the planet. So there has to be one. You want to have what Audre Lorde calls like a present that can breed futures. And we don't have that.

It's understandable because it's hard to imagine a livable future. Nobody really even knows how the pandemic is going to play out and you know, I mean, and what residual what the residual effects will be, you know, but there has to be one and there has to be a path to and you have to re narrate it, because otherwise, someone's going to do it for us. And it might not, it might not be good. Absolutely. You know, I think that's fascinating. And it really helps to give an indication of hopefully, you know, where we can start to go from here and a focus for reimagining and restating the past in a way that is positive and helps to encourage, you know, more positive movements, right? So Grafton, I really appreciate you taking the

time to chat to kind of give us your insight on nostalgia and the way it works in modern society. Thanks so much. Thank you for having me. I sure appreciate it. Grafton Tanner is the author of The Circle of the Snake, Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech. And you can find 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, a group of left wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find the show at TechWon'tSaveUs. TechWon'tSaveUs 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. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.