One Day All This Will Have Been Amazing
The intelligence age and anticipated nostalgia
Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 28,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮
If you are, like me, a nostalgia addict, you know that the internet is a powerful enabler.
Look at TikTok. It’s a full-blown nostalgia engine, replete with videos looking back on life as it was in the 1980s and 90s: an era that pre-dates the birth of most of its users.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about all this. What is nostalgia? Why does it exert such a mesmeric hold over so many of us?
The most persuasive argument I’ve heard is that nostalgia is a kind of evolved survival mechanism. According to this theory, when we look back on our past our memories work to fade out the bad stuff and leave us basking in the warm afterglow of what was best. This retroactive positivity-washing serves a purpose. It allows us to keep doing battle with the troublesome present, and to believe in the possibility of a better future.
Seen this way, nostalgia is about gathering the strength to keep going. But that may be only an evolutionary just so story. In the end, it remains a mystery.
Much of the nostalgia that plays well on TikTok is for a specific time. That is, a time before the internet and phones. We children of the 1980s and 90s didn’t know it, but we were living through the dying days of a certain mode of being. One that has been erased by immersion in a radically new information environment.
It was a life untethered from the maddening noise of a billion other thoughts, places, people. These days, the palm of your hand is another world entire. Back then, we just were where we were.
What does all this have to do with this newsletter’s usual terrain, which is technological change and its implications?
We all sense that we’re in the early days, now, of yet another process of technological acceleration. One jettisoning us into a future that we cannot yet understand. My contention is that this process will leave us, eventually, nostalgic for now in a particular way.
Nostalgic, that is, for the dying days of the world as it was before ubiquitous intelligence.
I know it’s hard, right now, to imagine ever being nostalgic for 2025. The world seems tired and out of sorts. But given the scale of the change that is imminent, this time will one day be seen as the end days of a vanished era.
We humans are long used to a world in which intelligence is scare. For most of our history, we thought of ourselves as the only intelligence around. Perhaps more important, we’ve been the only language bearers. Sure, we’ve imagined talking animals and even talking machines. But if you wanted a conversation you had to seek out another person.
Now, all that is changing.
We’re amid the rise of a new and alien form of intelligence. And a new kind of language bearer. We don’t have to imagine talking machines any longer; they are among us.
There’s much debate about whether the LLMs we’re building are sentient. It’s a valid question. But over time, I think our perspective on it will change. We’ll come to believe that while the machines may not have subjective experiences in the way we humans do, they have something adjacent to it. They have a way of seeing that is their own; a perspective on the world that is new to us; unhuman, but equally valid.
We will be, then, amid a new being; I mean a new kind of person. In all kinds of ways the place we carved out for ourselves — as the apex intelligence, the only language bearer, the only being that considers its own being — will be shattered. It will be an existential shock.
And life in the Before Times will, once again, seem simpler. The line that divides before and after ubiquitous intelligence will come to be seen as extremely consequential. Perhaps the most consequential before/after line ever.
All this lies ahead. We can see that. And it gives, I think, a certain texture to our experience of this moment.
There should be a word for this kind of anticipated nostalgia. A word that sums up this feeling of being haunted by the knowledge that, one day, we’ll yearn to recover what we have now.
But as some of you know, I’ve been responsible for enough bad neologisms in my time. So I will refrain from coining another. This feels like personal growth.
Just remember, the Before Time is slipping away. Soon it will be gone. Cherish it.
I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,
David.
This was #12 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH. The title image shows the ruined West Pier in Brighton, England.
The true definition of nostalgia, however, is likely closer to a homesickness for a place and time that no longer exists or, more appropriately, never really existed in the first place.
So I would not confuse "nostalgia for 2025" to be sentimentality for the actual 2025 -- just a false version of it that serves emotional needs in the "present" (future).
You could argue that the current U.S. White House administration is doing exactly today that with museums, history, medical research, art, etc. by trying to gaslight citizens about their shared history.
The before time is always slipping away!
No matter how complicated and digitally enhanced our society becomes, we remain animals. I think (I hope) it will be many decades before this really changes, if it ever does. I think soon we will see cultural reactions to modernity and the loneliness and neurosis that often seems to accompany it. Technology isn't the only factor here, but technological change is driving cultural disintegration and widespread unhappiness. The left doesn't have an answer for this, and is invested in maintenance of the status quo, and so it's beginning to become a political issue. That (politicization) may be the prelude to an inflection point.
We will see (ARE seeing) people intentionally restricting their access to technology. Will this kind of limited abstention become mainstream? It might seem hard to believe right now but I believe that it will. We could heal a huge share of our society's dysfunction if we intentionally ignored the signals of the market (buy, earn, download, watch, stream, click) in an organized fashion. The 'organized' part of that is the tough part. It's difficult to build a culture from nothing, in order to simply to improve the subjective experiences of its members. It's difficult to adopt cultural practices and norms that have been eroded by powerful forces, even if those old practices were regionally almost universal less than a century ago. Cultures don't change to make people happier. They DO often change in the context of political and military struggles, and that is why I believe the politicization of this issue is possibly a prelude to organization. If a political party (or a coalition, or an army, or a country) makes the rejuvenation of the family and the community a priority, even at the cost of technological integration and economic growth, we'll be well on our way. Trimming the size of government, dethroning technocracy and bureaucracy, abolishing transfer programs and bureaucracies... all of these things could open up a space for communitarian flourishing.
Things will have to get much worse before there's a general sense of urgency to take this kind of project on, but birth rates will continue to fall, Western countries' cultures and populations will continue to die and be replaced by outsiders, adolescents will continue to descend into misery and pathology, and the emptiness of the contemporary world will continue to grow. Perversions, loneliness, anxiety, depression, ennui... these are not the markers of a healthy civilization. All of the relevant trendlines (those which indicate happiness and fulfillment) point downward. And now this is quickly becoming a class issue. The educated people seem determined to continue their progressive project, relying on credentials for income and privilege and bureaucracies for social needs, but the rest of society is quickly losing faith in the credentials, and losing patience with the bureaucracies. Across the board our regime of regulation and administrative program and social support is failing, and badly. Worse every day.
We might see a new politics and culture based firmly upon the foundational biological and social attributes of humans. We're animals who need to spend our time active and outside, and who require close-knit communal groups and children and personal challenges for psychological health. We gradually moved away from that condition but the gradual exit turned into a sprint 2-3 decades ago, and now the sprint is accelerating. It's an uncomfortable fact for defenders of the status quo to acknowledge: our current trajectory is psychologically and financial unsustainable. Technology can't solve these problems... it's not even trying. Our options seem to be reform (which is impossible under our current system) or collapse. Right now, we have a massive complex of programs and tools and research which is devoted to addressing the symptoms created by the absence of natural elements of human life (physical activity, friendship, family life, pair bonds, community, nature, sex- and group-based identity). It doesn't seem to be working. Perhaps soon we'll simply focus on replacing the missing pieces in our culture, rather than trying to devise ever more elaborate substitutes and work-arounds. Technology can help, but it can't help unless it's used sparingly and with intention, towards larger goals. Pursuing profit and technological engagement and connection is ends in themselves will only make us sicker and more miserable. Eventually, people will have had enough.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-new-right