TRASHFUTURE - Nostalgia in Place of a Working Society feat. Grafton Tanner

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

The TF cast will be back with a new episode on January 12, but in the meantime please enjoy this interview that Nate conducted with author Grafton Tanner, discussing his new book 'The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech.' Get Grafton's book here: https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/circle-snake If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, Trashutra listeners. The cast is off this week, but we'll be returning with a regular episode on January 12th. In the interim, please enjoy this one-off interview I recorded with author Grafton Tanner. Hello, and welcome to this special Christmas week episode of Trashutra. It's just myself, Nate, and special guest Grafton Tanner, the author of Babbling Corpse, Vaporwave, and the commodification of ghosts. We're here to talk about his new book, Circle of the Snake, Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech. Grafton, how are you doing? I'm doing well. How are you?

Doing well, as well as one can. I live in London, and we had a three-tier system for the level of severity of risk of COVID transmission, and then they decided to just create a new tier out of nowhere. So now we're in tier four, and nobody even knows what it means. But our UK fans know full well that Britain and the United States are neck and neck in mismanaging and just generally being incompetent and corrupt, but somehow the hard-right government maintains support mostly because of deranged boomer Facebook and WhatsApp groups. And that is, in many ways, relevant to the topic at hand, because I have just finished reading Circle of the Snake, which, as I understand it, and of course I'm open to being

correct here, of course. Your thesis is that basically in the modern age of neoliberalism and alienation from labor, Big Tech has provided an outlet for people to escape into nostalgia, which has become an imagined sort of nostalgic utopia, creating an imaginary past. But that imaginary past has also yielded political ramifications of people coalescing around extremist rewing ideas. But even beyond the political, it also has managed to bleed over into the way in which entertainment is produced and consumed. Yes. That is, honestly, I probably couldn't say it any better. I think that's it. So let me ask you this question. You first wrote a book about vaporwave,

and I think an entry point into this would be, for me at least, I encountered vaporwave probably later than you did, but when I started to encounter it, I saw the appeal of it being, you know, I'm 36, so I can kind of sort of remember the stuff that it's kind of playing off of. But right around the time that Donald Trump got elected, I started to notice vaporwave memes with classical statues talking about, like, destroy the weak and things along those lines and came to realize that there was a right-wing appeal to all of this. And given the heavily nostalgia-inflected sort of approach to that, you're creating an aesthetic basically around the idea of what people think it would have been like to use analog technologies or to, you know,

repurpose design elements in a way that create a very, I don't know, like when the sun goes down in Vice City sort of effect. And yet that's become also kind of like part of a political consciousness. And I'm wondering, like, did that occur to you when you were writing about vaporwave or was the idea of nostalgia being weaponized, something that came to you later? You know, it came a little later. I've said this before, but my mindset at the time of writing Battling Corps was that I was kind of frustrated with the way that nostalgia was appropriated in culture. I mean, this was like early Stranger Things, Taylor Swift's album 1989, the indie synth nostalgia slowly bubbling up into the mainstream. And I just found it kind of,

like, lacking any kind of artistic in-game. It just seemed sort of, you know, to borrow a symbol from the book, kind of like the snake eating its tail a little bit. Like, what is the point of this? It seemed kind of safe, apolitical. I remember at the time there was a tumbler. I don't know. I've since tried to find it, and I don't think it exists anymore. But it was called Where is the protest music or something like this? And it was around like in 2013, 2014. And I remember at this time, you know, or even in 2015, you've got Donald Trump slowly becoming this figure in mainstream politics that was and continues to be very frightening. And at the upper mainstream level, I sort of resonated with that tumbler a little bit. Where was the mainstream protest music?

It was more or less this kind of blatant nostalgia bait, if you will. And so it was more just kind of like a frustration and kind of a curiosity of mine. And only later did it start to get weaponized by figures like Donald Trump and other reactionaries across the world. And so no, I really couldn't, as far as I can remember, foresee any kind of right-wing appropriation of vaporwave. That being said, what we see as a reactionary appropriation of vaporwave isn't entirely vaporwave. It's more what I would consider it's like sister genre, which is synthwave or retro wave. And I'm the last person to get down in the weeds and split hairs about different genres. But I'm pretty committed to having a separation between the two because synthwave definitely has the aesthetics of the

80s light grid and like you say, the vice city sunset and gleaming cityscapes and all of this. Musically, it's pretty much straight ahead reworked 80s electro pop music with these arpeggiated bass lines and old sounding synths. Whereas vaporwave just is not that at all at the musical level. It's mainly sample based or at least the good stuff is mainly sample based, slowed down, slathered and reverb, far more difficult maybe to listen to than a straight ahead synthwave piece of music. So what the right-wing essentially did was they took retro synthwave music, they combined some of the aesthetics with what you would find in vaporwave. And then what ends up happening is these publications then suddenly come out of the woodwork and say, oh, vaporwave

