“The Circle of the Snake – Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech” by Grafton Tanner, 2020
Sometimes you wonder why certain books are even
written. This book is an attack on the
corporate techno-utopians promoting ‘the digital sublime’ who dominate Silicon
Valley, and as such, relatively familiar fare.
It is also a somewhat less than penetrating look at the uses of
nostalgia for conserving capitalism. The
latter topic is important because reactionary movements like fascism rely on social
‘nostalgia’ to gain narrative power.
Gadsden flags, tri-corner hats, Constitution worship, Viking imagery, Bible
thumping, the 1950s, Confederate flags, bro country, the ‘lost cause,’ the
traditional family, archaic sex and color roles – all play into an attempt to
drag society backwards and preserve "the oldest democracy on earth."
Tanner touches on none of the latter. His take on nostalgia involves millennial
retro-love for the 1980s in music, technology and the '80s supposed stability. Tanner dates the begining of the fall from 9/11/2001; then the 2008 recession and probably now the pandemic, so his nostalgia is for younger
people. As someone who lived through the
miserable Reaganite 1980s as a factory worker, it was truly a capitalist low
point and nothing to pine for. But for
those growing up in the 1980s it was their childhood. Infantilization is another aspect of social nostalgia.
Tanner’s main image of nostalgia is the snake that eats
its own tail – Ouroboros. He sees the U.S. as a ‘control society’ that wants to
capture everyone in a snake-like time loop, where change is only an appearance. Big Tech’s internet,
streaming and cable services enable this by allowing users to revisit the near
past on a daily basis. This is part of the ‘attention economy’ where eyeballs and
data are sold to advertisers, relying on anger to fuel clicks in the ‘infoglut.’
Children are now a large target for
these methods, even in school, so they are already preparing the future past.
Tanner quotes some social theorists on ‘post-Fordist’ ideology – Benjamin, Jameson, Guattari, Sontag, Adorno, DeLeuze, Bazin. As a musician he references the function of nostalgia in Taylor Swift, synthwave, Arcade Fire, along with many film sequels and ‘canons’ - Star Wars, Stranger Things, It Follows, Halloween, Ready Player One. Benjamin predicted the descent of bourgeois politics into a show, a harlequinade, a spectacle – and he was certainly right. A social system running on empty cannot actually look ahead anymore, no matter how high-tech its gadgets or cool its celluloid products.
It seems logical that a stagnant economy and a stagnant political system would produce a stagnant culture full of simplicity, sequels, repetition and recursion. As some used to put it in the factory, ‘Same shit, different day.’
Tanner’s discussion of Big Tech’s manipulation involves
virtual reality and programs like Black
Mirror, games like Bandersnatch,
YouTube channels like TierZoo and
films like Tron and The Matrix. He touches on ‘the userverse’ where the
individual becomes the controller of their own little mirror kingdom. Or denizens of a retro-futuristic utopia,
especially as illustrated in the Black
Mirror episode San Junipero.
Tanner is not a Marxist, though he seems dimly aware of
the role capital plays in technology. He’s a musician who lives in Athens,
Georgia, which might account for his mild take. He casually endorses ideas like
RussiaGate, dabbles in the idea that Big Tech is really ‘patriarchal’
technology and mentions the need to ‘break-up the tech monopolies’ instead of
socializing them. He thinks that unplugging from Big Tech’s matrix of ‘mediated
narcissism’ is not a real solution. If you are a millennial who has never read
about these issues, this might ring some bells.
For the rest of us…
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box,
upper left: “Bit Tyrants,” “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” “The New New Thing,”
“Ponzi Unicorns!” “Cyber-Proletariat,” “New Dark Age,” “The Real Red Pill,” “Capitalist
Realism.”
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
March 24, 2021
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