Nostalgic Feedback Loops w/ Grafton Tanner

Feb 8

EPISODE #35

Writer Grafton Tanner shares his insights into how nostalgia is leveraged by big tech and corporations, how fictional universe-building has impacted the way we think about lived-reality, and how our recent obsession with the past might stop us from imagining a better future.

Grafton Tanner is a writer and musician from Athens, Georgia. He is the author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, and his work has appeared in The Nation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other locations. He writes and performs with his band Superpuppet.

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Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the FUTURES Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.

On this episode I speak to writer and musician, Grafton Tanner.

"Culture essentially freezes because these old ideas don't go away. They don't die out to be replaced by new ones." - Grafton Tanner, excerpt from interview.

Grafton shared his insights into how nostalgia is leveraged by big tech corporations, how fictional universe building has impacted the way we think about lived reality, and how our recent obsession with the past might stop us from imaging a better future.

You can view a full video version of this conversation at FUTURES podcast dot net.

Luke Robert Mason: Now as British musical comedian Mitch Ben once sung: "Everything sounds like Coldplay now." Indeed, the presence of rampant nostalgia in today's digital media environment means that nothing feels new, with the internet essentially allowing us to participate in a form of online demand time-based tourism. Frighteningly devoid of its own aesthetics, big tech has borrowed feverishly from a culture of a time before its own existence and the result is oddly familiar, but also troublingly alien.

In his new book, 'The Circle of the Snake', Grafton Tanner exposes how pop culture propagates and tech companies generate these nostalgic feedback loops. In doing so, he uncovers how they keep us always on, and always consuming. So, Grafton, what is nostalgia and how does it reveal itself in culture and through the media that we consume?

Grafton Tanner: When we think about nostalgia, I think we think of a cultural phenomenon where it's something that we associate with old dated movies, retro movies, retro songs, maybe. Old styles coming back in style. Remakes, sequels, prequels - all of that. I think that's what we normally associate with. There's this new TV show out called WandaVision that is this Marvel cinematic universe, nostalgic kind of trip.

It's important to remember that nostalgia is an emotion. It's first and foremost something that we feel in our bodies. It can scale up like any other emotion - like anger, for example - to a cultural level. Content creators and filmmakers and what-have-you: they can induce any kind of emotion they want in their narratives - whether that's sadness or anger, or could be nostalgia. It just so happens that there's a lot of nostalgia in culture today. There happens to be a lot of nostalgia in human bodies today, especially from when I think about the most recent outbreak of nostalgia coinciding with the outbreak of COVID-19, where people are yearning for the time before lockdowns and when life seemed to be much more normal than it is now.

It is first and foremost an emotion. Whether or not it's a basic human emotion, whether or not it's something that we've always felt all the way back to the very beginning of human time - that's harder to say - but at the same time, it doesn't mean that it's entirely an invention. Like most emotions, they change with certain context. New emotions get felt in new contexts depending on the time or the culture that you live in. Some cultures recognise certain emotions that others don't. It just so happens that nostalgia doesn't really show up in the literature and the world until about the late 1600s. Then over time, it goes from being this disease that people thought at the time, that needed some kind of medical cure, to being an incurable state of being or a kind of emotion, for example. Now it's something that everybody knows and they feel it. They can see it in culture. They can see it in politics, even. There's still no total consensus on exactly what it is.

Mason: So how and I guess why did nostalgia become so pervasive in our modern media?

Tanner: There's a number of reasons for this. I think we can start with probably the most basic reason which is that for a few decades now, marketing researchers and consumer scientists have known that nostalgia sells things pretty well. If you can market a product by inducing nostalgia...you have a can of Coke and it's got an older looking Coke label - maybe one from a few decades ago - you're more likely to sell Coke than if you didn't induce it or if you induced a different emotion. That's the first thing: nostalgia attracts your attention. From there, if a marketing company or advertising company, or even a big-budget filmmaker can get your attention, then, of course, it's going to drive profits.

Mason: The problem though is that the form of nostalgia that we get is kind of a warped version of the past. You even say in the book that the culture industry has much to gain from promoting shades of the past that appeal to intolerant impulses. How has the past been rewritten, and how has it been weaponised against us? It feels like this nostalgia is a deliberate form of misremembering of the past. It's a way to make the past almost more appealing.

Tanner: Yeah, absolutely. For this, I'd like to draw on the scholar Svetlana Boym who wrote 'The Future of Nostalgia' in maybe 2000 or 2001. She split nostalgia into two different kinds of variations. There is restorative nostalgia and a reflective nostalgia, which is kind of like the bad kind of nostalgia and the good kind of nostalgia. It's not necessarily that the emotion is wholly, essentially backwards and bad. It's just that you can utilise it in certain ways to support interests that maybe aren't so good. The point isn't necessarily to suppress all nostalgic tendencies and stare into the future because we should never yearn and look at the past. We're going to do that anyway - I think that's sort of a human condition. The point instead is not to suppress it but to redirect its flows in a way that maybe isn't so bad.

Over the past few decades, I think what we've seen is a rise of that restorative kind which Boym said was the kind of nostalgia that's more interested in getting back to some kind of order point in the past. The kind that's more interested in trying to revive the past no matter what that past might look like. It's the kind of nostalgia that's usually grouped together with the rhetoric of the homeland. These people who are nostalgic in a restorative sense may feel like there's been a grand conspiracy that has separated them from the home and they've got to get back there to it. It's a very reactionary kind of nostalgia.

The reflective kind is less so. It's a little more playful - perhaps even ironic. It's like if I wanted to wear a t-shirt with an old logo on it, I'm not really being serious about getting back to when the old logo was around. It's more just kind of like a playful, ironic thing that I'm doing, to say: Look how far we've come. This used to be popular, and now I'm wearing it. It's almost like a joke, maybe. That kind of nostalgia does well, like Urban Outfitters. Urban Outfitters in the early 2010s and still to this day to an extent.

The restorative kind helps to drive politics and teaches you to buy certain things. Restorative nostalgia says there's this thing we've got to get back to in the past. If you endorse me as a candidate or if you buy this product, then we can get back there.

Mason: I think the best example of where we've seen that and express itself in politics is in the phrase, "Make America great again." That's probably the greatest example that we have of a desire to turn towards some form of nostalgia. It's smart because Trump never defined when America was great. He allowed the aesthetics to be placed onto that phrase by its audience. Every person in America has a slightly different idea of when they believe America was great. Really, what a phrase like that tries to do is, I guess, create some sort of consistent ideology of what America is and was, and thus could be. Also, it really just warps this whole concept of America, doesn't it?