has now been appropriated by the right. Has it always been reactionary? Well, it's strange to me too because I don't really know what people see in it as sort of like a comprehensive politics or even any politics at all, aside from the nostalgia angle obviously, but there's a sort of golden age delusion aspect to it as well. But to me, I mean, as lame as it sounds, it just struck me as I could see people thinking, oh, this is cool. This is a useful vehicle for packaging these same sort of ideas that you could reach an audience that might not necessarily glom onto overtly political slogan yearning from the right. But if you throw a Moog baseline onto it and some cool VHS effects on video, that that gets people's attention and then because that even happened to

me, not that I didn't approve of the messaging, but saw a video that I thought was pretty cool. And then I went down the channel and all of a sudden I was experiencing, I was like, wow, that video where it was sort of using old IRA videos from Northern Ireland was kind of interesting. What is this insanely right wing Catholic stuff that they're also doing synth music over? And you know, sort of like basically using Vichy French slogans. It was wild. And the thought crossed my mind that, I mean, my experience with right wing stuff is that anything that's popular people are going to try to appropriate just because it's another mechanism by which to deploy that message. But I never, I guess I never connected the dots that beyond the coolness of

the sort of novel aspect of it, there was also this kind of yearning for an imagined past, a better past, when problems didn't exist and things made sense. And that to me, I'll let you respond because I have a tendency to ask these kind of long questions. But that to me just always seemed kind of absurd in the same way that, and you touch on this a little bit in your book, but our co-host Hussain on the show did a long article about this, about teenagers who are really into a sort of, not cosplay, but sort of they make playlists with effects to sound as though they're listening to music in malls in the late 90s and early 2000s, because there's a sort of like imagined nostalgia and kind of like peaceful feeling of imagining a space that

they've never been in before, which to me, I mean, I graduated from high school in 2003. So like, obviously, I have adult memories of that period. I don't know what the fuck is going on because none of that is, none of the stuff that's being presented has any resemblance to the actual thing. And so the thought had crossed my mind that maybe some of the appeal of things like vapor, the kind of fashion wave stuff was just taking the coolness and like the novelness and the interesting sort of juxtaposition of images, but then also playing to that yearning or that desire for a controlled, better imagined past. Yes, absolutely. And you know, I think I spoke with Hussain about that article a year or two back, because I remember talking with him about

this very idea, the sort of obsession with malls and the aesthetic of the mall and the experience of malls. You know, I often think about, I mean, I do not think that synthwave slash retro wave is in any sense essentially anything. I don't think it is essentially right wing. I do think that some of these genres make themselves more available to reactionary appropriation. I mean, if you've listened to some of this music, it's got an energy to it. It sounds kind of like you're getting up and doing something, you're going to get in the car and drive and go somewhere, and you know, it's almost a soundtrack of getting stuff done. And I think that can be very appealing to these sort of, you know,

macho right wing people who see the world as it is today as this thing to conquer that needs, you know, the radical left and liberals that must be conquered and defeated or else we're going to lose it all. So let's get together, grab the arms and go do something about it. And I think that kind of music provides a soundtrack to them, although I don't think it is essentially reactionary, but it does make itself available. I don't know about anymore, but about a year or two ago, I was made aware of some of Bolsonaro's ministers and different deputies and whatnot people who are associated with him politically in Brazil who were, you know, appropriating this same imagery on their Twitter profiles, you know, and they're like banner photos

up top, they would have what looked exactly like something like a synth wave, you know, 80s light grid with the metallic font with their name on it or whatnot. Some of that stuff is not there anymore. I remember going back to some of their Twitter profiles, I don't see them there, but or like the imagery there, but it used to be there. And there would be photos of Bolsonaro like coated in this like purple kind of hue or whatnot. And there's even, you know, these genres that show up on YouTube called Bolsonaro wave and whatnot. And, you know, it is not vapor wave, it's it's absolutely not that at all. But it is just an appropriated right wing synth wave kind of thing that, yeah, I think I think that people just really enjoy even though

right wingers. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to me because that you bring up Bolsonaro, because we've talked about that on the show before that the we've had a couple of guests on here, Ryan Broderick from Buzzfeed and Vincent Bevin is the author of the Jakarta method, and they've both reported a lot from from Brazil. And one of the points that, you know, that was echoed in both of their sort of reportage was that there were things that you would see in Brazilian politics that were sort of harbingers of what you might see in other Western countries, you know, down the road. And in 2018, Bolsonaro, one of the methods was the minions memes, the sort of fascist minions memes and mass blast WhatsApp groups. And we saw both of

those, you know, deployed to great effect here in the United Kingdom in 2019, where the sort of mild social democratic option got blown out of the water in favor of a completely incompetent, far right government. And it was interesting because here in the UK, we didn't have, from my perspective, we don't have that kind of, at least I never experienced anything trying to sort of juxtapose Boris Johnson with the in the 1980s, for example. I mean, if you want to have a weird 1980s comparison in the United Kingdom is not too hard, you can do it with thatcherism. That's sort of the avatar of the 80s in this country. But what you did see was a weird similar phenomenon of constant, endless, repetitive invocations of World War Two, the Blitz and Dunkirk,

