I want to reflect on some observations. I won’t be directly referencing shit or whatever (if that’s a requirement for you, look elsewhere). I want to express MY feelings on the topic, unmediated. I want to be as plain and human as possible when talking about *~nostalgia~*. In every artistic capacity (and increasingly our physical objects as well) western culture is chronically looking backwards, our head turned around while our body meanders ever forward. If you are in your 20s like me, this is our life now, and it seems to have been fermenting since before we had the capacity to self reflect. This topic has been discussed so much we need a graveyard for all the dead and beaten horses, but I want to add some personal touch to the conversation. When did exposure to this nostalgic bug occur? Recently? How recent? Is it good or bad? What is to blame (or be worthy of praise)? What are the consequences? Where can culture go when it seems ball and chained to previous spouses? These questions haunt me as I listen to Jungle, play in a Nü-Metal band, watch 90s TV, load songs onto my iPod, read real paper books, show my friends my vintage film cameras and take a million pictures with their point-and-shoots at the bar, play old ass games, shop for flip-phones, or posting this article on my fucking neocities site. I don’t want to just talk about technology either, as we are also nostalgic for the immaterial. A certain je ne se quoi that past aesthetics seem to imbue in us. Nostalgia is the ontological pool we are swimming in, whether you are in the deep end or not.
Our physical world would be almost unrecognizable to a 50s time traveler. I think of my rural grandma living in rural Texas who still asks for email and wifi help, while maintaining an immaculate calendar (it hangs in the kitchen and everything) and physical records. The progression of tech and its integration into our lives rocketed past her, leaving in its wake confusion and frustration. For her kids generation, which includes most of the technologists themselves, modern technology is truly amazing and worth immediate, mass adoption. This makes sense as they experienced the death of inconvenience, as well as the death of literal death with medical and agricultural breakthroughs, throughout childhood and adulthood. Images went from different shades of grey to full color. They no longer type wrote but processed words. Phones leaped off the walls and side tables into hands and pockets. Physical real maps? Fuck y’all meet MapQuest. Oh, wanna see a movie? We have a VHS player, a Sony Trinitron, and Blockbuster (may she rest in peace). Big ass vinyl records with like 45 mins of music? Stand aside for laserdisc, no wait 8-tracks (idek if this is a thing or not lmao) , no wait cassesttes, no wait CDs, oh shit what the fuck is an MP3? Experiencing the rapid change and !!NOVELTY!! of this time is unimaginable to my brain. Massive societal change seemed to happen consistently for their entire life. So I can’t blame them when they still expect (and convince themselves they are still witnessing) that scale of massive improvement. Its like Freudian childhood growth something something I don’t fucking know. People around my age, despite being told otherwise, have not experienced this.
I want to pause here to state that the evolution of technology is only as fast as whats sold to us. Capitalism has changed. This is obvious to anyone whether they want to see its continuation or not. R&D departments are liquidated, financiers replaced well seasoned experts in their industries, and pursuit of quick profit overtook producing quality products. This has been the status quo for a while. No one argues this. Not to mention the industrial failure of academic research in the U.S., knee capping progress in this context as well. Of course our media is so xenophobic as to ignore technological and academic progress in other countries, and our culture at large is so hungry to pay for things that pirating and open source software are seen as eccentricities. I want to continue here going over what has been sold to us, which is, unfortunately, all that Americans seem to ever give a fuck about.
*~The Fucking iPhone~* broke all of us. My parents were right. Your parents were right. ITS THAT GOD DAMNED PHONE Y’ALL WAKE THE FUCK UP!!! If you are in your 20s like me, the iPhone was a holy relic sent from the gods themselves. A pocket pond for producing Narcissus’ (Nacissuss? Narcissi?) to eternally look at themselves. It seemed to be the prophet (profit?) of what tech had been building towards for the past decade. Everything that our pc and other gadgets did, all packed into a single grey, black, and glass rectangle. It predictably exploded everyones minds. I couldn’t carry my mom’s hand-me-down pink iPod nano (THAT HAD A SUPER MANLY BLACK SILICON SKIN WITH A LAMBORGHINI STICKER DON’T CALL ME A GIRL), my point and shoot, my kindle, a laptop, my dads video camera, my dads Garmin, a note pad, our tv, an alarm clock, a flashlight, and my ds all at once; cargo pants were out of style and I didn’t have enough pockets. I hope you can reflect upon how differently we move through our lives now. This happened to people around my age in our childhood, but I’m hoping to connect with those older than me as well. This is the great luxurious oasis in the desert.
The iPhone has always been the smartphone of choice in the US. For me, they became ubiquitous staring in middle school, when iPhone sales saw their most rapid acceleration of sales from 2011-2016. I got an iPhone in 2013, my moms hand-me-down 4 or 4s I can’t remember. Having already ditched my super cool iPod nano for an iTouch a few years back, I was already addicted to YouTube, Instagram (an account I had made the year before and posted with the family iPad), Twitter, and Snapchat. Social media’s transfer to smartphones got increasingly addictive overtime. Smart phones made websites work better when complied into an “app”, platforms who focused on “the app” now had a certain magnetism; pulling me in with algorithms and UX that tapped into our most primal wiring. These algorithms divi up our world, justify previously held beliefs, and alienate us all while enraging us about those alien to us. While we use, The Cloud Empire collects endless information on us. Selling this information, called cookies, like Girl Scouts at Tom Thumb. This data is real. It lives in data centers that use fresh drinking water to cool the endless halls of GPUs-rapidly accelerating by AI. The Cloud Empires have been proven to use this data for EXACTLY one purpose. Keep us scrolling and sell us ads. They sacrifice us and the planet for one more penny. I think people are very nostalgic for when this wasn’t the case.
People around my age talk candidly about how shitty social media has become. While I take for granted every day that I get to stumble on the most beautiful piece of music I’ve ever heard made by some person in their bedroom half a world away, The Cloud Empire should not be the gatekeepers of the communication age. People around my age seem to be taking action. Some have parental timers on certain apps, they might delete their least used one, unfollow a bunch of people on another, and maybe replace the standard apps with open-source plugins. Many like me have tried to quit entirely (YouTube has such a grip on me send help its my l a s t o n e). The even braver among the Rebellion have opted for a dumb phone, or no phone at all. I see many around me channeling this nostalgia so brilliantly. This gives me hope that we can put down this vice ourselves. The Smart Phone can be butchered. Thrift some shit like an MP3 player, a point-and-shoot. Try taking physical notes, having a physical calendar, sending letters to your friends and family (they don’t have to be long), or checking out a book at the library. Make a neocities! The most important for me is doing things for myself, and not as content for the internet. At the end of this piece I’ll have a long list of stuff to try. Taking back a healthy relationship with communications technology IS POSSIBLE! Much more substantial social movements have occurred in our past. It feels like our conversation on nostalgia usually ends here, but that doesn’t account for everything. Have the world stay the same but The Cloud Empire totally vanishes, we would still have some big problems, huh?
Nostalgia is not just past aesthetics born again. No, we are nostalgic for this je ne se quoi of the past, that in the absence of being able to live and fully experience it, we substitute with symbols. I want to make a distinction here between this aesthetic nostalgia and what I’ll call renaissance nostalgia. I want to reference history too, but I am not a historian, and this is not a research paper. So I’m not going to make wild claims like the European Renaissance is defined by nostalgia, or even that the people of the time thought of the past like we did, which I’m sure they did not. At bare minimum, the art and aesthetics of the time reflected a deep rejection with the contemporary condition. I hope any of the rest of this piece makes any fucking sense lol.