Is There a Cultural Nastalgia for the Indoor Mall?

Paris Marx is joined by Grafton Tanner to discuss how social and environmental crises fuel nostalgia, how companies profit from it, and whether it can be reoriented to inspire a better future.

Grafton Tanner is the author of “The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia” from Repeater Books. Follow Grafton on Twitter at @GraftonTanner.

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Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Paris reviewed Grafton’s book in Jacobin.
• TikTok has already gone through a phase of nostalgia for the early pandemic and its lockdowns.
• Malls have been closing for years, but many people have nostalgia for their heyday.
• In 1996, Jennifer Light compared emerging digital spaces to shopping malls.
• Matthew Ball wrote one of the key essays on what the metaverse should look like (from a corporate perspective).
• A message mentioned in the opening crawl of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was broadcast exclusively in Fortnite.
• When Amazon bought MGM, it said it wanted to redevelop much of its accumulated intellectual property.
• At the end of the 2010s, some people questioned what algorithms were doing to our sense of time.
• The internet doesn’t get properly preserved and its history is being permanently lost.
• Tim Maughan wrote about how the world is too complex.
• Nishant Shahani’s “Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return” and Badia Ahad-Legardy’s “Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture.”

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