The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech

The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech

by Grafton Tanner
The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech

The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech

by Grafton Tanner

Paperback

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Overview

Shocked by 9/11, the Great Recession, digital anxiety, and ecological collapse, the West suffers from nostaligia. People everywhere yearn for a utopian version of the past that never existed. Desperate for relief, many long to escape from the present. Some will stop at nothing to achieve it. In his essential new book, Grafton Tanner, author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, argues that our nostalgia today is partly a consequence of the attention economy. At a time when historical literacy is crucial, and old prejudices are percolating into the present, Big Tech's predictive algorithms are locking us into nostalgic feedback loops. The result is a precarious society with its gaze fixed on the good old days. Spanning from the ancient Sophists to Black Mirror, The Circle of the Snake is at once a reckoning with the myth of digital utopia and an incisive analysis of nostalgia as a weapon to spread fascism.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781789040227
Publisher: Hunt, John Publishing
Publication date: 11/16/2020
Pages: 176
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Grafton Tanner is a writer and musician from Athens, Georgia. He is the author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, and his work has appeared in The Nation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other locations. He writes and performs with his band Superpuppet.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Myth of Digital Utopia 1

Chapter 1 To Manage the Universe: On the Sublime Power of Digital Technology 13

Chapter 2 The Race to the Bottom of the Brain Stem, or How Persuasive is Persuasive Technology? 30

Chapter 3 No More Futures: Pre-Recession Nostalgia in the West 48

Chapter 4 In the Mirror Maze: Regression, Recursion, and Canonization 66

Chapter 5 Mending Broken Windows: Virtual Reality and the Dream of Control 88

Conclusion: Carrying the Flame 116

About the Author 129

Acknowledgements 130

Notes 132

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