the todos santos diaries, #5: ~~~a e s t h e t i c ~~*
DISCUSSED: vaporwave, teens at the mall, cyberpunk, longing, the weirdly sinister nature of Muzak
I follow a bunch of vaporwave accounts on Tumblr, because one night I felt nostalgic for a time I’d never personally experienced outside of rewinding VHS tapes. I know I’m not the only one; earlier this year, MEL editor Hussein Kesvani published a nice piece about how teens now are nostalgic for mall culture. They go so far as to listen mallwave music and watch clips of people ambling around those now-retro suburban oases; the videos have hundreds of thousands of views. I’m a little too old to understand that — and besides, I was never a fan of the ones I grew up going to — but I do get the longing. As Kesvani reported, the term to use is “anemoia,” a word invented by John Koenig for his project “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”:
Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins—and live in a completely different world.
(As you can tell, the “Dictionary” is not one in the traditional sense; it’s more like a compendium of the fleeting, relatable feelings being online tends to raise.) I’m not, however, “anemoiac” for the time that vaporwave represents; what I want is to feel hopeful about the future. Also, I mean, aesthetic.
One of my favorite things about Tumblr — and by extension, one of my favorite things about young people — is the fact that they’ve grown up with the entirety of human thought at their fingertips, a couple keystrokes separated from the contents of fifty Libraries of Alexandria. That kind of access means that it's incredibly easy to fall down rabbitholes, but also that ideas that may have in the past been relegated to fleeting thoughts or drunken bar conversation can become genuine aspects of a personality. It’s given everyone a way to construct their identities based on their tastes no matter how much money they have, which happens to be the dominant way of expressing oneself of the internet and under capitalism.
I'm sure mall nostalgia, for example, comes from a sincere place, but experiencing a mall through a screen muddies the portrait; you don't get the danger, the packs of roving teens who might roast you for being corny using only their eyes. I don't want to say that makes their love inauthentic, because I don't think it necessarily does — not everything needs to be loved warts and all. That skew, however, embeds a certain amount of nostalgic longing, because the world is different now and as a consequence the experience has largely disappeared.
[imagine this video is embedded (tinyletter, uh, strips them out for some reason)]
By the same token, I’ve always found cyberpunk aesthetics compelling* because I can’t help but imagine what it would be like in the quiet moments: alone in your cramped room, which might be filled with various nostalgic tchotchkes like books and Edison bulbs, what would you think about? Would you gaze at the heaving, neon city outside your window and imagine what your life would have been at the turn of the century? (If I were ensconced in a neo-brutalist building and had to trade my data for credits in a post-capitalist hellscape, I think I would want to be some kind of sheep farmer.) The dominant emotion old conceptions of the future provoke is longing, because they’re all daydreams.
But I don't want to ignore loneliness. Even though most sci-fi and cyberpunk plots are solved through the actions of a collective — here, for some reason, I'm thinking about Scanners — society is usually totally atomized by the time the protagonists hit the breaking point that kicks off the plot. In our visions of the future, why does it feel like everyone is alone?
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A while ago, I went to a theater in New York that was showing a selection of the best commercials that Charles and Ray Eames made on the side, from the late fifties through the late seventies. My favorite was a semi-promotional one for IBM called “Powers of Ten" (1977) that showed what those relative scales actually look like. It is stunning; we zoom from a cell to a galaxy.
The future looks different from every vantage point, and every prediction is generally incorrect even as it reveals exactly how hopeful people felt about the present. (Remember how hoverboards turned out?) The world the Eameses captured was bright and sunny, surely full of technological breakthroughs that might enrich Americans and make their lives a little easier. That happened, in a sense, although if you look at the economic graphs that chart real wages, inflation, and productivity, a darker picture begins to emerge. The key to nostalgia is misunderstanding brutality: forgetting that things back then were just as hard — if not harder — than they are now. (Which is why I rolled my eyes when I saw that story about the woman who quit her job to "spoil" her husband by cosplaying a ’50s housewife. Where are the pills, babe?)
From here and now, on a beach at the end of the world, I’m not sure how hopeful I feel. On the horizon is total climate collapse, which is the kind of event you’d pop into a futuristic story as an explanation for why human society might have become unrecognizable to itself. But this is real; it’s happening now, on a planetary scale and with a speed that I don’t think anyone is quite ready for, not even the preppers. Even if we do manage to work collectively and turn back the clock, there will have to be a massive societal reorganization — around fossil fuels and climate refugee migration, if nothing else.
I’m not sure how I feel about it. I still like to daydream to Lo-Fi Chill Anime Beats To Work And Study To, or imagine myself elsewhen to mixes of library music. Both types of music feel anonymous, nearly free of the stamp of human authorship; they’re meant to make workers more productive, which to me makes them the most cyberpunk music of all. (The story of Muzak is dark, y’all.)
[the Final Embed]
But the daydreaming helps. It’s a small way to rage against the dying of whatever light is left in the day.
In solidarity,
Bijan
*Cyberpunk grew out of the ’80s, when Moore’s Law hadn’t started ending and Americans were absolutely terrified of losing their sense of technological superiority — a lot of the weirdness around imagining the future, at least back then, had to do with fearing Japan. Here’s a great thread if you’d like to learn more.