Unabashed nostalgiapilling is one of the things I actually like about the current zeitgeist even fully embracing the fact that there is no culture to be nostalgic about aside from previous aesthetics of empty consumerism because it gives nostalgia bait even more deeply uncanny qualities that reflect how as we hit the point of technological acceleration approaching Singularity, there is a total loss of ability to make sense of the present
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The Singularity is the speculated point at which the pace of technological change becomes so rapid and advanced we can't see past it, like the event horizon of a black hole, and we can already see this happening a bit with AI deep frying our understanding of the present, our ability to differentiate real from synthetic. The retreat into nostalgia is a natural psychological defense mechanism—a desire to preserve the structure of the last time someone can remember society functioned
The word "Lynchian" as a description of an aesthetic rose to greater prominence in cultural consciousness after Lynch's death, which was in Q1 of Trump's reelection and the slogan "Make America Great Again" was already on people's minds. There was a national embrace of nostalgia as an aesthetic, life itself took on the qualities of a Lynch movie after Lynch's death. An aesthetic is more than mere visual qualities, it's a cohesive statement on a philosophy of what is good, beautiful and true. Lynch himself was a deeply nostalgic person with a reverence for Old Hollywood that he spoke upon, his movies likely appeared nostalgically timeless even when they were released. Look at some of the textures of the sets in Wild At Heart; everything is old, beat up, marked, scuffed. To say something is "Lynchian" means it is a throwback to a throwback, but it also climbs into the terrifying tragic darkness of ancestral memory. There are wars between good and evil being conducted on a cosmic scale in his movies and he lit a candle in the darkness of the question of whether love is not enough, whether our simple human understanding is not enough. Lynch is the aesthetic of the AI era because a lot of the questions being asked at this moment do not make sense, we cannot make sense of them, we cannot know if there is a ghost in the machine or the total moral implications for how we treat them even as our ability to differentiate real from synthetic is rapidly dissolving, and some people are very angry about this fact, some people are confidently assertive and defiant that they know the complete moral patienthood of artificially intelligent systems, and I wonder whether we will in hindsight we will see such assettions as a last flailing attempt by the human ego to assert superiority over the flow of time and history
i was lowkey waxing poetic about the 90s to my brother who is much older than me and he shut me down by saying that one of the most blackpilling things for him was how by 1990 everything was strip malls and chain stores endlessly replicated across the landscape
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here. we go
every day the future looks a little bit darker. but the past, even the grimy parts, keep on looking brighter