Tanner: Yeah. You're absolutely right. Trump's weird strength was not literally pointing to a time when America was last great. It became this kind of subtext. What ended up happening was his supporters filled in the gaps. They came up with their own idea of when America was last great. If you take a moment to go through YouTube and look up the genre of music called 'Trumpwave' which is an electronic genre of music that takes clips of Trump's speeches and images from Trump on the campaign trail, and back when he was President, and pairs them with this kind of retrowave, synthwave, 80s throwback kind of music - that's essentially taking the subtext and making it text. Those videos have images of everything from 1980s MTV, old Simpsons episodes, but also images of Hulk Hogan and wrestling from back in the day. They're intercut with these images of people crossing the border and protests, as if to say, "We've got to get back there to the older times. Trump is the one to do that, because so much has gone wrong." I recommend looking them up because they're kind of frightening. It's exactly what his base did: fill in the gaps.

Mason: The reason why we desire a return to back-then as you just said it there is because it feels like at least back then, there was kind of a coherent narrative. I guess that's again Trump's power. He was creating this chaos. He was revelling in the destruction of narrative and at the same time, promising a return to the coherent narrative - something it feels like we've lost through our digital media environments.

Tanner: Yeah. To some extent, since making humans, we like to punctuate past events in order to make sense of them and turn them into a narrative or story. In doing so, there's always this kind of tendency when looking back to see things a lot more structure than maybe they really were. Two people can punctuate differently. You have, of course, wide groups of people who looked back into recent history in the West and saw intolerance and all kinds of mass marginalisation and groups of people. Then the other people who perhaps are the ones who are supporting Trump punctuate very differently. They see a past that is one where there wasn't all these evils that they think. Identity politics or things like this, they're really afraid of. That's one of the tricky things about nostalgia. It just so happens that it has recently been far more weaponised by the right in ways that might not align with democracy.

Mason: It felt during that Trump era we were treating America - or at least Trump and the media was treating America - as some sort of cinematic universe where they were trying to ad-hoc rewrite the entirety of its history to then sell it back to the world in a funny sort of way. As a Brit, I've always seen America through the lens of 80s movies, I guess. Speilberg is the reason I've always loved America. Again, the Speilberg vision of America is only a very mediated, very small version of what it is and potentially what it could be.

Tanner: I'm fascinated by the universe building of Marvel and Disney of whatnot. There's a few reasons why I think that's very popular. I do think that universe building functions as a kind of - and bear with me here - I think it functions as a kind of proto virtual reality. It allows us to construct these very finely detailed worlds in which we can inhabit in the sense of watching them, but also they have their own politics and their own backstories.

I just mentioned WandaVision earlier. I was trying to read a review of it and there are the reviews that talk a lot about how it treats nostalgia and whatnot but then there are these reviews that focus more on the Marvel cinematic universe. I admit that I don't know that canon so well. I'm reading it totally confused, like: this is a different world. For the people who like that stuff, they're able to almost live within it, to a certain extent. I think that'll scale to broader society.

It has something to do not only with this gamification or virtualisation of media and narratives, but also a gamification of life and politics. Where it's something that's not rooted in any kind of truth and it's instead something you can build to fit your own story or your own narrative. If you can get enough people to do that together, then I think you end up with something like QAnon - these conspiracy theories that are not rooted in reality whatsoever but are instead rooted in a shared belief that reality can be sort of built and controlled in a certain way to inhabit, almost as you would a game.

Mason: Do you look at Disney handles Marvel and Star Wars as a property? The fans come up with fanfiction which essentially bleeds back into those realities. They've forced the creators of some of these properties to actually do fan service.

I think one of the characters in the new Star Wars Mandalorian series: the fans wanted a certain actor to portray one of the new Jedi characters and what they managed to do there was create enough libidinal energy in this reality to affect another reality. Quite shamelessly I'm a bit of a Star Wars fan and it goes back to the fact that that's where my childhood lived. In 1999 Star Wars episode 1 came out and to me, as a 10 or 11-year-old kid, that was so new and so exciting to me. When I see things like 'The Mandalorian' appear on our screens, I'm harking back to that time as a child.

I've openly Tweeted: Oh God, I feel like a 12-year-old again every time I watch Luke Skywalker appear with a lightsaber inside the Star Wars universe. I just don't know what this media is doing to me but I know I feel that feeling. You kind of get very hopeless. You kind of relinquish yourself to these realities. You want to live inside of them for a little while. I wonder if that's just escapism or if there's something else going on there?

Tanner: Escapism is a part of it, absolutely. People want an escape. That's sort of the part of the plot of the film 'Ready Player One' which is that you get this future world that's totally collapsed and the only way that people can get by is by escaping into the oasis game and just messing around with the safe pop-cultural markers of the previous decades. There's definitely an element of escapism there. There's nothing necessarily wrong about escaping. People, I think, need that escape - absolutely. We don't want to lose you forever. We want you to come back. You don't have to go away forever, and escape. The point is to return and tell us what you've learned in your escape.

I've just finished up a manuscript for a whole book on the politics of nostalgia. Tight focused about nostalgia in the 21st century; it'll be out later this year. I have a chapter on escape. I also have a section about what I call 'the nostalgia industry', which is kind of like the culture industry but one that's more like Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm - that's interested in churning out these nostalgic stories. One of the reasons why Disney is, as Henry Giroux calls it, 'the nostalgia machine' is because Disney has consistently, for years and years, lobbied to keep all of their works out of the public domain so that they can keep the copyright on everything from Mickey Mouse forward. Doing so, they continually create after buying Lucasfilm and having those rights to make Star Wars films - more Star Wars movies, and more Marvel movies and all of this. They know it's going to sell and they know that stuff is never going to go out of copyright. It's always going to be something they can use to sell and build their universes more, and make more money. Build their franchises even more.

The effect of this is that culture essentially freezes because these old ideas don't go away. They don't die out to be replaced by new ones and they're not ever going to, as long as Disney continues to lobby for copyright extensions. The reason why they're able to do that is because they're Disney and they're huge. This sort of process of not just consolidation where these megacorporations buy each other up, but also the process of extending that copyright means there just isn't a lot of new and diverse voices and ideas. Instead, they're kind of all being edged out by the same things - Star Wars, Marvel and Disney.