which, you know, if you're familiar with them and I imagine you are that basically, not great situations in terms of the government being competent at all, but they have been so like recursively misremembered, given that I mean, to be old enough to have been of draft age in the UK, when World War Two started, you would have to be like 98 or 99 years old. And, you know, there are very few people left alive today who were that old. There are obviously some, but there's just not that many anymore. So most of the people doing this invoking this and sort of making these these claims to like restore Britain's greatness, they were constantly invoking a thing that they would either have been small children for or

not yet born for. And so it's weird to me because that same, to me at least, that same tendency or phenomenon that you're describing in your book about, you know, appropriating a misremembered past as an icon of what could have been or what should be and what has to be restored, even if it's never really existed. We see that here, but it's not, you know, stranger things. It's not 1980s malls. It's not music or early pop culture in a way. It's this constant sort of, you know, we won World War Two single-handedly. We survived the Blitz. We bested the Germans at Dunkirk. We can do it again. Whereas if you know anything about the history of those events, it's like, well, you know, you had a significant collaborationist aspect of British society.

The Blitz was a disaster and the government response was a huge failure. Basically, people wound up having to force their way into the London Underground because bomb shelters were inaccessible. Dunkirk was basically my co-host Milo's in the studio with me right now. He's made the joke that people talk about it being this master stroke with planning, but you were basically bailed out at the last minute by a bunch of dudes who fish. Like it wasn't, it's not a thing that anyone who knows the story would look at and be like, hell yeah, let's emulate that. But it has such power over people. And so it's like, to me, it's almost a different facet of the same phenomenon that you've described in this book,

but just rather, instead of it being four decades ago, it's eight decades ago. Right, yeah. Yes, from the post-war period until the start of this century, there are numerous events and people and what not that political leaders and corporations can easily commodify to advance certain interests. And part of their ability to do this, especially when you talk about eight decades ago, what's something that happened eight decades ago, is simply the fact that people who are alive today didn't live through that. And yet just a brief cursory look at one's history reveals all the things that you're saying not to mention, this is something that Owen Hathorley has written about,

and I believe it's in the Ministry of Nostalgia, where he talks about the keep calm and carry on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Logan. And he says, he's like, you're talking about inducing nostalgia to advance austerity measures and this kind of like cultural bootstrapism for a time in which there were state benefits, trade unions, public housing programs, and yet that's being induced for everything that's not that. And yeah, in the United States, we get some of that for sure. They would have been doing the memorialization of World War II, obviously, even before the 21st century. But yeah, the 1980s does seem to be a pretty stable reference point for America.

And I need to send you this, there's a video of, it's the Trump wave video of this genre called Trump wave, again, synth wave with Trump aesthetics. And it is Trump delivering these speeches, intercut with images of like, you know, 1980s television, MTV, Miami Vice, maybe Hulk Hogan. And it's just so grossly blatantly nostalgic. But it's like, apparently very effective. It's interesting to me too, because I appreciated the extent to which you talked about the precarity of the sort of modern condition and the ways in which social media has effectively, I mean, it's not the only usage of it. But one of the reasons for which it's become so ubiquitous

is that it offers a kind of escapism or an opportunity to encounter things that, you know, a kind of niche interest. But, you know, as time continues, as we watch the state continuing to wither away, we see, you know, especially in the past year, you see this, the complete inability of the state to respond in the United States and the United Kingdom, in many other countries, I mean, obviously not all of them, but in many other developed countries, there is this desire to, I don't know, whether it manifests itself as the sort of, you talk about this in the book about coloring books, or like adulting kind of stuff, you know, that sort of are the show Chopo Trap House made in the comment about being neoliberal daycare for

adults, that kind of sensation of, you know, taking infantilizing and providing solace or escapism in childish activities. There's that, there's also the ability to just kind of daydream about some kind of imaginary, you know, I'm guilty of it as anybody else. I love looking at post-war architecture stuff, which here in this country is, you know, there's quite a booming industry online of rehashing that stuff. You know, Mark Fisher talked about ontology specifically about things like when the British state literally ran their own at-cost pubs and restaurants, and sort of like imagine what the world would be like if we still, if that was still considered politically viable or possible, you know, things along those lines, everybody's got

a mechanism, a sort of escapism. But you argue, at least as I understand it in this book, that this is, this is both illusory and also just, it's, it's kind of, I don't want to say time wasting, but it's basically an almost impotent reaction to the lack of control that people have in their own lives. Yeah, you know, and I can't, I cannot blame people for wanting to buy, I mean, I don't think the adult coloring book thing is much of a thing anymore, but five or six years ago, it certainly was. I can't blame people for wanting to do that, because things are really difficult and hard. And if it's like at the end of a day, you just want to zone out and color in a coloring book, you know, it's not your fault. Nobody wakes up and asks to

not have social safety nets and have to struggle and all this, right? But at the same time, it, it speaks to a larger tradition that, and what, you know, you are, you're touching on this, I think, you know, of sort of just a not very politically viable way to, to rethink the present, you know, if you will, like to not be able to face what's really going on. And we see this in this year in particular, when once the lockdowns happen, at least in the US, there were all these articles coming out, talking about like, you know, you should go ahead and indulge that nostalgia kick that you've been wanting to, you know, all these 90s movies you've been wanting to watch, go ahead and watch them because things are really bad. And like,

