Retro At The Edge Of Forever
January 28, 2025 posted by Merryjest
I'm not gonna lie to you guys.It's scary out there, right now.
The world is on fire, figuratively and literally. Climate change is making our world increasingly more hostile to our existence. Authoritarianism is on the rise across the world and, to put it tactfully, the most powerful country in the world has decided to test out whether the maxim that an unexamined life is not worth living is true by electing a certifiable bedlamite to the highest office in the land. Social media has gone from a quaint and seemingly pointless thing that began as a sad and pathetic man's attempt to rate the hotness of women on campus to driving the political fate of the world's most powerful nations, eroding critical thinking and corrupting the average person's ability to engage in honest discourse. Buyers' remorse for the 21st century is a real thing.
Maybe that's why Star Trek never really dwelled a lot on what happened in the 21st century, Gene Rodenberry must have caught a whiff of something.
It's not surprising, then, that in the face of everything that is going on, some have turned their thoughts towards a time they once knew... including a surprising number of people who are too young to have ever lived through it. Neocities is full of people who experienced the glorious excess of early 90s web-design, and members of newer generations who are more than eager to emulate it and take it to new levels. The neon of the 80s and the grunge of the 90s blending together in the false memories of those born too late to experience them firsthand, but who live through them vicariously through their parents' memories, or 'vintage' media. Synthwave and Vaporwave strike a chord. Chappell Roan is clearly stepping forth to claim the tiara of her generation's fantastic intersection of Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper, yet she is exquisitely her own. Roan openly discusses themes of queer love and sexuality that could only be mentioned obliquely thirty years ago. Enya-inspired singer-songwriter Weyes Blood has seemingly resurrected Karen Carpenter's wistful voice in her own to sing apocalyptic soft-rock ballads in protest of a future that wasn't promised to us. Genezation Z may be vibin' to the 80s, but there's more layers to it than just the aesthetics.
Even if we have to admit that the aesthetics were pretty awesome. Once you stop taking yourself so seriously.
It's about taking back a future that went off-the rails by grabbing a hold of the past and making it our own again- make it something it always had the promise to be but never quite was... but still could be. Someday. Humanity has always wrapped itself in legends to give itself courage and shelter when dark, dreary things have lurked outside. Campbell's musings on myth and Pratchett's warning about the power of stories come from the same observant nature that has sought to make sense of human behavior, and we are indubitably pans narrans, the storytelling ape. Camelot as we know it never existed- or, at least, it never truly existed as it is presented in songs, novels and stories, and yet the appeal of the Arthurian myth lingers on throughout the centuries, in great part thanks to the tradition of the troubadours, storytellers and writers. The entertainment media of its day for millennia. While the younger generations are familiar with the classic legends in varying degree, they have also grown up with their own private mythologies, as popular media can now serve up entire decades repackaged and remixed, ready for consumption and complete with dramatic lighting and glamourized filters. Jareth the Goblin King, The Childlike Empress, the Goonies and Howard The Duck now co-exist with the kids from Stranger Things. One epoch is poured into the sensibilities of a newer one while still wearing its original trappings, not unlike what T. H. White did with the stories from Thomas Malory, who also did the same with the works of Robert de Boron.
Some of us remember what it was like, stepping out of the 80s as teens or children and seeing the promise of the internet, and the tech boom that accompanied it. We could, conceivably, talk to people all over the world! We could be in each other's living rooms and have discussions, play games, write articles with and at each other. And it was fine. No, really, it was- up to a point. While forums could get contentious and chatrooms could get heated, there was still a certain degree of separation between inner thought and outward expression. Netiquette used to be a thing you were expected to know and observe in the early days of online communities. But as the internet became more widespread and technology more accessible and less expensive, a lot more communities opened up, and troll culture eventually entered the chatroom, distilled into a pungent ichor in dedicated communities. Nevertheless, it wasn't until the advent of social media that the boundary between thought and impulse truly began to be eroded- not as an act of subversion (as trolls do) but as normalization. The value of 'saying what's on your mind' began to acquire more appeal than any discernment about whether or not the contents thereof merited sharing, or if maybe they needed more time in the oven for fear of being half-baked. Oversharing became social currency, and in its wake came the cacophonous din of the desperate for attention, the grandstanders and those who- for the sake of control- found pleasure in dysregulating others. Social media turned public discourse and private relationships into bare nerves and open sores. Melanie Safka's line about bleeding into each other's wounds as a metaphor for compassion is drowned out by Weyes Blood's plangent realization that everybody is, in one way or another, bleeding. Some of us have realized that we've blurred the lines between ourselves and others, and that only madness can result from that. And it has.