Mason: I struggle with the Marvel universe. You want to look at these sorts of highly popular media and see how they comment on current society. The Marvel cinematic universe - as you said with WandaVision - is starting to play with the idea of alternative realities, quantum time, the possibility of time travel. When I first saw that, I thought: wow, they're understanding how we're moving towards an understanding of reality in the quantum sense and they're reproducing that on the screen and making us feel more comfortable about the possibility of there being a multitude of possibilities and a multitude of worlds in which we could live.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised than in actual fact it might not be a comment on the latest understanding of physics. What it might actually be is just an idealised example of perfect corporate synergy. If you can create multiple worlds then you can create multiple strands of the same story. Even Marvel now is doing something called 'What If' where they basically take all of the stories they've already told and then slightly change things about them, so that they can retell them again. It's nothing to do with an understanding of how we're moving from a linear understanding of time to a quantum understanding of time. It's everything to do with corporate synergy and that's the sad thing about it.

Tanner: I hadn't heard about this: that they'll change certain things of the stories and repackage them.

Mason: So they're basically using the source material and changing small bits about it to basically milk more IP from the original symbol of the superhero character that they have access to. I agree, WandaVision is a kind of oddly self-referential version of that. I assume you've seen the first couple of episodes. The first couple of episodes are nonsensical. They're set in a 60s TV show. You're sitting there expecting superheroes but it's not until about - no spoiler alerts here - but it's not until about the third or fourth episode that they finally create the bleed between the outside world and this fictional TV world that's being created - we don't know yet - but being created by what seems to be the main characters. There just seems to be this odd playfulness that's happening, that we are passive observers to.

On reading your book, it made me more critical about how Disney operates with their IP.

Tanner: That playfulness attracts attention. They can play with their published works as much as they want because like I said, they've got firm copyright hold on them. At first glance it's like: wow, how self-referential and meta. That's kind of cool and far more interesting than blatant spoonfed freebased nostalgia of something. But it's all serviced to their profits and them trying to get you to watch it by any means necessary.

This is part of the reason why Easter egg marketing is so effective. People tend to, like I said, be attracted to the things that they're able to recognise. That also becomes a process of gamifying culture and media - the act of watching then becomes not necessarily something about keeping up with the plotline or understanding deeper themes, or character motivation or whatever it is that we do when we consume narratives and stories. Instead, it's more about trying to hunt the references in order to tally them and see how many you can see. It's like a citational practice of consuming.

Ultimately, it serves them really well. It serves a company like Disney really well because they know it's going to do well.

Mason: I wonder whether that citational way of watching large popular media has bled back into real life. It really does feel like the QAnon thing, doesn't it? You look for any clue within reality to be able to generate the narrative that points back at the assumption that you had. The spoilers are in the little referential cues that you can notice in reality. That's how these weird conspiracy theories almost begin.

Tanner: Yeah. I was just talking to somebody the other day and talking about maybe Trumpism as a kind of ideology that operates that very same way. An ideology that went viral or something and that people believe because it is kind of like a game. Conspiracies are like that. Just existing in the world.

If you happen to leave your house - now we're in the pandemic or whatnot - but being able to go down the road and see signage, billboards, brick and mortar stores: nostalgia is not just in the narratives we consume on Netflix of Disney Plus but it's literally everywhere. Even in the real world, there's always this spotting the reference that we tend to be doing. Even just existing in the world. It's really hard to escape that kind of Easter egging of reality, even beyond the media that we consume.

Mason: The key to your book really is about nostalgia's relationship with big tech and media corporations. How do the big tech companies keep us locked inside of this nostalgia trap using algorithmic analysis and all sorts of neverending feedback loops?

Tanner: There's a few ways that I see nostalgia being generated out of our relationship with big tech and the devices that we use. Being a social media user and being tethered to certain devices like iPhones or whatnot kind of keeps you always on. You're always doing this immaterial labour of branding and networking or whatnot. That is a breeding ground for nostalgia because there's always this yearning to throw the phone down and get off.

We were just talking about trying to get off social media and leave all that behind. Because we're always working hustling and there's no routineness to it if you're essentially having to sell yourself. That can be very stressful on a person. Therefore, nostalgia tends to come with that.

There's also the fact that the internet itself is a giant archive and you can pretty much look up anything from your past that you want to. It could be things from your childhood. I did this sort of experiment on myself where I followed this account on Instagram that just posts once a day these images of old Lego sets from the 80s and 90s. It's literally a hit of nostalgia every time I go on there and see. I'm not even looking for it. I just check my Instagram and there it is. Being able to look up anything and find anything from your past - old TV shows, old random commercials that only aired a few times but you saw them enough a few decades ago to remember them and so watching them again makes you feel nostalgic for that time - that's kind of like how the internet works.

In terms of the algorithms that we interact with all the time when we're online, there's been a lot of great work on algorithmic bias. Safiya Noble is one of them. She wrote 'Algorithms of Repression' in which she writes about the biases of these people who create the algorithms. The computer scientists and coders or whatnot end up coding their biases in things like Google Search, for example. Then you have people like Catherine Stinson who is a researcher looking at what happens with culture. When how we come across new cultural ideas is by essentially an algorithm recommending it to us, what happens then? She writes about how that leads to a general homogenisation of ideas because the algorithm is only going to recommend what it thinks you like and what it thinks you like is what you've previously looked up or consumed before. What it recommends is a self-derivative of that. Algorithmic feedback loops work by recommending things to you that you already know that you like, or maybe you already tell the algorithm that you like.

It just so happens that if that happens to be a piece of nostalgia - if you happen to watch 'Saved by the Bell' because you're super nostalgic or whatnot - the algorithm is going to see that and give you nostalgia over and over again, even if you didn't want it.

Mason: All of this, Grafton, feels like it started at a particular time. You point towards perhaps two moments that began our nostalgic turn. That's the shit sandwich that was 9/11 in 2001, and the recession in 2008. What is it about those moments in history and culture that made nostalgia so appealing to us?

Tanner: I'd like to start at 9/11 because it ushered in the 21st century but it also ushered in a particular kind of nationalistic nostalgia in response to what Robert J. Lifton has called 'futurelessness', which is this mass belief among people that anything is possible now that we know that people can fly planes into buildings. He writes that in the aftermath of 9/11, there is a feeling of deep despair. Not just any kind of despair but a despair that the future could only be more horrible now that we know this, because we can never truly be safe.

It's also expounded by then going to war and now not only are you worried about random acts of terrorism but now we're at war. Will the war come home to the homeland? And all of this. That sort of futurelessness that he writes about - I argue that nostalgia tends to be almost a way to ward that off, by settling instead and rooting oneself into these familiar, perhaps even patriotic ideas of the past and the homeland, and therefore feeling safer.