yeah, like, I totally get that things are really bad, but you wouldn't have to do that if we were able to have some, you know, competent leaders who knew how to take care of people during times like this, instead of, you know, I live in Georgia, they locked us down for a little bit, and then by May, it was like, that's it, everybody's out. And suddenly we all are going back to work and because we have to because there's no financial support from the government during a time which, you know, they pretty much mismanaged the pandemic from the beginning. And so, but at the same time, yes, nostalgia, a normal emotional reaction to really unstable times. Well, the more that you have unstable times, the more you're going to have nostalgia circulating in the culture. And it

just depends on what you do with it. If you just want to zone out and watch old movies, yeah, it's like that, that's like, you know, I don't always like to do that, but I could see where escaping, you know, escaping every so often to return into the world can be healthy. But at the same time, it also gets picked up by various demagogue type leaders like Donald Trump. We're only going to see more of that, the more precarious things become. There's a passage in the book that I thought was relevant to what you just said that I highlighted as I was reading, because I do think that it echoes some of the observations that I've had and that we've had on this show. And you write, under control, citizens certainly feel free, but they're managed on the finest

of levels. Flexibility under the eye of constant tracking and assessment makes for an exhausting existence. Steady, long-term jobs continue to dwindle as short-term gigs take their place. Individuals must put in the work to brand themselves across media platforms in the desperate contest to land a job. Debt piles on. Though we have nearly everything at our fingertips and can work various side hustles to complement whatever full-time employment comes our way, we are still monitored. The illusion of freedom feels liberating, but the prevailing emotion in much of Western debt or society is deep nostalgia for more stable times. And you also bring up the point in talking about a sort of leave-it-to-beaver style of portrayal of the 1950s, for example, that those

were profoundly anxious and reactive portrayals of society that were tailored to their own times. But over time, the portrayal is what winds up being sort of taken at face value as an authentic portrait in the same way that we've joked about this, that you better at least pay attention to what the plot of Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War is because there's going to be people who think that's actually what the Cold War was, that people were out doing mind control, fake memories of Vietnam and trying to detonate neutron bombs. That that is real because over time, these portrayals sort of amass and they become the authoritative representation of history even if they can be fact-checked to death, it doesn't really matter. And underneath that, at least the impression

that I've gotten from your writing about this is that what they all have in common is a desire to manifest an existence where stability and order prevailed. Yes, yes. And Stephanie Koontz wrote The Way We Never Were back in the early 90s and she said, something along the lines of contrary to popular opinion, leave it to bever actually wasn't a documentary. And I'm always struck by that sentence because the representations of life through situational comedies and films and just the archive of leftover media and narratives and images that we have over the past 50 to 60 years, I guess, gosh, what year is it? 80, 60 to 80 years. There's so much of it and it can be accessed so quickly at any time

that they not, yeah, they not only provide sort of a just simple escapism from the world, like pretty much any watching any film or any show might, but they also represent a window into a world that literally doesn't exist anymore, but in fact was also fabricated as well and artificial as well because, of course, leave it to bever wasn't a documentary. But these people did, they used to exist. They used to be dressed this way. At the very least, the show just illustrates what people wanted to watch back then. And for some people, that's just enough of to be nostalgic for right there. And so, yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess that. No, I mean, it's interesting because I think about this for myself recently, maybe a couple

of months ago, I was having a conversation with a fan of our show and making jokes about the resurgence of vinyl records as a physical medium of music. Some people have joked about the fact that if you're going to own a physical medium, vinyl is obviously like a very fragile one. So it's cool. It has a certain aesthetic appeal. It has a nostalgic appeal as well. I'm guilty of it as anybody else of finding cooler and more authentic for some reason that I can't qualify. But, you know, in sort of passing conversation, what a fan of the show mentioned is like, well, I mean, ultimately, if you want to have a storage medium that's going to stand the test of time at least in terms of being durable, you might as well just put everything on a mini

disc. And I thought I was like, oh, fuck, I haven't thought about mini disc in so long. And was able to, because they were really popular here in Western Europe, less so in America, I was able to get a NetMD-enabled Sony mini disc player recorder for very, very cheap and start pulling stuff down, pulling MP3s down and putting them on mini disc. And I had to ask myself, why do I connect with this in such a way? What about this? Because, oh, yeah, it is cool. It looks like it's a cool-looking format. But is there some deeper meaning to it? Is there some deeper reason why I've connected with this more than other things? Why do I not really care that much about cassette tapes, for example, which are also

resurging in popularity? And I'm old enough that cassette tapes were the only way I listened to music when I was a kid. We didn't have a CD player. But then I realized it. I actually kind of realized it was sort of an epiphany. I was like, well, fuck, yeah, I make sense. Mini discs became heavily marketed and more or less affordable in America. Right around the time I was old enough to get my driver's license and sort of glimpse the adult world and what the adult world might entail. When I was old enough to start looking at where I might go to school, like when I graduated from high school, like if I was going to go to college, I decided I wanted to, where would I go to school, that kind of thing. I was starting just in a distant way,

