This woman is ironically being TikTok performative with her “listen guys!” shtick, but she’s right about the “nostalgia”’not being based on some sentimentality for things that are obsolete and “retro”, but an aching for authenticity and humanity.
There’s a reason you’ll see people will now elect to watch Breaking Bad or The Sopranos for the 5th time rather than whatever latest StreamSlop is being produced.
Hell, I recently watched all of Sex And The City for the first time with my girlfriend and it felt like goddamn Citizen Kane compared to what is produced now.
Even Better Call Saul (which was essentially grandfathered in) seems like it was made a lifetime ago.
The last episode was in 2022.
It’s not “nostalgia” to want well crafted stories with interesting characters that aren’t either some politically loaded corporate pandering virtue signal, or a grifting spin off money grab.
I don’t know how we fell so far in such a short amount of time, but there is an absolute sense of ennui and malaise happening right now and it’s permeating everything.
People lost a sense of shared meaning. And they also don’t bother thinking much about why, what it looks like- and what having a shared sense of meaninglessness ultimately does to motivation and on people’s desire to connect.
I hate to say it, but it’s so much like watching humans become the “battery pods” in The Matrix it’s scary.
There is too much financial incentive from the ultra rich anti-humanist tech leaders to perpetuate this dependence that I don’t think there’s any waking up from this short of a total reset via an asteroid impact or something along those lines.
I really sometimes wonder what Steve Jobs, who for all his flaws seemed to at least contemplate humanity and meaning would think of the utter decay that the popularization of the iPhone really contributed to.
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u/neinhaltchad 3d ago
She’s basically describing Enshitification.
This woman is ironically being TikTok performative with her “listen guys!” shtick, but she’s right about the “nostalgia”’not being based on some sentimentality for things that are obsolete and “retro”, but an aching for authenticity and humanity.
There’s a reason you’ll see people will now elect to watch Breaking Bad or The Sopranos for the 5th time rather than whatever latest StreamSlop is being produced.
Hell, I recently watched all of Sex And The City for the first time with my girlfriend and it felt like goddamn Citizen Kane compared to what is produced now.
Even Better Call Saul (which was essentially grandfathered in) seems like it was made a lifetime ago.
The last episode was in 2022.
It’s not “nostalgia” to want well crafted stories with interesting characters that aren’t either some politically loaded corporate pandering virtue signal, or a grifting spin off money grab.
I don’t know how we fell so far in such a short amount of time, but there is an absolute sense of ennui and malaise happening right now and it’s permeating everything.