Age of Stagnation

NOT BLISS

Now, in about 10 minutes I’m going to blame technology for making us nostalgic. But obviously that’s a bizarre and unjustifiable position. “What is he even talking about?” So I’m not gonna start with that, I’ll work up to it.

Hey (d’ya) remember things

THE COMMODIFICATION OF GHOSTS

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Basically nostalgia’s an emotion. Actually I think there’s some debate about that. But it definitely is or isn’t an emotion. That’s the range of options available.

Now the word’s been around for a few hundred years, and the feeling we assume, has been around forever.

It’s usually triggered by interacting with something you remember, or remembering something you remember. But it tends to show up more in times of change. Like, in your life. You’re more likely to watch a 90’s movie or play a PS1 game if things are going badly for you.

But it doesn’t have to be that extreme. Like… vinyl records… You think you like them because of the sound quality or whatever but that’s not it. The reason you like vinyl is because they stopped making iPods. They stopped making iPods and now your iTunes library is worthless, so in revenge you found some tat to collect. It’s pathetic.

Now, once I hit the Spotify library limit I got into cassettes. Which is different. It’s different. You can tell the difference in sound quality with a cassette. (Beat) It’s much worse.

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But nostalgia tends to show up more when there’s been some change, any change. So everyone gets more nostalgic in unstable periods. Whether that’s Coronavirus, the Global Financial Crisis, or when the Americans elected to have James Corden on TV.

And we can see that in the swell of sales of products from your childhood. The trading card industry basically relies on regular crises.

Because as an emotion, nostalgia is incredibly powerful, and even though it’s usually triggered by bad things, most of the time it’s very positive, it can lift your mood, give you meaning, make you feel less alone, even though you are, you are alone.

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But it can be worse right. Remembering some things, that’s nice. But you can be overtaken by nostalgia, to the point where you don’t just want to remember things you want to make it the past now. Which is really the driving force behind a lot of racists: “Remember racism times? Let’s have them now.” And it’s that impulse which makes it so commercially successful.

So like a lot of things nostalgia’s been around for ages, but for the longest time it wasn’t monetised. Until the 60’s with the invention of “retro.”

After the student movement had all hope for the future beaten out of them by the cops they stopped looking forward and started looking to the past. Before then, there hadn’t been a way to dig up old crap from the recent past and start selling it immediately after it stopped being cool. So the tastemakers and advertisers and PR people went, “let’s dig up old crap from the recent past and start selling it immediately after it stops being cool.”

And what they found was that nostalgia was actually incredibly useful: You get an instant emotional connection with your audience, and an overwhelming yearning for an imagined past. And if you could tie that yearning to your product you could, in theory, create an emotional need for the product.

And they’re very proud of doing this. Nostalgia has therapeutic properties, so they’re not using it as a form of emotional control, they’re just doing a bit of public service while they advertise.

But it’s not just in marketing now. Throughout culture there is sort of stuckness. Our movies, music, and culture seem to be increasingly stuck in the past. Or at least, people have been saying that for the past 30 years.

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In the 90’s there was this fucking idiot who was like: “We’ve basically come up with the perfect world and we’ve found out all the facts so you know, we’re done now. The Russians will never go to war again, so there’s nothing left to challenge the financial free market.” And that’s the End of History: it’s just going to be now, forever.

he’s still at it by the way

And that caught on. Not because history ended but culture slowed.

explains the attitude

There’s that thought experiment: if you took music from the 90s, went 30 years back and played that to someone in the 60s, they’re gonna be like, “Woah what the fuck, this doesn’t sound anything like The Beach Boys.” You take music from now, you play it to someone in the 90s, they’re going to be like, “Okay, that’s nice. Thanks for sharing.”

That’s not to say there haven’t been any musical developments since the 90’s. Of course, some guys learnt to mumble 10 years ago, and autotune 20 years ago, and uh, K-pop. That’s the one brand new genre that we’ve never had before. It didn’t exist 30 years ago. 

Actually, I don’t want to get on the bad side of the K-pop stans, if they got wind of this, they could wipe me off the internet. I’m not being an ignorant racist, I understand that K-pop started on the 11th of April 1992, at about 5pm KST. That’s roughly 30 years ago. Please don’t come for me.

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So, that’s the one brand new genre that we’ve never had before. And I don’t want to get on the bad side of the K-pop stans. But… For a brand new genre that we’ve never had before, it is just noughties pop. It’s just noughties pop with different lyrics.

And that lyrical content has a childlike innocence. Love and drugs; the mainstays of the American pop scene are kind of a no go. So actually it’s more nostalgic than even our stuck-in-the-past, mainstream pop.