kind of grasp, understand what the adult world might be like, what my adult life might be like, you know, right around 1999, 2000, 2001. And then 9-11 happened. I was almost 17 when 9-11 happened. And that completely upended everything. And I thought, and I was like, it was a weird sort of realization. I'm like, am I glumming onto this outdated, you know, obsolete technology because it looks cool because it looks like something that would be in like mid-90s sci-fi movies? Because I mean, it is. It's in Johnny Mnemonic. It's in The Matrix. It's in Strange Days. Or is it because it represents a sort of physical manifestation of what I thought the future would be like before reality intervened, before history intervened?

It's definitely both. I was going to say, it's absolutely both. It's just wild to me because it's like, you realize that no one is immune to this. It's just what is the thing that you're nostalgic for? What is the sort of imagined past or hypothetical, you know, prematurely terminated future that you are connecting with? What envisioned possibility makes you sort of be willing to invest your time? And I guess that's it for me. But you make the point that as that, this as a genre, if you will, the sort of nostalgic storytelling, the re-envisioning of things, you talk about specifically stranger things, but also some of the permutations of the, what's it called, the Michael Myers Halloween

franchise, or episodes of Black Mirror, things along those lines. One of the points you make is that there's a weirdly dystopian aspect to this, which is that all of the mechanisms by which you are going to consume this entertainment that is playing to that kind of yearning, is also a mechanism by which data can be collected on you. And I mean, depending on how far people want to go, your privacy can be violated. And so there's this sort of this endless loop of feeding the yearning by giving more of yourself over to the sort of marketing algorithm. Absolutely. Yeah. And you bring up a good point about the media nostalgia. There's a lot of good research out there on how physical media in particular, VHS,

mini-disc, what have you, vinyl records, how they factor into our nostalgic feelings. Ryan Lazardy is a scholar of this, so is Manuel Menke. And Menke in particular writes that we get attached to these older media technologies simply because we grew up with them. And they do absolutely mark distinct periods in our life, especially those periods that are kind of filled with hope and promise, like you say, like you're about to go into the world as an adult or at the edge of college, perhaps, or at the end, leaving high school behind. And so they represent that for us. And when things get unstable, in particular, when media change happens quickly, when we have to suddenly adapt to

using new media and getting rid of the old one, whether it's a new technology comes out and it's better than the old one, or streaming comes along and gets rid of CDs or what have you, that when this happens, we tend to cope with that change by going back to older media. And then there's research into figuring out whether we're nostalgic for the types of films, or I guess you could just say content, that sort of gets channeled through this old media, or if it is actually the old media itself that we tend to be nostalgic for. And it's, of course, it's a little bit of both. But I'm reflecting, you're talking about mini discs growing up, reflecting on my own life. This happened to me at the turn of the

21st century when my grandmother gifted me with an old stereo that could only play cassette tapes. And I didn't know any cassette tapes. In fact, I didn't know in any physical media. But I knew if I was going to buy one, it was going to be a CD of something. Well, now that I couldn't, I just had this stereo. And so I had, my mom take me to go buy my first piece of music, which was a cassette tape of Daft Punk's album Discovery. And it kind of became this talisman for me. I mean, I listened to it constantly. You know, it's how I got introduced to physical media consumption in an era when the tape was already gone, basically, it was already outdated. And then something happened, and I kind of stopped listening to it.

And years later, I was like, you know what, I want to hear that album again, and I went and bought it on CD, and it just wasn't the same. And I eventually found the cassette tape, and I still have it to this day. And it has that magical power to an extent. But you know, I also have Apple Music, you know, like it's not like I just listened to the cassette. I don't really own any other cassettes. I didn't go out and buy a bunch more to indulge in that way. It literally is just that one. And I think that's totally a normal reaction for people to have, is to indulge in older media. The problem is, when it starts to kind of instantiate this feeling that because you feel so good about listening to that tape, that things back then, when you

were listening to it, were also just as good. And you know, we know better than that, but we always are having to constantly ward that off. It's funny because I have a similar experience, but obviously I'm a bit older than you. So for me, it's slightly different. My brother and I, our first CDs, well, we purchased when I would have been about six and he would have been about eight, I think, and it was Depeche Mode's violator. So this was in 1990. And similarly, I have this sort of weird kind of esteem for that record, which I think is warranted. I mean, if you're a fan of their music, like, I think it's considered their most accomplished album. But to me, because it was this sort of, it felt like encountering this artistic object,

you know, the sleeve design is very striking. The disc print is very striking. The music is very, is very stark. I mean, I hadn't really ever heard anything like that before. You know, obviously I was a very little kid, but you know, we had, my parents got a CD player when we, my dad was in the army, we got stationed in Germany and moved there. And so, you know, whereas my first cassette tape was the Batman soundtrack, the one that Prince did. And like, I mean, I don't know if that stands to test of time, Prince fans might argue with me on that. And it's strange to me because yeah, I have that same tendency. If I go back and I'm like, man, to go look at like the ephemera from that era, to like, you know, look at photographs from