Some of us remember what it was like, remember the promise, and recoil as we look around because the future was usurped by plutocrats, tinpot dictators, manipulators and narcississts. Dimestore wellness industries and spiritual gurus and conspiracy theorists all dance to the beat of demagogues, who use their fractured psyches to bolster their shock troops and weave a common thread of a culture of outrage and distortion, because it's easy to get people to fight for you... if you can get them to believe in outrageous things.
And because we remember, the children remember, even if they weren't there. Remember what the witch says at the finale of Sondheim's "Into The Woods"? Careful the tale you tell, that is your spell- children will listen. They, perhaps, feel more cheated than we do, because they can only hear about it. They weren't there.
So now the promise is spent, and the hope is gone.
Funny thing about hope, though. Funny thing about a lot of things about the human experience that Terry Pratchett very astutely observed. In his novel Hogftather, the Death of the Discword (WHO SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS) speaks to his granddaughter (it's complicated) Susan thusly:
Far from being nihilistic, Pratchett's observation is factual. Justice, Hope, Fairness, these are things that do not exist in the world- they aren't some platonic thought-form with an existence pre-dating the existence of humankind, but rather they are 'lies' told by mankind. Lies, however, is a strong word- especially if we take into account that fiction is, in and of itself, a very elaborate set of cohesive lies. A story, goes the saying, doesn't have to be real, as long as it is true. We invented lies about flying men and women long before we could finally soar through the skies, and such was the genesis of almost every important invention. Justice, then, and hope are things that do not exist in the world by themselves, but rather emerge from our interactions with the-world-that-is, and we start to conceive the-world-that-should-be. Our minds first birthed the gods to make sense and explain the order of the world and, finding them wanting, they then birthed ideals not to make sense out of the world, but rather to put sense into it. And it is always an uphill battle.
But isn't that fitting? After all, Jennifer Connelly's Sarah says "Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered I have fought my way here" at the end of her long and arduous journey, ready to confront the Goblin King. It is the fortitude she has accumulated through hardship and through learning how to use her brain and talents that has made her capable of uttering the words of power that prove to be Jareth's unmaking: "You have no power over me." The hero's journey may be fiction, but its beats ring true.
To the Stoics and the Taoists alike, every reversal and every downturn of fortune presents an opportunity to surmount an obstacle. Hope is not lost because it is created, and every act of creation is an intentional act defiance against oblivion and entropy. And so we look at the world-that-was and the-world-that-is and express our deep disgust and dissatisfaction."No," we say, "You've gone the wrong way. Let me show you." And we take that past unto ourselves and bring it forth again. It's not the same past, but it's familiar enough, and it's new enough. In this world of Retrofuturism at the edge of forever we can create counter-currents. People are exhausted by social media. They are ill from the toxicity, of the indiscriminate comingling of selves. Tapping away at keyboards to write HTML pages and cascading style sheets, infusing pages with the ornaments of yesteryear and simpler times, we can propose alternate presents, different pathways and methods of exploration. Different ways of existing online that focus not on the corporatist amalgamation of brands, but on uniqueness. We often forget that the 80s themselves existed as part celebration and part protest- the glamazons embodied femininity and sex-positivity as an empowering judo-flip against the cultural norms that portrayed femininity as weak and submissive. Androginy and glam blurred gender norms and elevated queer idols even as the government ignored and denied the existence of the AIDS epidemic, and extravagant fashion and pageantry occupied the ambivalent space of being a reactionary gesture against Reagan-era conservatism while also indulging in commercial culture.
And so, once again, the time has come. At the rise of a new wave of authoritarians and moralists who seek to erase 'the objectionable' from sight, it's time to be as bright, as outrageous (truly, truly, truly outrageous, even) and as colorful, as improper as we possibly can. The tools of today are tainted- social media is unsalvageable because it never was worth it, to begin with. It is time to make new tools from old ones, and to start creating the past we wanted in order to bring about the jump-point towards the future that we promised ourselves. Nobody is coming to save us but ourselves, but don't worry- we can create hope where there was none before, and that's incredibly powerful. And we have our stories.
Oh. And Webrings. We can't forget webrings!
It's time to go back- so that we can finally go to the future.