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, support the show on Patreon, and sign up for the weekly newsletter.

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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