Grafton Tanner, author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, discusses his forthcoming work from Zero Books, The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech. Tanner teaches at the University of Georgia and writes regularly for The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Hong Kong Review of Books. His band, Superpuppet, released their debut EP, Museum, in 2018.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
12TH STREET: What projects are you working on now?
GRAFTON TANNER: I’m working on a book right now that specifically targets Silicon Valley as a circulator of a certain kind of nostalgia: the kind that reached a fever pitch after 9/11 and the Great Recession and that influenced Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” political campaign. The main thesis is that the nostalgia industry that’s risen over the past decade, especially in the West, is a direct result of post-Recession economic factors. Some industries fell pretty hard after the Recession, academia being one of them, while others got back on their feet over time. But the culture of nostalgia has remained. And one of the ways nostalgia circulates in society is through Big Tech. I’m basically blaming Big Tech’s algorithms for perpetuating a culture of nostalgia.
STREET: Can you explain how Big Tech relates to post-9/11 nostalgia?
TANNER: After 9/11, large-scale destructive events populated the public screen: the Twin Towers, Shock and Awe, Hurricane Katrina. When one tapered off, another would come along. That process has sped up in the 2010s. We have what I like to think of as a daily trauma, every day a new trauma. Not every day is a new 9/11; it’s not like that at all. Instead, what we now see is a constant cycle of outrage and smaller horrible events, a hum of panic and anxiety. It reminds me of the Radiohead lyrics, “A low-flying panic attack,” but it’s happening constantly, all the time.
A consequence of 9/11 is the belief that we all need to be tethered to devices, which provide us with a steady drip of trauma. This is something Sherry Turkle touches on in her book Alone Together: In the wake of 9/11, the fear that another terror attack would happen meant that everyone would need to stay connected, even when you’re far apart. So, give your kids smartphones, and adults need to have them too because you never know when the country’s going to be attacked again. You’ve got to be ready to find out where your loved ones [are], so you can find out what’s really going on when the next 9/11 hits. That feeds right into the culture of fear, that the next big thing is waiting down the road. To cite Robert Jay Lifton, this lends society a feeling of futurelessness: it’s either that the future doesn’t exist or it’s horrible. The natural reaction to that is nostalgia.
Growing up, I was most affected by the years after [9/11]. Parents having Fox News on, witnessing an around-the-clock war mediated through the television. No smartphones are needed when you have 24-hour news giving trauma to you all the time. That had a profound impact on me.
I think that’s one of the reasons I was drawn to the Oneohtrix Point Never album Garden of Delete, which mines the culture of that time period, bringing out the aggro nu-metal music of the early 2000s, the torture porn, the hacker ethic, and the American public learning about countries [it had] never heard of before and bombing them. I think that album is an excellent interpretation of that time period.
STREET: Can you explain the difference in effects between televisions, for example, and smartphone technology?
TANNER: They’re created under completely different economic systems. Televisions and iPhones were invented in different historical milieus. They have two completely different kinds of supply chains, not to mention they elicit relatively different responses from individuals. We have to contextualize our media instead of saying “it’s media change as usual.”
Big Tech produces wealth on an enormous scale; it also does extraordinary environmental destruction with massive server farms. Then there’s the free market ideology and the ability for corporations to offshore much of their labor, produce things cheaply, and then introduce those products back into the American market. The iPhone also represents a neoliberal mindset: the idea that every individual is atomized. As such, everyone needs to have their own device to be able to communicate, and that leads to further individualization.
There are also specific cultural differences between a television society and an iPhone one. There’s this term, “cocooning,” which is essentially the process of being in a room with other people but scrolling on your device individually. Sherry Turkle has written about this occurring in a two-screen environment where you’ve got a television on, but everybody has smaller screens in front of them. The television is running, nobody’s watching it, and everybody is immersed in their own device. You’re together, but you’re somewhat alone. That can only really exist in a culture where people believe they are individual enough to have these devices and communicate through them. It wouldn’t make sense to have smartphones in a society where we didn’t believe in the myth of individuality.
