“Forget about the click-economy, it’s nostalgia-onomy that counts now!”
This is a quote from one of the geek pods we are following for our project. While one can debate the death of the click-economy, it brings to the centre an observation that we have made across the material we’re collecting for our study, namely the centrality of nostalgia to geek culture. In this post, Andreas Ottemo, discusses such nostalgia and how it relates paradoxically to other aspects of geek culture
I have reflected on potential “core” aspects of geek identity and would not suggest that nostalgia animates ALL aspects of geek culture. It does, however, recur across settings. For instance, when a Kickstarter campaign was launched for a re-release of Drakborgen, a “classic” Swedish 1980s fantasy board game, it beat the record for best-funded Kickstarter in Sweden.
Similarly, we see a whole bunch of remakes of classic films and other media products appreciated by geeks. In a sense, the superhero wave is marinated in nostalgia. At cons and other real life manifestations of geek culture, a recurring element is the sale of “vintage toys”, like He-Man and other superhero dolls and paraphernalia from the 80s.
Not only do such media products provide a geek audience the possibility of being nostalgic about their own life experience. Nostalgia itself also makes up the content of many geek cultural products. Again, from a Swedish perspective, it is interesting to see how popular illustrator and writer Simon Stålenhag’s scifi-nostalgic art work has recently become very popular. Obviously this is not just a Swedish phenomenon, as manifested in the global success of Stålenhag’s work that has been adapted as a series on Amazon Prime.
Talking of TV-series, Stranger Things is another good example of the wave of nostalgia currently flowing over us. As discussed in an entire special issue in Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media, central to its popularity is the possibility it provides for indulging in the “allure of simpler, innocent times”. (The special issue also discusses how this relates to race and gender.)
In a way, this wave of nostalgia seem only natural when related to the increasing status of the geek in society. As one of my project colleagues recently remarked: “Well, it is not so strange that when the geeks of the 80s have grown up to become the new societal elite, the cultural products they endorse and finance are largely the cultural products of their own childhood”. This is a good point but at the same suggests a contradiction in drawing attention to the new found status and “success” of the geek (or the complete takeover of popular culture if you wish).
When the rise of, for instance, “white melancholia” is addressed, it is often explained as manifesting a longing for an imagined past time, more homogenous and “simpler”. However, the time that geekiness is nostalgic about as culture is also a time when geeks weren’t exactly at the height of the popularity.
One can of course suggest, as another of my project colleagues did when we discussed this, that geek nostalgia is a form a gatekeeping, insofar as it “longs” for a time when geek identity still felt special and was not as mainstream as today. There is probably truth in that position too, but it still doesn’t resolve the peculiarity of being nostalgic for a time when you were marginalised and had less status. Especially if you relate this to another central trope in geek culture, namely its revanchism.
Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett in their book Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing, note that “geek media often follow the standard story arc of a revenge fantasy”. How this notion of revanchism becomes compatible with the more utopian idea that it is the future that holds hope for geeks is, we believe, a theme worthy of future scrutiny in our mapping of geek culture. And as usual, any reflections and thoughts on how to resolve these paradoxes are gratefully appreciated!