rehearsals or when they were recording or like, you know, when they, for the first single from that album was recorded in Milan in 1989 and stuff like that. And you think, man, it would be amazing to be there, to be able to experience it. And it's sort of like, yeah, but then, you know, I hear people talk about stuff that I can remember as an adult with or at least close to adult age with that same kind of hazy reverence and idea that like things would have been simpler and better and easier and, you know, and just less problematic. And you just realized that that's just a cycle that maybe that's just this eternal phenomenon that people have. It's just that nowadays, it's not just, you know, I recall this from college taking a class on

medieval literature and reading, you know, people in the 1400s writing about like, well, love is debased now, but, you know, thousands of years ago, people understood the value of love and things were better back then. And you can kind of laugh at that. But it's like, but you do realize now there is a desire to find that imagined past because the modern, the situation that so many people find themselves in is so, it's just so dire. And it does not seem as though, you know, there's gonna, there's an opportunity, at least at the present moment, we live in the fog of the present. But at the present moment, it does not seem as though there is a viable exit from that that's going to occur anytime soon, certainly not in the next, say, half decade. And so, to me at

least, it feels like I can understand why people would want to retreat into that sort of gauzy, rose-tinted kind of imagination of what the past would have looked like, you know, what it would have been like to, if you've ever seen the film, Downtown 81, like what it would have been like to be there. Like another one that I remember people really liking when I was younger was ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. Like you see just these sort of documentaries of an era when things looked very different, when people dressed different, when, when things had a certain kind of style that seems completely vanished at this point. But those, though the problems that were, you know, I think about, yeah, it would be really amazing to, you know, go back to experience

what it was like, you know, back in 1990 when that music was just coming out. But it's like, yeah, but you talk to people who were alive and who were adults back then, like there were some, you know, most of the world was in a recession, the Gulf War started, you know, it looked people thought there might be, still might be the possibility of a nuclear war, like there were so many things through these anxieties and problems and frustrations that, you know, you don't touch upon when you, you kind of dream about what it'd be like to live out that fantasy. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it's, and there is this strange phenomenon where we tend to be nostalgic for the eras in which these representations had to look a certain way to soothe the anxieties of the,

of their moment, you know. So, in the 1980s is always a great example because this was the decade of nightmares, as Philip Jenkins calls it, where, you know, such moral panic, you know, of related to Satanists and child abductors, and then real problems too, like the, like what we would consider the fear of falling and this sort of economic precarity, and as you say, like the threat of nuclear war. But the moral panic was what caused the political leaders to induce the nostalgia that now, you know, has decades later, still kind of hangs around with us, thanks to figures like Reagan and the culture industries at the time that also knew they could make a quick buck by capitalizing on that kind of sunny morning in America rhetoric.

And so, yeah, the eras that are that, and also 1980s, of course, were nostalgic for the 1950s. It literally was like the 1950s with some, you know, digitized in a way. And so, the eras that were themselves most nostalgic, we also tend to be nostalgic for them because nostalgia often snowballs, like, like going down a hill just gets larger and larger being, you know, built upon the previous bouts of nostalgia. Like, for example, people tend to be nostalgic for school. High school, like Svetlana Boehm says, lost dances, lost chances anywhere from American graffiti to, I mean, you know, you can name it. So, but yet, school, as we know, tends to be kind of a bummer place, you know,

it could be very deadening. And as you know, at that point in your age, you don't have a lot of freedom. You have to follow a certain routine. There's tests and exams. And there's also a lot of good stuff too. But the fact that school is a conditioning structure, it disciplines you into thinking and behaving a certain way. It is sort of our first run in with nostalgia. It's sort of the first place for many people, at least, where we are controlled in a certain way. And yet, we tend to be nostalgic for it. So oftentimes, the things that make us nostalgic in the first place, we tend to be nostalgic for. It's interesting to me because, yeah, that thought occurred that if you look at stuff now, and you think, okay, here's, you know, modern in the last 10 years,

perhaps, entertainment and cultural products meant to, you know, evoke a certain feeling of, say, 1985, like, 86, something like that, like the mid-80s. If you go back to the 1980s, the mid-80s, you know, as you were describing stuff like American graffiti, dirty dancing, specifically, I was thinking of Stand By Me. Why, you know, Stand By Me, the original story was set in 1960, but they made the decision in making the film adaptation to change it to 1959, because there was a certain nostalgic sheen to that to it still being the 1950s of sort of like American innocence, if you will, as opposed to even though, like, not much had changed between Labor Day 1959 and Labor Day 1960, but that digit was so important in sort of creating that effect.