STREET: How would you define the culture of nostalgia?
TANNER: I’ve studied nostalgia as it has operated since around 2008, and I’ve found three main effects. One is regression, or the explosion of stories set in older decades starring children. The second is recursion, old narratives made into new ones, resulting in a feedback loop. The third is canonization, or the siloing process whereby individuals determine what gets remembered. There was a big controversy over the recent Halloween sequels; fans debated what counts as canon and what doesn’t. By the time we watch these movies—Star Wars is another big example—we are all familiar with what is and what is not in the canon. And watching them means spotting the Easter eggs that reference the canon.
Our culture of nostalgia seems to merely recycle the worn-out cultural modes from previous decades. It is an attempt to restore lost futures by reinstating lost histories, and that can’t be healthy for society. For example, Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was deeply nostalgic. It was frightening to witness. Even more frightening was how certain groups, mainly online groups with connections to supremacist forums, would draw out the nostalgia from his rhetoric and bring it into sharper relief. If you want to study Trump as a purveyor of nostalgia that’s all fine and good, but the way it gets taken up by others is where the danger lies. His nostalgic rhetoric is rarely framed with a sentiment of, “Let’s go back to the tax rates of the 1950s,” but instead with, “Let’s go back to the 1950s when certain groups were marginalized.”
There is a connection point between what we might consider our media nostalgia, like the It movies or Stranger Things, and the nostalgia of “Make America Great Again.” I used to split them as left- and right-wing nostalgias, but they hang together. One of the effects of nostalgia today is a regressive tendency to create narratives not only about what life might have been like in the 80s and 90s, but what life was like during those times as a young person without smartphones. To me, that’s what narratives like Stranger Things or It are responding to, a direct consequence of growing up as a young person tethered to mobile devices today.
Stranger Things, in particular, made me profoundly sad to watch. Characters essentially interacting with old, analog technologies: that’s the show, set to the music of synthwave. I wrote a review for The Hong Kong Review of Books in the aftermath of watching it because I was like, “This is what we want? This is what we desire from our culture?”
I don’t have a problem with drawing on the past—you’re always going to draw on the past as a content creator—but this is a show that is essentially a little John Carpenter, a little Steven Spielberg, a little Goonies. Mix it in a pot, take out anything potentially new or subversive, leave the Easter eggs, and then [we] spot the Easter eggs that refer back to the previous things. It’s almost a game. Ah, there’s the old synth score, there’s the font that looks like old Stephen King paperbacks. You just catalog them in your head and that’s what it means to watch the show.
The short-lived Netflix series Everything Sucks also made me sad, but it wasn’t nearly as offensively ostentatious in its erasure of the past. The funny thing is, so much of this retro aesthetic gets taken up by fascist Trumpist groups all the time. Have you ever heard of trumpwave? It’s a pro-Trump subgenre of synthwave. In particular, there’s a trumpwave video on YouTube that takes Donald Trump’s announcement of his candidacy in 2015 and sets it to synthwave music that would not be out of place in Stranger Things. The video has all these images of the 80s, of MTV, The Simpsons, Chevy Chase—it’s disturbing.
STREET: Do you think it’s harmful for our media to reimagine the lives of young adults in the 80s and 90s?
TANNER: I think that it’s harmful, and it makes me sad to think about it. Consider Everything Sucks, in which two lesbian characters get to assume the kind of identities that they want in the heteronormative 1990s. Ready Player One also foregrounds the idea—I mean it’s said in the beginning of the movie—that you can be whatever you want in the virtual reality game in the film. And then there’s Black Mirror’s “San Junipero,” which is a story about a virtual reality fantasy of the past wherein we can be whoever we want to be.
The Reagan 80s was a time in which the war against AIDS meant, for many people, the war against homosexuals, which persisted into the 90s with Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act. Everything Sucks does mention DOMA in passing in one of the episodes, but we have to acknowledge that stories like Everything Sucks and “San Junipero,” which in my opinion succeeds as a queer love story, put forth the idea that virtual reality can be the place where we can fully assume our identities. It’s frightening. It’s a nice fantasy, but it does position technology as a sublime force, capable of solving all problems. Believing in VR to solve our problems places us in what’s called “curative time,” which means we’re always waiting for the cure to come.