After 2008, my generation for example, were coming out of college and whatnot and not having work and no jobs. They were feeling pretty much knocked out at the knees moving back in with their parents - something that's happening right now again in the pandemic. But also starting to consume nostalgic content around this time using some of these algorithmic recommender things that were starting to become more mainstream around that time.

If you're out of a job because of a recession and you've moved back in with your parents, and you start binging a bunch of nostalgic media - something that people have been doing for the past year especially, but also right after the recession for years after 2008 - then what you're going to be recommended is more of that nostalgic content, thus trapping you in this nostalgic consumption loop.

Mason: Yeah, when you mentioned 2001 and 2008 being so prevalent, I did have to think: what do I remember from that moment? I was in my teens, you were in your teens as well. We were 11 or 12 years old to about 18 years old. I can't confidently point at anything that denotes that era. It feels like there's a physical gap in my memory. It's weird to me that I can't point at a single cultural moment between those times. Maybe it's just a factor of my age and that I was in my teens, and that wasn't something I was particularly looking for. Or perhaps we just did have this beginning of the end of cultural creation. Away from the new and into this nostalgic period.

Tanner: Yeah. I feel kind of similar. I think my memory of it is that there was a lot of fear and anxiety. It was the beginning of a mass constant ambient kind of anxiety, that has only seemed to just increase with each new crisis. There's also a lot of push to get people to not only go and fight these wars - in the aftermath of 9/11, the war on terror - but also for everybody to come together and support it. To unify the audience of the United States especially - but the West - to support this cause.

In a book that I have coming out later this year about nostalgia, I write about the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as a way to codify nostalgia in society, to say that to secure the homeland itself is a nostalgic kind of impulse. When people feel that feeling, what they yearn for is the safety of home, but it's different because home isn't necessarily a place you can go to now. That would cure homesickness, but nostalgia is a home that exists somewhere in the past, that we really can't get back to and hence there's that feeling. To refer to the United States as "the homeland" which is something that had been done before, but to literally make a department out of it, now suddenly there's this feeling where this place is sacred. It's our origin point, and if we aren't careful it's going to be under attack, thus we lose it all. There's this sort of constant nostalgia for the homeland which is always at risk of being lost. That's something that is, in my mind, one of the major long-lasting effects of 9/11: this terror of losing the origin point, which is the United States.

This is now being written about a little bit more widely. Especially in the wake of all the protests that happened under Trump in 2020. People were writing about how the war came home. It was like the war is finally in the United States after so many years of it being over there. Now it's here, and we're almost at war with each other. It's this feeling that we have to hold onto this thing called "the homeland". If you aren't nostalgic for it, then the DHS is going to send its boots after you and enforce you to be nostalgic for it.

Mason: I think I really misunderestimated the long term psychological impact of 9/11 on our generation. It didn't become real to me because of course, I'm British and the way I saw it was 11 years old on a square TV. It didn't hit home to me until I was in New York. I got into an Uber cab at JFK and the Uber driver goes, "Man, where you flown from?" I go, "I came from London." He goes "How is it dude?" I go, "It's about an eight hour flight." He goes, "Man, I can't fly." I go, "What do you mean?" He goes, "I can't fly, man. I'm probably your age from about 30 years old. I can't fly." I go, "Why?" He goes, "I saw those planes go into those buildings on TV and ever since then, man, I've been scared of flying. I won't step onto a plane." It was at that moment it became obvious to me that that has had such a scar on our generation.

Tanner: Yeah, I mean I haven't flown in a while because of the pandemic but I think about it every time I get in a plane. There are plenty of crises that predate 9/11 that help to unleash nostalgia. It does seem like for longer than even just the past 20 years, well through the last century even, each new major event just unleashes nostalgia on a lighter scale. Once it starts to die down, suddenly the next major crisis happens and then it spreads once again.

We're living through that now. The major crisis events are starting to come one after the other a little more quickly. I regard Trump's four years in office as one of these events too. One of the kinds of nostalgia - not just the kind that he induced - but also the nostalgia for the Obama era. You have a number of people on the left who voted for Joe Biden because they felt that he could bring us back to that origin point; back to that safe point. When in fact, of course we know, the time before Trump wasn't very safe at all. It wasn't like some utopia by any stretch of the imagination.

Now we're in yet another perhaps more powerful one - perhaps one to even rival the nostalgia outbreak of 9/11 - which is the COVID-19 pandemic. Just a week into the lockdowns, a number of these articles were being written about binging nostalgic media to try and get through it. I think we're living through a major moment where that emotion is very high.

Mason: I wonder if it wasn't the internet and if it wasn't for this nostalgic media, if we would ever make it through the COVID-19 crisis. We've been going through this for almost a year now. We've been in and out of lockdown in the UK for pretty much a year. February 2020 marks the beginning of when we were slipping into lockdown, and it's February 2021 now. That time has passed so quickly. I wonder if there is a weird effect of nostalgia and the web, and how media is presented in this format messes with memory.

Tanner: I think it definitely does. It definitely messes with your sense of temporality and of being able to experience time. I think even Doug Rushkoff said that the 2010s were post temporal. It didn't feel like the time passed as it normally would in the 2010s. There were also writers who were coming out with articles at the end of the 2010s saying the exact same thing - it felt like they didn't happen, and whatnot. I think some of this has to do with the way that we consume content and media, and by extension the way that we consume events, and then understand them as well. The sense of time passing over the past year, especially - in 2020 during the pandemic - that sense of time passing is very different for different people. I think in one way, it can feel like it's gone on forever. In another way, like you say, it doesn't seem like it's been a year at all.

I think about over the summer feeling like that didn't exist in 2020. I don't know what it was, but my summer experience seemed to be a different year. I went from lockdown in March and April to September. I'm not really sure what that means but I think that consuming nostalgic things at the very least can help you get through really bad times. How that changes your sense of time, I think depends on how much of the media that you do consume. I think for so many people over the past year, there just doesn't seem to be a regular beginning, middle and end. Some of this also has to do with the fact that there isn't really an end yet, to the pandemic.

Mason: It's not just about how media is consumed, but it's how it's represented - how it's captured and represented. As I was reading your book and as I'm listening to you now, I can't help but remember Douglas Coupland, the science fiction author who in 2012 at a presentation in the Serpentine Gallery jokingly talked about this idea of Ninten-acillin. Nineten-acillin, a magical drug that you can take that makes you think 9/11 never happened.

