A Nostalgia Generation

The culture is a broken record. The silver screen is consumed by remakes of Disney classics and Marvel reboots; the runways by recyclings of previous fashion trends (and not for sustainability purposes); the arenas by acts from decades ago (2022’s most in-demand touring act, Elton John, hasn’t had a #1 single since 1985). The photographs cascading down social media feeds are either a) filtered to emulate a time before the iPhone, b) actually taken on an analog camera, or c) doomed to get a mere sympathy-like from your aunt. Little would remain of Harry Styles and Stranger Things if stripped bare of the 80s-inspired aesthetics they bask in. And so, the culture has become a TV show of endless reruns, spinoffs, and reboots. A Greatest Hits record on repeat.

This is bad news for everyone (save, perhaps, for Elton John’s management team): if the youth are looking backward, development stagnates. Throughout history, times of cultural development have followed from a desire to move on from the past. The creative explosion of the 1960s, for example, can partly be credited to the aggression felt toward the past; the youth were angry at their parents’ dusty worldviews. Nostalgia was nowhere to be found. And The Beatles were founded.

With age, the privilege of hindsight, and forgetfulness, it’s common to long for — what we imagine to be — simpler times: the good old days. What’s new, however, is that the nostalgia is creeping closer. Today, it’s not necessary to go back to the era of “Poker Face” and Vine to identify a time that will kindle a feeling of longing for the past: the early days of lockdown were already in 2021 being looked back on with the rose-tinted lenses of nostalgia. Stranger still, for the first time in history, the youth is nostalgic for a time they haven’t even experienced; soundtracked by artists like Lana Del Rey, it’s not uncommon to see young people online say they were “born in the wrong generation.” The widespread uncertainty of the present combined with increased access to the world’s largest nostalgia mine — the internet — facilitates this trend: never before has the Windows XP startup sound (a five second YouTube video of which has 13 million views) been available without first waiting for the displeased wheeze of a computer fan coming back to life.

Hollywood executives, aware of this craving for nostalgia, will readily greenlight a sequel, prequel, or spin-off of any hit from the past decades because — though often culturally vapid — the project is guaranteed to generate green, upward-facing arrows in their quarterly reports. This results in a culture corroded by nostalgia, in which the window for new cultural phenomena to grow shrinks. Driving into the future with sight set only on the rearview mirror is bound to end in a crash — in the aftermath of which only cheap TV fuck fests filmed on sunny islands and Taylor Swift’s re-recorded albums remain.

I wonder, will we ever get another Harry Potter, Andy Warhol, or Lion King? Will we leave behind grand architectural structures like the Big Ben, Empire State Building, and Stockholm City Hall, or just scalable highrises as devoid of unique personality as your average SSE student? Will souvenir shops in Manhattan 100 years from now be selling fridge magnets of both the Flatiron Building and 432 Park Avenue?

I wonder, are we all just living among the ghosts of our past, trying to keep our former glory alive for a little while longer?

Attempting to answer this question, I found myself asking: Who’s the great thinker, the Winston Churchill of our time? It’s hardly Rishi Sunak.

And the question “Who’s the great artist, the Elton John of our time?” had barely occurred to me before I realized its futility: the Elton John of our time is, well, Elton John.

And just like that… one – nil for AI vs. humans.

Creativity has long been considered a distinction between human and machine because it requires a consciousness; an inner desire to create. Today, AI algorithms can be prompted to create new paintings in any artistic style. While this may give the illusion of creativity, it isn’t really: the algorithm is just creating advanced combinations of what it’s already been fed with. Real creativity requires an inner willpower to create new things; to, say, introduce an entirely new art movement or create art to express emotion. No AI program can do this. Yet.

But if the 21st-century human has — as a byproduct of his quest for nostalgia — ended up simply creating combinations of what he’s already seen in lieu of real creativity (and not particularly advanced combinations at that: anyone up for a tenth installment of American Pie?), then what is the remaining difference between artificial and human intelligence?

All along, we’ve concerned ourselves with the consequences of AI becoming more similar to humans. But perhaps we’ve gotten this the wrong way round. The machines are not just becoming more human; humans are becoming more like the machines. We’re converging into one.

And it won’t end with Happily ever after.