Technostalgia

Black Technopoetics and Creole Futurity: Professor Louis Chude-Sokei of Boston University (In Athens, Greece. 2017 November. 1 hour 11 minutes)

Nostalgia for a Future Yet To Exist

We often think of nostalgia as a desire to reify the past, when it is more often an expression of futures now missed: potential concurrent selves now impossible forever, dreams never birthed into being, that one time we almost were part of something huge. The many times things turned out a little different than planned. Memory is conscripted into playing tricks on us–insisting that we could have, would have, should have. If only.

I admittedly lack the historical and practical education to sufficiently comment on the video above. That being said, I can run with some ideas expressed therein: all human groups are “formed” and exist within their own interpretation of history, many of which are technologically derived. We do not have to go very far in the [white] U.S. mainstream imaginary to encounter such technologically mediated cultures: (a) Gamers; (b) neo-fascists and other online far-right groups; (c) those who participate in social media platforms around an identity, i.e. reddit, deviantart, or instagram celebrity fanbases. The third example no longer can refer to anyone online–being online is no longer significant, it is _what one does online_ that matters. And what we do online increasingly matters not only in the social world, but to the surveillence capitalists and their algorithms.