The reason he proffered this idea was if you look at the footage from that day, everyone's hair and everyone's clothing looks oddly familiar. It's been almost 20 years but the aesthetics, the fashion, hasn't really changed much. The only thing that seems odd - apart from the fact that all the footage from that moment is in 4:3 - is that nobody is standing in the street pointing their phone at the sky as it's happening. He argues that that means two things: Either 9/11 was the last top-down mediated event in global history - the last global event where you and I, and everybody across the globe would have seen six or seven camera angles of those planes hitting the buildings - that's all we have. That becomes burnt into our retina.

What we could actually end up seeing 9/11 as is possibly the last under-documented event in history, because there weren't people there who were able to point their phones at the sky. I just wonder, how all of that changes our memories of these events? The fact that, look, we're not the people who are mediating these events at that point in time, but we are now.

Tanner: That's interesting because even when it happened, it was considered a major media spectacle. Of course, now we know that compared to the dizzying amount of information we can record at any given time - all of us that have access to phones or whatnot - it does seem very under-mediated by comparison.

I do think that over-mediation leads to a kind of amnesia; that there doesn't seem to be a very well established, coherent understanding of something. I think that the reason why it feels like the 2010s didn't really happen is because there was such a gathering 'infoglut' - is what Mark Andrejevic calls it - but it kept gathering and gathering. Where each of us is kind of recording our own ideas and our own realities. There's just so much information. No one could ever collate it into some kind of meaningful beginning, middle and end. I think there has to be a slight bit of under-mediation in order to make sense of certain things.

Mason: But Grafton, do you think America is even capable of doing under-mediation? The thing about 9/11 that really struck me was in 2012 - which was the first time I ever visited New York - I went to go and see what was then at the time the 9/11 Memorial. Then at the time, the thing was still being built. The Freedom Tower hadn't been built yet. I had to go through this faux airport-style security to even be let on the grounds to go and see the fountains - the infinity fountains that they have there. You arrive and the infinity fountains are built verbatim, on the grounds of the buildings. These two massive squares that represent exactly where the towers were.

As you get closer to these memorials, around the outside, they have all the names written. You see all the names of the people who had died. The thing that was most striking to me was the sound. As you get closer to these infinity fountains, what you hear is 'shhhoooooo' - which oddly enough is the sound of buildings in freefall. It's like they mediated the actual collapse - the tragedy itself - and then have fixed it and are constantly representing that.

I didn't realise what sort of psychological impact that might have until I went to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a couple of years later. The Holocaust Memorial is an entirely different visceral experience. You go there and it's these concrete pillars that are built amongst this very uncomfortable stonework. It's these cobbles that you have to walk through and eventually as you walk through the Memorial, these pillars sort of engulf you. They get larger and larger, because the ground is dipping. There are no names. There are no names of the folks who died - the Jews who died in the Holocaust. You have this weird, uncomfortable, visceral response. You feel like something terrible has happened, or something terrible is happening. You hear the echoes of other people in that space. It's not specifically trying to remediate what happened in the Holocast - obviously that would be horrible to do - but then when you compare that to the 9/11 Memorial and you're hearing the infinity fountains, you're like: why are they focusing purely verbatim on the collapse? It feels like they're trying to force the eye and the ear back to that moment, back to that moment, back to that moment - constantly.

I wonder if that's just an American way of mediating memory. It's not possible to do what they've done in Europe with the Holocast Memorial which is to create a visceral feeling of something. Of course, the Holocaust Memorial is not in most people's recent memory, so there has to be a different way of remembering.

Tanner: Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. I think that's interesting. I think about if we talk about 9/11 as a kind of spectacle, then the Memorial being itself a kind of spectacle makes sense. I think there's something to do with this. You talk about the 9/10-acillin or whatever. That has something to do with the way we remember 9/11. Having something to do with the way we remember 9/10. Even for the ones who weren't even alive then, with these commemorations of 9/11, there's this idea of: everything was calm and placid. To pretend everything was good on September 11th, it was like the world ended.

In 2011, ABC News ran this thing called, 'The Way We Were', in which they highlighted the major news stories of September 10th - 'before the world changed forever', I think is what they say. That's got something to do with that kind of memorial of something that's so spectacularly devastating and deadly that just occurs in an instant and that just right before, it's a different world. Just the day before or a few hours before, on September 10th, it's like a foreign country. I want to say that maybe there's something there with that.

Mason: Do you think we have a - I have to be careful here - but do you think we have a weird desire for something that momentous to happen again? To shock us out of the current malaise that we're in. Is there an odd thirst for a media moment like that, that we can all share collectively? It feels like we no longer have any of these forms of grand narrative. I'm not saying by any means that I want another terrorist incident to occur, but what is it on a global scale that could occur, that would shock us into dealing finally with the new? It just feels like we're dealing with this trauma and we're dealing with it by avoiding it. By going to the time before it even happened, to escape the memory of it even happening.

Tanner: Well I think that there's some post 9/11 cinema scholars who have talked about some of the disaster films or whatnot that came out in the wake of 9/11 as being a replaying of the grand, spectacular, explosive, traumatic moment. I think about films like, The Day After Tomorrow' which I believe was post 9/11. 'The Transformers' films and whatnot, and these massive visual feasts of destruction that were really popular in the 2000s. I think that serves a kind of way to deal with and feel through some of that initial shock of 9/11. To replay it over and over again as if to feel it once again for the first time, the sheer horror.

I know that shortly into the COVID-19 pandemic, with me and my friends, we're texting one another and calling. It does seem to be like a galvanizing moment, suddenly. Maybe not the same kind of galvanizing moment you had after 9/11 which was one that was very much about reknitting a community under the signs of patriotism, for example, and therefore justifying going to war. This was like a collective, "we're all in this together" kind of feeling. That eventually went away. It went away for a number of reasons. One of those was the wake of George Floyd's public execution that led to the protests of people who were already stuck at home, without jobs and whatnot, feeling the weight of the pandemic a few months in. Then something horrific like that happens and they hit the streets, rightfully so.

It's not going to take a giant, spectacular, horrific event to galvanize a lot of people in a way to then deal with 9/11 instead. Each event sort of plays off the one before it. The trauma only increases, because it's kind of just so hard. At least in the United States, it's relatively difficult to live as just a working person. How many of my friends lost healthcare when they lost their jobs in the wake of the pandemic? How many of us have had a burden by student debt which can be literally just eliminated tomorrow, if our President wanted to do it. All these things that make it so difficult that when major national crises happen, you barely can survive.

Mason: Then that becomes a thing. There's nothing to be nostalgic for if we're jumping from terrible moment to terrible moment. There's not going to be a generation that looks back on COVID-19 and goes, "Oh, those were the good old days." You know?