Which is deliberate. They are intentionally employing nostalgia as a marketing tool. K-pop has an extremely corporate, top-down, production system. They snap up talent as pre-teens, make them sign “slave contracts,” which you should never do: You should always read a contract through, and also, double check that it hasn’t got “slave” in the name.

But they train their artists to perfection, deny them a private life, and food, and pump out production line hits.

So in 2016, when China limited their import of Korean culture (due to a disagreement over anti-ballistic missile systems) there was a concerted effort across the K-pop industry to penetrate America. K-pop had always followed the American pop trends, so the early attempts were just to produce english-language versions of their existing hits. But that actually had the opposite effect, those english-language versions often had worse international penetration than the originals.

What they found instead, was that you had to make the music’s production reflect American pop music of the recent past. The K-pop agencies are the only ones actively head-hunting producers of the Jonas Brothers, for example. Maybe K-pop’s existing appeal came from how nostalgic it was, so instead of trying to put an American spin on it, you double down and remind people of their childhood.

So, now, while these agencies are starving young boys to death, they’re also going “could we subliminally sample Britney Spears in this song.”

But it’s not just K-pop, not just music, nostalgia’s kind of everywhere now right?

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In movies, there were the Batman/Superman serials in the 40’s, and then 20-30 years later the Batman/Superman movies, and then 20-30 years after that you have Spiderman, which they’ve just been remaking twice a year ever since. They just open up that Sam Raimi Spiderman script and run a find/replace on all the character names. 

But that’s not necessarily about trying to smuggle in some nostalgia as a marketing ploy. It’s just the narrowing parameters of commercialism. The Hollywood studios are continually moving away from making little gambles.

Outside of the scam known as “streaming,” no-one’s really making midsize movies anymore. Which is absolutely deliberate. The theory is, our attention is more divided than ever; most people are only going out to see a movie once a year. So instead of trying new things, they make that movie. Instead of expanding out, creating a broad range of options that are gonna be interesting to different people, some of it good, the model is to pile all your resources and make a few expensive, inoffensive, theme park rides every year.

Now that’s all nice to know, but it’s not really what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about, if you remember, is how technology is making us nostalgic.

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Now maybe technology makes us nostalgic because of how we use it. That feeling of instability which creates nostalgia can be caused directly by technology. Since they released the iPhone back in the noughties, we’re expected to do the constant work of posting. For absolutely no reason. Log off now while you still can. But for a lot of people that constantly running public persona is a stress.

Extreme pushes in productivity and surveillance create stress. Instead of giving their employees time off, Amazon just use cameras to make sure they never stop working, classrooms are adopting surveillance tech designed to squeeze maximum productivity out of children, while harvesting their data for advertisers.

But maybe technology makes us nostalgic because we’re surrounded by reminders of the past. We’re sitting on a database of niche moments from your past. You don’t have to be feeling nostalgic at all, but suddenly your apps are going, “LOOK AT THIS. THIS IS YOU 5 YEARS AGO. LOOK AT THIS” and you have to go, “Alright calm down I’ll be nostalgic.”

And taken to the extreme there are people leaving high-school now, getting to an age where they might start to experiment with different personalities, interests, racial identities… But they can’t actually escape their past because it’s so thoroughly documented.

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But maybe the tech makes us nostalgic because the algorithms themselves are nostalgic. Now, the goal of a recommendation algorithm is to predict what you’ll like, right? But there is a key problem with that: it’s not possible. 

So there’s two approaches:

There’s content-based filtering, which compares the content itself: If you liked Space Jam it’ll recommend Space Jam: A New Legacy, or if you bought a product it’ll find products in the same category, or posts with similar keywords…

Or there’s collaborative filtering: which matches up people with similar tastes and recommends their likes to each other: This person likes clips from the 2011 movie Real Steel and racism, and this person likes clips from the 2011 movie Real Steel, so they might like racism. Just expanded to a mass scale. Comparing all the tastes of all people.

Both ways have drawbacks, so usually it’s some kind of combination of the two, using hundreds of slightly different variations to generate an overall score of “recommendedness” — and it seems to work(, right?)

But no matter how it’s done, it’s an internal filtering system. Which means instead of trying to expand people’s tastes, the goal is actually to cull them. You’re always recommended to be like someone else, and for the system to work that person is like you in the first place. So on a social scale, instead of expanding everyone’s tastes, it has the effect of dragging everyone together and streamlining everyone into a few buckets. 

And it’s always based on data from the past, it’s very difficult for new information to be introduced. And the platforms have so much faith in these algorithms that they often limit your browsing ability beyond the recommendation system. So it’s a closed feedback loop. No new taste information can be introduced, and all recommendations are a copy of the past.

