Remembrance of Things Past

I recently re-watched an episode of Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker’s Nathan Barley, a show about a misanthropic writer, Dan Ashcroft, and a group of Shoreditch, media, hipsters exemplified by baying twat Nathan Barley.

It’s as funny as it ever was, in part because it feels as fresh as when I first watched it in, I realised to my horror, 2005.

Despite the show being created before the cultural takeover of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and the smartphone, pretty much everything about it – its stories, the fashion and attitudes it satirises, even it’s actors, could be taken from 2005 and dropped in 2018 and you probably wouldn’t notice much of a difference. We have the sense these days that everything is moving too fast, in part because of an increasingly networked world in which a video or image can be uploaded in the morning and the population of India can have looked at it by lunch-time. But, if that's the case why when you look at things from ten years or so ago does it seem as though, culturally at least, not much has changed? What if the impression of speed is wrong and our culture isn’t fast but has in fact ground to a halt? Or what if our culture has stopped moving precisely because it is moving so fast? As when you approach the speed of light and as a result everything seems slower relative to yourself. Or so they say. In fact we've perhaps past the speed of light in this laboured metaphor and as a result things even seem to be going backwards.

There’s been a tendency over the last ten years or more for cultural trends to look to the past – to be nostalgic. The period of time nostalgically mined can differ. There's a late 19th Century, waist-coated, waxed moustache look

and the Steampunk movement adopts the same era’s style, accessorised with pseudo-technological gadgetry.A lot of music and accompanying style and presentation of the musicians seems to divide along an alt-folk, tweedy, bearded 60s vibeor an 80s nylon aesthetic – with accompanying hair-sprayed hairdos or rainbow striped tank tops and jackets.

There are sub groups of people who dress up like 40s spivs and go to swing dances and, ironically, amidst this new feminist shift, a harking back to a 50s housewife look, with accompanying renewed interest in home baking and the appearance of domestic servility. I recently saw a hipster wearing tracksuit trousers tucked into his socks a la the de rigeur style of the ‘chav’ around ten years ago.I can’t help but think that the ‘chav’ of ten years ago would’ve been the subject of ridicule from the appropriator of the look today.

So it goes.

In short, very often these days the new thing is actually the old thing. So why might this be then?

Douglas Rushkoff has spoken about the impact the speed of life is having on us in his book Present Shock.

In this he talks about two types of time - stored time and present time. In terms of information and media the difference is like that between an Encyclopedia and the 24 hour news cycle. The Encyclopedia is a store of knowledge. It may change and be updated over time but this will only happen slowly and is subject to a time laborious process whereas the 24 hour news cycle is constantly updated, never allowing for deliberation or consideration. It is a barrage of what is happening - now - with no time to catch your breath.

He draws the analogy of stored time being like a pond and present time being like a flowing stream. The flowing stream might be fresher and you might be more inclined to drink it if you’re thirsty but it’s in the stagnant pond that things actually have the time to grow. We're caught between these two types of time in our world today both of which are pushed to extremes unknown before in history. And, while there's good and bad to both types of time we seem to be more trapped between the negative aspects than the positive. We're subject to a never ending fast flow of information we can't digest while everything we do or say is stored, seemingly forever, ready to bite us on the arse when someone puts you on the board of the office for students.

In the past, Rushkoff says, culture was allowed time to grow like, well, a culture. People have always looked back but then had the time and space to innovate and create something original from their appropriation. Today new things have no time to gestate and develop. The new is there but it’s shallow and empty - dead eyed vloggers flogging trainers or empty headed music that thinks passion is measured by how long it takes to warble a single syllable. We don't want the hard work and the bruises born of error that are necessary for a new cultural moment of any depth to develop so we retreat to the things that have already done the hard work. The things that have gone before. The tendency toward appropriating things from a previous time is an attempt to capture a presumed authenticity that nothing new possesses. We are stuck and in this sense the speed of life has paradoxically frozen it.

The appropriation of the past perhaps wouldn't be so bad if, when we did it, we didn't sanitise the source. The apparent authenticity is only that - apparent. Bound into the thing co-opted are the mistakes and the rough edges that gave it value in the first place. Rough edges we can cynically offload in our appropriation. This cynicism is most apparent when you consider that a lot of the appropriation is often of specifically working class culture. Like dressing like you're on a 70s building site or in the Peaky Blinders or that hip guy's tucked in socks. It's not just the past but the people of a particular class that imbue a certain thing with the sense of authenticity, but they, along with other 'undesirable' aspects of the past, are often white washed from the story. An inconvenience. The chip stains and grease will come out in the bath.

The nature of many social media sites instead of allowing for a progressive march toward a glorious new future do the opposite and for another reason bound to our experience of time. Youtube is an amazing tool for broadcasting new things but is also full of the past. You want to see the first episode of Buck Rogers? It's on there. You want to watch an old episode of Rentaghost or be horrifically reminded of whatever the fuck Noseybonk was? They're there waiting for you.

Facebook is great for organising future events and telling people how brilliant your life is but it also compresses your entire history into one forever updating platform. Not only are your current friends and associates gurning at you from out of their profile pictures but so are all the people from your past – old work colleagues and school friends, family members you haven't seen for decades and people you were introduced to at networking events you can't even recall any more. There's also little space for discussion, nuance and depth on these platforms so your whole life is to be summed up by an ironic meme or sternly serious # . Every aspect of your life is recorded and condensed into a filtered instagram post and everywhere you go and everything you do is snapped and uploaded – so you better not do anything unexpected. You better not try anything new.

The platforms promote timidity and predictability, which is very useful for those who would like to predict and control our behaviour. Or, put another way, those who would like to control the future. Big data companies buy up the wealth of stored information we willingly provide these platforms and use it to predict our behaviour which they sell back to us in targeted advertising. And it works. The past collides with the future and in the present nothing changes.

Which isn’t to say we only look to the past but when we do look to the future we tend to dismiss the present on account of it being so damn slippery. We fall into seeing only apocalypse – nuclear or climactic or, in fiction, alien or walking dead. Or we see transcendence. Where technology surpasses us in a singularity and saves us from ourselves or we disappear into virtual worlds that some think we’re already actually in. A convenient way to not only whitewash one class’s contribution from the past but to render us all, in the present, obsolete.