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.
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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.
This definitely feels like a huge time of change and also of death. Death of the old ways of being in many ways. All this rapid change & growth can create ripples of positive change for those that feel them & feel able to cope with them.
There’s a lot more talk of learning to deal with impermanence & uncertainty, which are signs of human growth. Not easy at all, but needed in these times.
There’s so many people being drawn to slowing down, meditating, yoga, reading books , being in nature that this is creating a counter balance to this tech fervour. We just don’t hear about it in the news.
And even the newspapers are looking back into what they have created & into how they address the way they report.
I don’t buy into this doom forever, as it’s just a shift we have to go through. Sometimes we need to hit rock bottom as a society and individuals, before we decide it’s not working for us / me & make changes.
The governments are showing their true hands now, that was always there, and yet always covered up by lies. That they are not there for the people & that really gives each of us a chance to delve deeper into who we want to lay trust in. Outside authority, inner authority and / or the universal energies (god).
All the social media channels are the same now. Even linked in. Just all the same stuff going around & around. It gets really boring, so I see a lot of benefit in nostalgia.
Of looking into what felt good & what we can adapt and implement now. I don’t use ticktoc, but I can still feel these urges of links to the past that were comforting.
Not an easy time to live in, but I get the strong sense that planting good seeds now, will reap rewards later on. And each of us has to do that for ourselves. Leaning into our own intuition of what feels right.
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.