Author: Paris Marx, Grafton Tanner

Paris Marx is joined by Grafton Tanner to discuss the dangers and consequences of companies and politicians leveraging nostalgia for their own purposes. 

Grafton Tanner is the author of Foreverism. He also teaches at the University of Georgia.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode: 

• Paris wrote about the material footprint of data centers in Disconnect.
• Ian McKellen broke down on the set of The Hobbit after acting with no other actors on a green screen.
• In an interview with Charlie Rose, George Lucas described differences between Soviet and US film industries.
• Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy told Vanity Fair it wasn’t as fun making Star Wars films today as it was making the original trilogy.
• Jake Gyllenhaal described the difficulty of acting in a Marvel film after Spider-Man: Far From Home.

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Paris Marx is joined by Grafton Tanner to discuss how social and environmental crises fuel nostalgia, how companies profit from it, and whether it can be reoriented to inspire a better future.

Grafton Tanner is the author of “The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia” from Repeater Books. Follow Grafton on Twitter at @GraftonTanner.

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Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Paris reviewed Grafton’s book in Jacobin.
• TikTok has already gone through a phase of nostalgia for the early pandemic and its lockdowns.
• Malls have been closing for years, but many people have nostalgia for their heyday.
• In 1996, Jennifer Light compared emerging digital spaces to shopping malls.
• Matthew Ball wrote one of the key essays on what the metaverse should look like (from a corporate perspective).
• A message mentioned in the opening crawl of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was broadcast exclusively in Fortnite.
• When Amazon bought MGM, it said it wanted to redevelop much of its accumulated intellectual property.
• At the end of the 2010s, some people questioned what algorithms were doing to our sense of time.
• The internet doesn’t get properly preserved and its history is being permanently lost.
• Tim Maughan wrote about how the world is too complex.
• Nishant Shahani’s “Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return” and Badia Ahad-Legardy’s “Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture.”

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Paris Marx is joined by Grafton Tanner to discuss how social media constantly resurfaces the past, why film and television uses nostalgia to keep us engaged, and whether there’s a way to wield nostalgia in pursuit of a better world.

Grafton Tanner is the author of “The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech” and “Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts.” Grafton is also writing  “The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia” for Repeater Books, due out in October 2021. Follow Grafton on Twitter as @GraftonTanner.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Paris wrote about consolidation in the film and television industries.
• Disney lobbied to extend copyright terms and what it might mean when Mickey Mouse goes into the public domain.
• George Lucas describes how commercialism limits what kind of movies can be made (17:18-18:40).
• Hollywood is using AI to help decide which films get made.
• A Harry Potter television series is in early development at HBO Max.
• Books mentioned in this episode: “The Future of Nostalgia” by Svetlana Boym, “New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future” by James Bridle, “Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization” by Alexander Galloway, “The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media” by Kate Eichhorn, “Radical Nostalgia: Spanish Civil War Commemoration in America” by Peter Glazer, and “Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia” by Alastair Bonnett.
• Movies and shows mentioned in this episode: Ready Player One, San Junipero (Black Mirror), eXistenZ, The Matrix, and The Merchants of Cool.

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