And then, of course, you know, if you really want to mess your brain up, you can do the math there and realize that if you wanted to make a film that had the same nostalgic distance that 1986 had from 1959, you would have to set a film in 1993. And then you're like, okay, because I don't particularly think of 1993 as being or the early 90s as being particularly utopian or nostalgia inducing, but they will be. I mean, I'm sure that they have been and will be just as, you know, I've read a commentary from people online saying something to the effect of, like, you know, there's a massive yearning for amongst young adult fiction consumers for young adult fiction set in the early 2000s in which smartphones aren't a thing and people communicate

by like SMS or like AOL instant messenger, which to me is just like, it's insane to think of, but I guess I get it, you know. Totally. People are nostalgic for 2014 already. They're nostalgic for January this year. I mean, I've seen the sort of the, you know, the cultural responses, if you will, to a 2014 nostalgia. And, you know, so what you're witnessing is really kind of like the feedback loops of nostalgia, which used to be, it was like said, every 20 years or something like this. They're getting smaller, the feedback loops. And so now, and there's a number of reasons for this. And part of it is because we are able to historicize events so quickly, thanks to social media, and then call those events up just as quickly by going back and scrolling through a

feed and finding them. So, you know, everybody's always asking, like, how will we remember this? You hear like, not just the pandemic, but anything, you know, a major event that occurs. What will history think of this? What will the future blah, blah, blah? That is a question, yes, that's sort of like a human question to ask. But at the same time, it's particularly a particularly relevant question because we all kind of know that things get historicized and locked into place pretty quickly. And then, you know, a few years down the road, the nostalgia gets induced and that thing that got locked in then comes back up. And if you don't, you know, lock it in the right way, it's going to come back all backwards. Take, for example,

one of Donald, I don't even remember, I don't even know all of Trump's kids' names, maybe that's bad, but one of his kids was writing some book about his father and the administration or whatever, and likened the, you know, quote, mistreatment Donald Trump had at the hands of the liberals to like the those who were, you know, targeted by Cointel pro decades ago, or the targeting of Martin Luther King Jr. Wacko backwards kind of rhetorical maneuvers, right? But if that stuff gets locked into place, suddenly now we have to do so much more work in the future to remind people that that gentrification of memory is itself just a lot. It's funny because, you know, a significant chunk of our audience is British, this show started

in the UK, and we've branched out to North America quite a bit, but we see this a lot here with a profound sort of nostalgia industry for the 2012 London Olympics. And it's very interesting because it's amongst, primarily it's amongst well off liberals of a certain age, because there was this very, you know, I believe it was Danny Boyle directed the opening ceremony, and it was this really long sort of pageant of English and British history, you know, that made a big showing of like the establishment of the NHS and of the Windrush generation, people from the Caribbean migrating to post-war Great Britain to work. And, but, you know, it's wild because most of that is a desire to return to the era where they're like, Oh, this is just when Britain was things were so

great here, things, you know, I felt like people felt like they could be proud of Britain. And it's like, well, first of all, that's a reaction to the advent of Trump and the advent of Brexit and, you know, the hard right turn in this country that's been going on, you know, in this past decade since the Great Recession. But also, you know, we talked to people, you know, my age and younger, up into, you know, as long as they were old enough to be, you know, around university age, at that time, what they recall isn't this sort of, you know, gleaming representation of all the great things about modern liberal Britain. It was the utter just crushing of the anti-austerity movement here. You know, people have stories of, you know, because

overnight they tripled the maximum amount that universities could charge in student tuition. It went from it's low by American standards, but also in the United States incomes are quite a bit higher. It was, it went from 3,000 pounds a year to 9,000 pounds a year overnight. And basically, they said, Okay, well, this isn't going to be, this is just a benchmark. Well, every university in the country switched to 9,000 pounds a year overnight. So people all of a sudden had, and there was also a commensurate cut in, you know, sort of scholarship student tuition assistance and things like that. So people protested massively. And they were, I mean, brutalized, you know, people, some people, you know, suffered permanent brain damage, they were kettled, they were beaten,

they were tear gassed. It was similarly, there was a massive amount of social cleansing in the part of London where the Olympic facilities were built, you know, people will have stories of like getting mass arrested just because they did like a, like a, you know, bike protest in Stratford around the time the Olympics started, you know, people getting arrested, like 200, 300 people at a time getting arrested. You had London riots in 2011 where they ran all night court sessions where they were sentencing people to five years in prisons for stealing a bottle of water, you know, stuff like that. That's what people who were experiencing the blunt end of the state recall from that period. But, you know, people who are old enough to, you know, work as a magazine

journalist and still be able to buy a house in London in the 90s when that was possible, they have a, 2012 is this totem. And it's such a strange thing because we experienced this in the same way here where it's just a desire to pretend that the things that are distressing us about politics and our experience in the modern day when those didn't exist. And if we can go back to that, then we can, we can just forget all this nastiness with whatever, you know, with Brexit, with the Tories, with right wing austerity, all these things. And it can go back to, and it's like, to me, it's like, yes, but you don't realize those conditions are what led to this. Like, we're in this moment because what was happening in that moment could not respond to, you know,

the exigencies and the emergency of the time of the conditions that people were suffering. And you, in your book, you close on a point specifically about, as my, to my read, that we're, what we're up against is neoliberal capitalism, but we're also up against is the ubiquitous reach of the tech industry. And that what you and I are talking about today, and this sort of permutation of nostalgia, that is, in so many ways, a byproduct or a, you know, a fixture of the reach that social media has in people's lives. And I mean, this is a long digression on my part. So I'm interested, like, if anything, you want to react to what I've said, but also if you want to talk about that theme too, I'd love to hear about it.

Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, talking about the 2012 Olympics, you know, and the nostalgia for the spectacle of it. And like you said, the Danny Boyle involvement and whatnot, you know, those spectacles get created, you know, to help soothe the anxieties of the moment. And yeah, paper over what's really actually happening. You know, don't look over here at the protests and what's happening. Look at the big, you know, bright spectacular thing. And to me, that is, when people ask me, you know, aren't, haven't we always been nostalgic? What's the big deal? You know, whatever. My response is always, what ends up happening is, is that these, like I said before, these kinds of moments in history, where capitalism shows us its big

gesture, its big grand gesture, those things tend to get locked into place and people tend to be nostalgic for them. And the reality, the social reality is not present in the remembering, at least not at like the mainstream level, because it can't be, you know, it would, it would, you know, completely resist or go against, you know, the status quo. And so, to me, that kind of like spectacular response to austerity, then becoming the thing we're nostalgic for does this cruel historical violence to a particular moment where the people, you know, suffered the damage and were arrested and detained and whatnot. And I think about, you know, in the United States and across the world, but particularly in the U.S., when George Floyd was publicly executed by this

police officer, you know, and you've got massive protest movement and the movement for Black lives and whatnot, and what kinds of, you know, things will be instead made nostalgic for the future. And, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is the Department of Homeland Security troops and whatnot who are trying to restore law and order. That may not be a big 2012 London Olympic spectacular thing, but it is certainly something that can easily be commodified as nostalgia, or, you know, nostalgically appropriated because it just feeds into this like saving the homeland idea, this, you know, securing law and order by, look, we succeeded and we've stamped down these rioters and anarchists or whatever. Let's do it again, you know, they'll invoke it in that way

10 years from now. And I'm writing, so a lot of this is on my mind in particular, because I'm actually writing currently a recent history of nostalgia, like a broad step back look at nostalgia over the past, not only the past 20 years, but since the post-war era. And so I'm thinking a lot about how we think about history and remember it and how history gets made in these moments of collective action, but then often are, you know, thrown into the historical dustbin in favor of something more nostalgic and glamorous. In terms of big tech, as you mentioned, you know, there are three ways that nostalgia really, the connection points between nostalgia and big tech, one of them is simply that the technological creep, you know, the more that

we have to rely on our technologies and our daily lives kind of puts us in this always on, always hustling, you know, always working the gig economy kind of mentality. And of course, a normal reaction to that is nostalgia for simpler, more stable times. The internet also functions as a big giant archive, you know, I mean, I could scroll through Instagram feed, not feeling particularly wistful or nostalgic at all on a given day, and suddenly see something and bam, I feel it, right? And it's not just nostalgia, of course, it's also other emotions like anger, some more so than others, but anger is a big one too, you're just scrolling and then suddenly something sets you off and you get super bad and tweet about it or whatnot. But nostalgia

is also one of the main emotions that shows up through social networks. And then finally, you know, the way that we consume culture today through streaming platforms, recommender algorithms, you know, an algorithm pretty much just projects the information of the past into the future. And you see this, you know, something as innocuous as like, you know, getting a recommended artist on Spotify, if you put just a certain amount of information with Spotify, and they, it figures out, you know, what you like, then it's going to recommend, of course, what you like, not anything novel or anything new. Well, then at scale, this starts to become a problem, you see students getting kind of, you know, getting upset because they were screwed over on their exams, like we saw earlier

this year in August, where these algorithms pretty much looked at historical data related to student exam scores and the schools that they attended or whatever, and then made this determination, and suddenly all these students who would have gotten good grades didn't. And so what ends up happening is you have a constant sort of intrusion of the past and of the present, thanks to this kind of algorithmic determinism. Yeah, and this is packaged, of course, as, I mean, I know the case you're referring to here in the UK, and it's wild because the argument in favor of that was not just, you know, the machine knows better, but also that we can't trust the teachers. The teachers are too soft on their students. The teachers will want to give

the students better grades because they're not, you know, they're not objective enough. So we've determined, thus, that you are statistically speaking too poor to have done this well, and therefore we're going to downgrade your grades. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that, of, you know, the way in which that is in an application of the past to determine the future, but yeah, that's a, that clarifies a lot, I think, with regard to the argument here. And, you know, we're coming up on the end of our time, so I'm just going to give another opportunity to plug the book. So it's The Circle of the Snake, Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech is out from zero books. I will link to it in the show notes of this episode. Grafton, is there anything

we've missed before we go? No, I've just, thank you so much for having me come on and discuss some of these things. I certainly enjoyed it. Me too, man. It's been really great to speak with you. I really enjoyed the book. I hope our fans give it a shot as well. And thank you for making time right before Christmas to come on the show and talk to me. Totally, absolutely. Thank you.