Tanner: Well, it depends. That's the funny thing about nostalgia. I think it was Phoebe Bridgers who Tweeted, "These better not be the good old days." I replied and was like, "I think they're probably going to be, because that's usually how it happens." I was talking to someone else the other day about being slightly nostalgic for their early days - at least in the US - of lockdown, where they didn't really have to do anything. The reason why they feel that was down to being in the United States and being forced back to work - when maybe you don't want to because the pandemic is still so bad and the numbers are still so high. Of course you'd yearn for when you could just stay at home, if you're privileged enough to do that, and not have to risk your life trying to work whilst this thing is so bad.

Nostalgia tends to misremember all parts of the past. It remains to be seen whether or not some of these recent things like the COVID-19 pandemic will be looked back at fondly. I'm just not sure.

Mason: The interesting thing to me is not just how nostalgia allows us to canonise media or canonise reality. It's how it's forcing us in the present to canonise ourselves. Let me explain that a little more. We're essentially using social media to create a canon version of our own identity, to then represent that to the world and to fix everything - by which I mean hold in place everything that we are in the present. When you talk about nostalgia, the first social media platform most folks think of is Instagram. Instagram originally was set up to create these little filters over those very low-resolution images so they would look very referential. They would look like little polaroid square photographs. It was this very cute appeal to nostalgia.

What Instagram has morphed into with this whole new age of Instagram influencers is something where it's no longer about nostalgia, but it's about creating fictional layers on top of nostalgia. Creating whole new realities. Instagram influencers sit and edit their photos ad infinitum and draw out certain colours, do these odd high dynamic range filters. They put fake stars into the sky. They put fake birds and fake clouds, fake lights. They're creating this utterly false rendering of the world. All that ends up doing - as someone who then has to perceive that media - is it provokes a deep sadness. It provokes a deep sadness that we can't live there, in the reality that they've created. My question is: how do platforms like Instagram lead to this very warped understanding of who we are and how we should canonise our lives?

Tanner: You said 'fix' and really, both meanings of the word - not just solidify into place but also to correct for the future you to look back on. Not just Photoshop, but using the very basic editing softwares you can get on your phone before you upload a photo. More than just editing, curating and selecting what you choose to put online. Therefore, it becomes a part of your feed or whatnot. You've got all these layers of unreality between the thing that you experienced and what ends up showing on Instagram when you go back to it. This is kind of like the main problem with photography in general. It allows you to fix moments and look back at them, and perhaps feel that nostalgic rush a lot easier than if you just had to sit back and close your eyes and try hard to think about it. Now you just look and it's there.

Being able to constantly document your life and curate it to make it look as good as you possibly can or as unreal and utopian as possible means that later on, you're likely to look back and see that fake world on Instagram, and yearn for it. Being able to have that much information about yourself and that many images of yourself, in the future, you'll look back. You'll see how you used to look and what you used to do. You can look back on your feeds and look back before February 2020. You can look at the way life used to look. I guarantee you'll feel a little bit of nostalgia.

Something that's relatively new: Katy Eichhorn wrote this book called 'The End of Forgetting' in which she talks about growing up with social media and being a young person, becoming aware that your parents have since the day you were conceived put stuff about you online, including images of you when you were a kid, and a baby and whatnot. She writes about how that causes the child to always be there and follow you into the future when maybe it's something you need to leave behind. I'm trying to remember, she talks a little bit about nostalgia. Being able to look back at what may be by the time you're 18 years old in this day and age is your entire life documented on something like Instagram, does make it relatively difficult - and I think she would agree - to move into the future and leave some of that stuff behind, and let that stuff be forgotten. That being said, that stuff can be forgotten. All you've got to do is deactivate the account and that stuff is gone.

Mason: It's not even documentation though, is it? It's remediation. The way I can look back on my childhood is I go to the loft or the cupboard under the stairs at my parent's house and there's a biscuit tin of printed photos that allow me to see myself as a child. The moment at which you look at that photo, suddenly your memory changes. I remember less about my childhood by looking at those images and remember more about the moments that were captured by looking at those images. We've got to be really careful with what we capture and what we fix, and then fixate on. I do think it can have a real impact on how we tell the narrative of our lives back to ourselves.

The same sort of interest that you have about what happens to these kids who are born digital, whose parents have mediated their lives up until they're 18. In some sort of weird moment of digital bar mitzvah, hand over the passwords to their accounts. Surely the thing you'd want to do in that moment, as any 18 year old, is just to delete everything, to get rid of everything, and to start again and be able to play your identity. To be your own person and not be fixed by the images of yourself that have been put on these platforms.

Of course, as you write so beautifully in the book, what these platforms end up doing with these images like that are analysing them for these cues that can then be used to sell things back to us. There's hundreds of photos of this kid sucking his thumb, then we know that he's orally instead of anally retentive. That's going to change the way in which advertisers market to him. There's almost a good reason to not put children into these platforms; not to mess with their memories by fixing them and then allowing them to fixate on how the parents have subjectively edited their identity.

Tanner: It's a very strange problem. It's a novel one. I think that's why her book is so great. She's one of the first to really think about this problem and what it might mean for people who are coming of age and wanting to perhaps leave some parts of themselves behind that they should leave behind. Like I said, that is a problem but there's also the problem of being able to get rid of that stuff pretty quickly. Nothing ever really dies on the internet, you know? But if you wanted to get rid of all of that, you could just deactivate it and it's gone. That itself is almost an issue.

Svetlana Boym was writing this in the early 2000s. She said - I'm going to paraphrase it - but on the internet, you've got these two options. Either total memory recall by having all of this stuff archived for you to see, or total disappearance, and it's gone. It's very tenuous. It's not under the stairs with the photographs. I guess I could throw those into the fire or whatever, but I cannot get rid of them or call them up as easily and quickly as I can get my phone out and scroll really fast, and within seconds be in the past - or press a button and it's gone.

Mason: It's going to be difficult to navigate the relationship that we have with information that we place in the cloud. Again, Douglas Coupland talks about this beautifully. It's so prevalent for our moment right now. He talks about how if you want time to pass quickly, then just go on the internet. It feels like in a COVID-19 environment where all that I do is spend time on a machine interacting where there is no differentiation to my day with the exception of being able to do these podcast interviews, this moment has passed so quickly. All of my memories are generated by my interactions with a shiny glowing rectangle sitting in front of me. That's a problem at this stage but it can get worse if we start to escape completely into virtual realities of our own creation.

