Being nostalgic for the past isn't the answer
I'm at the age where I'm starting to see people pine over a past they don't actually remember. I often say to people now, "That's not how that happened," or, "You're remembering that wrong." My older brother used to do that to me a lot growing up. "You're not thinking of MacGyver," he would tell me after I tried to explain some old TV show, "you're thinking of Highlander."
Lately I've noticed more people being nostalgic for the past, especially here on Bearblog where people talk about the indie web and detoxing from social media and returning to a smaller, simpler Internet. I agree with all that too, and I have often expressed my frustrations with social media. But sometimes I wonder if people think I'm pining for the 90s, because I'm really not. In fact, I remember hating the 90s. I remember thinking it was boring. The TV shows were bad, and the dominating aesthetic was a washed out plaid. I remember in 1999, in middle school, telling a friend right before Christmas break that "we won't miss this decade."
Of course, as time passed, I realized that the 90s had its charm. (Plus, it's always easy to hate the decade you're currently living in.) But I have no desire to go back and don't want to. Not even a little bit.
I think a lot of this conversation about a "simpler time" are people misremembering the past. There was nothing twee, simple, or cute about the early Internet days. It was wild and unregulated. You could click an innocuous link and be spammed with porn popups that took over the family desktop computer. You would have to reach behind the desk and unplug the whole system to get it to stop, all while your parents (or a loud sibling) sat on a couch yelling at you.
The Internet was full of weirdos trying to contact you in chat rooms, gore galleries, naked Photoshopped pictures of celebrities, and sparkly Geocities pages made by mentally ill fans of the Hanson brothers or whatever. It was weird. It wasn't any of the words I see people describe the past, this past they so desperately want to return to, that they're so nostalgic for.
This pure, simple past never existed. And sometimes when I see people try to detox from social media and return to "the good ol' days" and then complain later that they didn't reach this purity or enlightenment they were promised, I wish I could tell them they misunderstood the assignment.
Wanting a better world and better technology does not mean returning to the past. Wanting a world more akin to how it was like pre-social media doesn't mean the answer to that is to just...cut out social media. The answer should be: What can we create to make our current reality less shitty?
And technology isn't evil. I'm so grateful to have the Internet, to live in the future, and to have the level of technology we have. As a kid I had to rewind VHS tapes, blow into Nintendo cartridges, clean scratched CDs with alcohol. When I got older and got interested in foreign films, there was no way to watch them. I had to buy Chinese bootlegs on eBay that would take weeks to show up and usually had a blurb of an entirely different movie on the back cover. I remember how proud I was to show off my bootleg copy of Battle Royale in college. Everyone was like, "OooOoo, where'd you get that? How'd you find that?" Now you can watch that shit on Netflix.
I just don't see enough people talking about how we can use technology to fix our current problems. I see way too much fear mongering of how technology is scary, made our lives worse, and how we should all unplug and live these boring, minimalist lives in the forest where we live in an aesthetically serene cabin in the middle of nowhere. It's a fantasy, and the pre-Internet world wasn't even like that. As my brother would say, "You're not thinking of the past, you're thinking of the movie FernGully."
And I get it — because it's hard to imagine the future. It's easier to fantasize about the past because we know what it looks like. We can return there at any time through media or our imaginations. But that's not the case with the future. It's something we have to create from scratch, and I think that task sounds daunting to a lot of people.
But, despite my cynical ramblings here, I am truly an optimist at heart. And even if our current way of life collapses, something new will emerge in its place. And maybe that perfect, idealized society, the one where humans and technology and the Internet can live alongside each other in some sort of harmony, can finally appear.
But whatever we're trying to build, it won't be built with nostalgia, because nostalgia is just fantasizing. And it's fantasizing over a past that didn't even fully exist, because people only cherry picked the parts they liked. What's our modern version of a utopia? What does it look like? If we want to fantasize, let's fantasize about the future. What is ours?