That’s not a prediction. If someone had said to you “I like Nicolas Cage,” so when you go to watch a movie you let them pick what movie to watch out of all the Nicolas Cage movies, when they pick a Nicolas Cage movie, you can’t be like “Oh I predicted that.” That’s n– At best that’s remembering. 

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Then the people making this content have to go along with these algorithms. The only hope for a musician or a YouTuber to be financially viable is that you somehow make a viral hit. Or, you could do this, which is just a waste of everybody’s time.

But it’s not just internet losers, in Hollywood historically it was the executives making sure that no one ever took a risk or made anything good, but now they’ve outsourced that to algorithms.

People joke about scripts being written by algorithm, which is ridiculous, obviously they can’t do that. What they do is use an algorithm to filter existing scripts. See how similar they are to the successes of the past. There’s multiple services built to check over pitches and scripts and casting, and predict the Box Office numbers. By looking at the successes of the past and applying that to the present. So Spiderman with the nouns changed, that’s a smash hit, but if you want to try something new, get fucked. If your script isn’t nostalgic, it just won’t get made.

And weirdly, all of this race-to-the-bottom, nostalgic-feedback-loop shit, actually makes the algorithms work better. It becomes much easier to “predict” that you want some nostalgia, if you’re trapped in a loop of nostalgia.

Again, not a prediction.

But it’s a pretty good outcome for them, from what, let’s be honest, is a mistake.

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So maybe culture has slowed but it’s not just because of tech, these algorithms have only been in use for the past 15 years. Or– well, “only.” It’s a good example of how stagnant things are actually. There haven’t really been any major technological innovations since the noughties, just fiddling at the edges.

Outro V1

So maybe culture has slowed a bit since the 90’s, we’re in a bit of a stagnant time. But it’s not because history ended, it’s not because we’ve come up with the perfect world, it’s that we can’t imagine a better one. We see stagnant growth, our ruling class is getting older and older; not just in politics but in business, the average CEO age is going up 1 year per year.

Outro V2

But I think we’ve seen this cultural stagnation before. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, their politics stopped promising a better future, their culture became stuck in time. They called it the age of stagnation. 

The dream had been that they’d be able to manage society through complete subordination of the market to the state. And through quantifying, forecasting, and planning, you could create a perfect system. And you could, you could create a perfect closed-system. But because of this complete devotion to the plan, it was a system that could not handle the complexity of the real-world.

So faced with this decay, but unable to imagine a different future, their culture began to just repeat the aesthetics of the past. Which made actual engagement with politics become increasingly meaningless, while growth stagnated, the ruling class grew older and older, and despite the fact that everyone could see society crumbling around them, no-one was able to even process it, let alone do anything about it. So when the end came, it was like a dream. Impossible, but at the same time, inevitable.

The dream of neoliberalism is that we could manage society through complete subordination of the state to the market. And through quantifying, forecasting, and planning, we could create a perfect system. And we can, we can create a perfect closed-system. But because of this complete devotion to the market, it’s a system that cannot handle the complexity of the real-world.

So faced with this decay, but unable to imagine a different future, our culture has begun to just repeat the aesthetics of the past. Our politicians no longer promise better futures, while growth has stagnated, our ruling class is getting older and older; not just in politics but in business, the average CEO age is going up 1 year per year.

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Meanwhile, wages stagnate while housing prices increase, which works for people who got onto the property ladder, but locks an increasing percentage of the population out of the market completely. In some ways, trapping entire generations in a child-like state.

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V1

Coronavirus has shown us that the market will put short-term cash-flow above millions of human lives, climate change shows us that it cannot offer any solutions, and we’re supposed to expect an unprecedented financial crash every 10 years. We see stagnant productivity, stagnant growth, growing wealth inequality, and corrupted democracy. It’s not completely terrible, the average quality of life is decent and things like the productivity stagnation don’t really affect your day-to-day life. But it all exposes just how broken and absurd this system is, it cannot handle the real world.

V2

And we know that this system isn’t working, the Global Financial Crisis, Coronavirus, climate change, all expose just how broken and absurd this system is, it cannot handle the real world.

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V1

But we can’t imagine a different future. So instead of looking forward, we seem to be digging up the past and desperately reframing it to try and shore up the present.

V2

So it’s not that history ended, it’s not that we’ve come up with the perfect world, it’s that we can’t imagine a better one. So instead of looking forward, we seem to be digging up the past and desperately reframing it to try and shore up the present.

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Nostalgia can be a destructive, regressive force that traps you in an imagined past. But (when we’re trapped in the present ) we can also deliberately root around in the past for positive moments or abandoned futures, look at it critically, then keep moving forward. And use the reflective power of nostalgia, not to make it the past now, but to imagine new futures.

Nostalgia implodes the world around Caleb.