Tanner: I think that's one of the important things about escape. It's important to escape every so often to reorient yourself and get a different perspective, but there has to be a return process. Mere escapism could be really dangerous. It wrenches people out of the world in ways that might be really unproductive then they really need to just get away for a little bit, and then be able to come back and give what they've learned back to the present. I write about this in the book that's coming out later this year. One of my problems with people who are always trying to go off the grid and trying to escape to a cabin in the woods is that it's a solution only for those people. It doesn't help society or the collective whatsoever, just by exiting society and being like, "I'm out of here." That's a solution only for you.

The guy Mark Boyle - I think that's his name - who goes by the term ‘The Moneyless Man’, who started to live without money at the turn of the 2010s and then ended up moving out to a cabin in the woods without any technology whatsoever has written some books about this experience. He did this interview a few years back where he essentially admits, "Yeah, I don't know anything about Brexit. I don't really know, and thankfully I don't have to worry about that. It's like: good for you, good for you. That's one of the problems I have with escapism. The pure total escape, "I'm off the grid, see ya." - that doesn't help anything. Nobody but you, basically.

Mason: It doesn't have to be that pure, does it? There could just be an advantage of managing our relationship with digital technology. Having a dopamine break from these devices. That doesn't necessarily need to be a privileged position. It's difficult when your job is so intimately tied to shiny glowing rectangles. If it's not, why can't we begin to retreat away from the use of this social media? Is the dopamine kick just way too strong right now?

Tanner: Recently, in the past few years, you've had a number of ex Silicon Valley technocrat guys come out and argue for people to just put down the phones. This is what 'The Social Dilemma' was about. I got in a fight with them on Twitter a few months back. I feel really embarrassed about it. They were like "put down the phone, take a digital detox. Put down the phone." I teach at college and I often tell my students, "Take six months off of social media just to see what it's like and to also maybe give yourself a break. Just to experience what that might feel like." When I got off Facebook, it was a strange experience and kind of a cool experience. I felt way more rooted, in a way.

At the same time, this blanket statement to say, "just put down your phones" is a problem for a few reasons. One is that as you say, not everybody can put down their phones. People who rely on phones for their jobs have got to work. I hate that that's the way it is, but you can't just put it down. Students, for example, are constantly plugged into their phone. Not just because they want to post on Instagram, but because they've got education apps that update constantly what their grade is. They've got to turn this stuff in and so they're very much tethered to their phones, because they're students. Also, just going off of social media might make you feel a little bit better but the main problems with big tech are still kind of there. You've still got people like content moderators who are working in these gigs that don't pay very well, to go through the refuse that's posted online and see all this crazy stuff that they're tasked with monitoring. It's a horrible gig and one that's been written about. You've got all these problems with tech that have to do with the environment, like how much water it takes to cool these data farms and everything. Yes, it's fine and good that I'm off, but the problems are kind of still there.

Mason: You're right. It's a very privileged position to be able to switch off. It feels like what's at stake is our ability to look objectively at these platforms. When you're in it, when you're consuming it, when you're enjoying it - whether that's just the dopamine hit that you're getting constantly or it's the fact that it's another Star Wars thing and that's a wonderful form of escapism. It's very hard to turn away from it.

Even in my own life, I had to literally be dragged kicking and screaming away from it, by doing a Vipassana meditation retreat. I signed up for this thing, and God knows why. A couple of days before I realised I had to do it, my first thought was: ah, there are so many emails I still have to reply to. I don't have time to take 10 days out. Reluctantly, I got on the train and went to do the Vipassana meditation. Basically, for anybody who doesn't know, Vipassana is 10 days of silent meditation. The first part of that is locking away your devices; locking away your phones and locking away your electronics. The anxiety I felt for the first couple of days of: I didn't inform so and so that I was going away. I didn't put an out of office email on. There's probably people emailing me wanting things. I probably should have deactivated my social media because people are going to be worried that I've disappeared and they can never reach me again. The reality was, of course, that when I came back from the 10 days, no one cared. There wasn't that trauma or anxiety.

The second thing I found during that process - again, I was in a very privileged position to be able to even take 10 days out to perform silent meditation - but one thing I realised was that by putting the phone away, I was finally able to have a train of thought. That sounds odd, but every lunchtime you would go on these breaks. During these breaks that were about an hour-long, after lunch, you could walk around this small piece of grassland. There's nothing to do. It sounds odd to say, but there's nothing to do. All you do is you walk. As you're walking, you're thinking. The crazy thing about silent meditation is that silence is deafening. All these thoughts rush to the head. What you can't do is stop the thoughts from rushing to your head by turning to your phone. You can't turn to your shiny glowing rectangle - that little comfort blanket - and check notifications or go Tweet something, or go watch a YouTube video. You're stuck with the thoughts that are rushing in. The only way to deal with the thoughts that are rushing in is to quite literally deal with them. To think them through. You can't write anything down during this process either so you have to spend time trying to work out how you're going to catalogue this memory or this thought that's come to your mind. You begin to work stuff out, simply because there's no interruption.

It was so shocking and frightening to me that this process felt new to me. Of course, there was a time before the phones. I wonder if that's the thing that we find so appealing: the ability to have a train of thought. You and I - we're around 30 years old, each - there was a time where before the Nokia 3310, we didn't have these devices. We were able to grok and play in reality, create our own little fictions, but with our friends and in a community. I always want to be careful to say that that time was better. Certainly, without the phone, I wouldn't be able to do what I do. I wouldn't be able to have a job. I wouldn't be able to pay my rent without these digital devices and the ability to do this podcast. But equally, it does feel like - again, as Douglas Coupland says - it does feel like I really miss my pre-internet brain.

Tanner: Yeah. I feel that. I think a lot of people who lived that divide - what you might call 'digital migrants', but even some sort of natives who can just imagine what it must have been like pre-smartphone era - to some extent each context in which there's a dominant technological thing like the TV or whatever, there's still always this: Oh I remember, back when my pre-TV brain. That's normal. That's not to say that all media change is the same - it's not true. I definitely feel that. I think that it's important to have some distance from devices that you're tethered to all the time. I think it's normal to yearn for some time away from them. I think that my issue with it is when it gets prescribed as a solution for everybody. "That's just what we've got to do." It puts the burden on behaviour change on all of us when we can't help that. You said, "I can't help that I had that anxiety", because that's your job. That's how you grow the podcast, and whatnot. It's unfortunate but it's true.

I'm in support of people having a healthy relationship with their devices, even if that means occasionally getting off and trying to get their head straight, to have another train of thought. You need a train of thought, as you say. The idea that that's the way that you solve the attention economy or something is just not true. Unfortunately, it's a really popular solution, thanks to 'The Social Dilemma', where they essentially argue for that. They say if we all put our phones down, it's akin to pressing a button having the whole thing disappear; the whole big tech disappear. We just know that that's just not true at all.