I would be really upset for some people to assume that either technology is the way that we can assume identity freely, and so we wait for the tech giants to give us the next great invention, or the idea that actually things weren’t that bad in the past. The belief that the 1980s was a time in which fluidity was celebrated in such a way as it is in “San Junipero”—that’s just not how it was. America’s been intolerant for a long time. We have a real problem with understanding what has transpired over the last 30 years, thanks to decades of neoconservative PR, so when these nostalgia vehicles come out, you’re witnessing a dissolution of historical awareness, which is dangerous. I mean Ready Player One doesn’t mention anything about punk music or Iran-Contra; it’s all about Tears for Fears and mainstream pop memories.
STREET: You use hauntology as framework in Babbling Corpse. How does hauntology fit into the culture of nostalgia?
TANNER: Hauntology is a cultural mode that reflects certain tendencies that have come out of postmodern culture, a mourning of the past’s vision of what was supposed to be. It is a more specific rhetorical tool than something like nostalgia because it’s bound up with notions of subjugation. I’m not referring to the Derridean use of the term, but to the version of hauntology Mark Fisher reclaimed. Hauntology has been applied to The Shining, which is considered to be a story about genocide, the marginalized, settler colonialism, and this element of unmasking the power that exists at the heart of historical narratives. Who’s actually telling the story? Who owns the history and leaves out certain people? I think that hauntology as a cultural mode unmasks that power to an extent, so it is like the first critical step after disillusionment.
I am reminded of the Notre-Dame fire. The Victor Hugo novel was written essentially as Notre-Dame propaganda—like, hey this thing really matters and here’s this really romantic story about it. It was renovated in the nineteenth century as a way to symbolize or create a version of the country that didn’t exist. Again, any of these simulations of the past are obviously going to be distant from the real thing. There’s always going to be a real disconnect between the actual past and what we remember. The important thing is to ask who’s providing the money to build the thing to symbolize the narrative that then gets circulated.
These massive cathedrals, massive architectural spaces, great works of art, symphonies—or whatever—that seem to stand the test of time, we like them because they escape the stream of history. We’re finite human beings so to see something last, it’s like death escaped, you know? There’s an experience that happens when we’re in the presence of these things. Often times, there’s no words for them. We can look at Guernica and feel nothing other than the way it immediately makes us feel without understanding anything about the political context of the painting. This is what Frederic Jameson might call “the political unconscious,” a latent political element within texts that may not manifest on the surface at first glance. Jameson wrote that we need to pay attention to the political unconscious or else we’re just going to have a culture of surface level trivia where we only know facts enough to get on Jeopardy! but we don’t know anything about the context. The apolitical response to the 2019 burning of Notre-Dame is an example of that process.
When these major monuments burn down everybody flips out because our foolproof method of preserving history by escaping time cannot escape the purity of fire. I understand the reaction to it, but yes, it is a hauntological gesture to rush to its aid and to spend a bunch of money to rebuild it as a way to control the narrative of history. Any kind of grand structure that takes a lot of money or human power to create is always going to be a colonial gesture. Think about the people who go see the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids and say, “Wow, how could they—Aliens must’ve helped them build this! How did they do it?” It’s actually very easy to build those monuments when you have slaves. Anything that stands the test of time is going to be built on the backs of others or with some money that gets reallocated when it should’ve been allocated elsewhere.
Again, I go back to The Shining and the Overlook, this enormous hotel—it’s massive, it’s ornate, it’s got a giant ballroom, it’s got a huge hedge maze—that impresses itself upon you when you watch the film. But again, it’s built atop the remains of indigenous persons. The hauntological art and music of the twenty-first century drew inspiration from the Overlook ballroom where all the white people dance atop the remains of Native Americans. When you create these massive things, somebody or something gets written out of history, erased. It seems to be a natural tendency of our thirst to build things and escape time.