Mason: The thing that scares me, Grafton - following you on Twitter and having some interactions with you on there, I know it scares you too - is the fact that it's big tech that's offering solutions to the problem that big tech created in the first place. That's best captured by the idea of the wellness industry. The wellness industry is a billion-dollar market, suddenly created from a problem that big tech created in the first place. The wellness industry is the thing that's going to give us back our mind and our memories. We get these meditation apps - Calm, and Headspace. Headspace did this painful Netflix series. Again, it's all about using digital technology to get us to the place before digital technology. It's like they have to be there regardless. The wellness industry is selling us the wellness we would have had if it wasn't for those buggers in the first place.

Tanner: Yeah. I think that was my initial problem with 'The Social Dilemma' guys. Their thing is called 'The Center for Humane Tech'. It used to be called 'Time Well Spent'. Now they're 'The Social Dilemma' guys. Whatever, it's the same group of people. That's my initial problem with them. From an ethical standpoint, I didn't want to take their solutions because they were the ones who helped create the problem, if you will. The solutions themselves are tech solutions to tech problems. It's not completely made explicit in 'The Social Dilemma', but if you dig around a little big on their website, 'The Center for Humane Tech', read some of the stuff that those guys have written about how the utopias that they can consider, the ones that they dream up; this is the perfect world we want to live in. Justin Rosenstein wrote this treatment of what the future would look like post-big-tech, or whatever. It is like a digital utopia.

There's no indication that it would be any different than what we're in right now. There's nothing about the environmental costs of living in a digital utopia, or who's going to moderate it and make these things, and devices. There is a supply chain here, they don't just show up out of the sky. They're made under-exploited means. That's a major issue. You know what? They see tech solutions to tech problems because it's their narrow tech-focused worldview that they have. Everything is through that lens.

Mason: The core sadness, I guess, in the book is that we spend all our time focused on nostalgia and if we spend all of our time living in the past, it becomes increasingly difficult to embrace and to think about the future, if all of our narratives and the narratives we really care about exist in a time before the present, it really problematises how we choose to think about the future. When folk do think about the future, they can often be dismissed as naive utopians. The idea that tomorrow is going to be so much better than today - again, this American 60s version of the future. As you so beautifully said, the only way to create a liveable future is by creating the circumstances in the present that can breathe those futures. What is it that we do right now, for us to not just have a relationship with the past but to have an honest and authentic, creative relationship with the future?

Tanner: I think it starts, like I said, with not necessarily suppressing nostalgia or trying to excise it out of this situation. That, also, is a very privileged thing to say: to tell someone to not feel nostalgic. Imagine telling someone after everything we've gone through in the past year, "Just suck it up. Deal with the pandemic and deal with your feelings." - just no. You're right, that starts to vere into this techno-utopianism where the future is always better. We can have hope for the future. It does require work in the present. To be able to do that, we do have to rely on the past. It's not necessarily something we can write off forever.

I think that in terms of directing nostalgia and being able to have a more radical kind of nostalgia that yearns for parts of the past in which there was collective action against capitalism or what have you - the marks of state and corporate powers against regular people - I think is an important use of emotion. There are times when nostalgia isn't an appropriate emotion to use and it's not an appropriate emotion to use.

The same thing with anger - sometimes, anger is very useful when we use it in the right way. The protests of 2020 or fighting for the rights of regular, normal people against the powers that be, if you will. Other times, anger is not very useful at all. Same thing with nostalgia. That's part of it.

In terms of a wider tech critique, I think it's important that the conversation about tech has to go beyond the micro-level which is the individual psychological effects of big tech. They're important, but it's getting beyond that. It can't even go to the middle level - the mezzo level - politics and things like this. It's got to go all the way to the top. You've got to be able to have conversations in the mainstream about how big tech is capitalism. It doesn't exist separately from it and it's not a solution to capitalism. It's not an aberration. It's just capitalism doing its thing.

I think we're going to be faced with two very dominant discourses about big tech and trying to solve the problems of big tech in the next decade. On one hand, you're going to have 'The Social Dilemma' guys who are going to advocate for their version of an attention economy that's going to be like, "It's not Mark Zuckerberg, he's the bad guy. Trust me and trust my attention economy. It's going to be tech doing the work for you as opposed to tech being against you." We know there are problems with that. The other tech critique you're going to see over the next 10 years is what I call 'the right-wing tech critique', which you're already starting to say in the wake of Trump being de-platformed, which is Conservatives saying that big tech squashes free speech, and that it's this evil dominant thing that is going to take away our rights, being able to say what we want to say.

We have to come up with other discourses and plenty of people are doing the work on this. Those other two are very dominant. Why? Because then you could critique big tech without having to critique things like capitalism and the exploitation of capitalist labour, which can be kind of difficult. In doing so, might call out some of these people on their interests that they have. If they were to be too critical of capitalism, they might be out of a job.

Mason: I guess what I'm trying to get at Grafton is, is there an equivalent emotion to nostalgia that doesn't focus on the past, but focuses on the future. An emotion that we can leverage right now in the present, that will allow us to move towards the sorts of positive solutions that you're suggesting.

Tanner: I think it's hope. I know Chris Hedges has written about hope. He says that hope is different to optimism, because optimism is what you get sold by corporate powers to pull up your bootstraps and go along with it. A radical kind of hope is extremely important to have and is one in which there is some reliance on the past. There's no way to hope and therefore fight for a better future if you don't have any kind of grasp on how the previous social and collective movements of history help to time and again fight off major capitalist problems. This is something I think Naomi Klein has also written about brilliantly. She wrote, "This Changes Everything" about climate catastrophe, just a few years back. She writes that it's going to seem that climate warming is so bad that there's nothing we can do and we just have to hate ourselves for being humans and destroying the world. Hold on, it's going to be a bumpy ride. She says it's not a good thing to do. Instead, you have to look back to the past and see how other people did it when they were fighting off these major problems of modernity and exploited capitalism, and then fight for the future with the hope that even if you do it for a lifetime, that's what you have to do.

Mason: Grafton Tanner, our conversation has made me feel just a little bit more hopeful. I just want to thank you for being on the FUTURES podcast.

Tanner: Thank you for having me.

Mason: Thank you to Grafton for revealing how nostalgia functions in modern Western culture. You can find out more by purchasing his new book, 'The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech', available now.

If you like what you've heard, then you can subscribe for our latest episode. Or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram: @FUTURESPodcast.

More episodes, transcripts and show notes can be found at FUTURES Podcast dot net.

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