disclaimer: i did take approximately one sociology class at Santa Monica College, and failed it. i am not a sociologist, nor am i entitled enough to think i've discovered something & should get to name it; i am a student/artist/writer observing a phenomenon that may not even exist outside of my community, and this is what i, myself, call it (but you can call it whatever you want):

RESPONSIVE-RETROSPECTIVITY

or, "responsive retro."

has anyone else noticed what i have?: my sister goes hiking with friends and one of them brings a disposable film camera. the last conversation i had with an old family friend involved talk of how all of her friends who were into music have started collecting vinyl records, and this old family friend is in highschool while i'm almost done with college. one of my best friends is only on Instagram, no other social media, and rarely on Instagram at that. i'm the same but with Spacehey; i started geocaching last month, i'm going to start scrapbooking this year, i got my first ever pair of crocs this year, and i use a Flash game emulator to play Poptropica. i own Wizard 101 on Steam. meanwhile, Spacehey itself, the classic-Myspace clone & only advertised-as-retro social media, has 900,000+ users so far. i'm also creating a print-only magazine with friends. what's going on? why would my sister's friend bring a disposable film camera with on a hike? why would my family friend and her equally relatively young peers be collecting physical records? and apparently they have actual record players, what's up with that? why do i and most of my peers kinda avoid most social media, except for one random passion project by a fan of something that peaked decades ago, which is surprisingly popular?

if i'm not alone, there's something else going on, something beyond a fair amount of folk interested in the "vintage" or "retro" aesthetic; aesthetics are purely visual, they usually have no other substance to them, no 'reason' for their being other than their visuals. whether it's a part of artistic experimentation or self-expression, or both. this doesn't have any negative connotation for me, i think aesthetics are wonderful, and there is no one way, no set rules, about how to make art or express yourself. but the aesthetic of punk, for instance, is vastly different from the personal, practical reality of it, and that's not what's happening; my sister's friend bringing a disposable film camera is not an artistic experiment devoid of any other reasoning beyond seeing how the wider audience that is other hikers react to its presence, no, i've asked those who still use film cameras why they do so, and there are very much personal, practical reasons; "i just prefer the old-school method," and i've thought myself, well, why not use a filter so your photos look the same?, i do that sometimes, but, "no, it's the whole process that's different," "it feels better in my hands." the people who collect vinyl records don't do it to show them off to guests, well, not only to show them off to guests XD, nor do they simply post how many records they have on social media for likes & then never touch each record again, they actually listen to the records. i started gaming less, and geocaching more, exploration my urban environment more, because i wanted adventures, yes, but also to touch something real, tangible, physical. it's why i'm going to a friend's art show in 10 days (10 at the time of writing). and that appears to be a reccuring theme here; "real, tangible, physical." for me, it's not because i believe in any hierarchy between analog and digital (digital, virtual environments are extremely important for me! i met my partner in one! i consider video games art, storytelling, not just pixels devoid of intent or meaning! Spacehey is a virtual environment!), but because as a kid who grew up outside, and then developed severe anxiety & agoraphobia after a relatively-near-death experience, i missed it; 'the outside.' i isolated myself for years, not only because i was anxious, but because i was physically disabled (which reminds me of the gravity of the neglect & cruelty with which we treated our immunocompromised family & friends during the pandemic, and still). the reason i identify as a zombie, who died in 2012, and was reanimated late last year, is because that's how it feels. i feel like for the decade i isolated myself, i wasn't a person, i was incubating, or pretending, or both. and the world transformed without me, and i am capable of holding the truth that transformation is inevitable, but i wanted to be transforming with it. instead, i was stagnant. not anymore. now that i've chosen and started to seek out the kinds of things i want to experience, i feel more like an active participant in my own life. perhaps ironically (maybe it's ironic to you), i found that feeling by rejecting any fear of stagnancy and returning to what made me deeply happy when i was younger. i don't limit myself; there are things and people i love that i didn't even know of at those ages, but there's this myth that when the world transforms without you, and you carry with you the things that have always brought you joy, you are going backwards. time only goes in one linear direction, forwards, and you are going backwards. you are regressing. i say, fuck that; i'm not literally becoming younger, i'm remembering that feeling of joy, and asking that version of myself that didn't yet know fear how to hold onto it in this time, and this world, this reality. my current, contemporary, 2024 truth is, it's got nothing to do with technology or culture shock; i'm reconciling myself with myself. if i remind you that i am a zombie, and i ask you to recognize that i was still dead for a decade, and i'm alive again now, you'll see, i'm not going in any direction i didn't choose. i'm choosing myself. this week is the first time i've read truly voraciously in years. i'm starting over, on my own terms. and now back to the collective application of this thinking; because i don't think i'm the only one that feels this way, but there's a difference between nostalgia and resistance. 

the definition of a "subculture" explains that subcultures, like punk & its various offshoots, or hippies, hipsters, bikers, furries, and more, are "group[s] of people within a cultural society that differentiate [themselves] from the conservative and standard values to which [they] belong, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures develop their own norms and values regarding cultural, political, and sexual matters. Subcultures are part of society while keeping their specific characteristics intact." while countercultures are more formed in direct, diametric opposition to larger, more mainstream society, the two concepts are not to be conflated but are not entirely mutually exclusive; a subculture can transformed into a counterculture, and vice versa. it all depends on what shared values there are, if any, and if the -culture is treated as political resistance. i don't know if this phenomenon i've witnessed fully counts, from a sociological perspective, as either, but i'm going to talk about it as though it could, because if it does, it might signify something important for us in the coming decades.

when we talk about political resistance, my first question i bring to the table is going to be, "what politic are you resisting?"

for a number of young folk, younger than millenials or on that cusp, to be returning to physical media & physical activity after being raised to be comfortable with digital, virtual media, and digital, virtual environments, something might be seriously wrong with our mainstream media & mainstream spaces, digital-virtual or otherwise. what's wrong here? what's worth resisting? (well, a lot, but:) i have a couple hypotheses, and again, it all has almost nothing to do with the technology itself:

1. Everything - and Everyone - is Content Now

this morning, i watched a video of Laina Morris discuss the fame she gained from her experience as a human meme; The Obsessive Girlfriend. it's not hard to notice that despite her intentional decision to keep 'milking' (her word) the first video she made, as a professional comedian, her mental health suffered. greatly. the pressure of having to be 'on;' performable, all the time, got to be too much. so she said goodbye to YouTube. it might be slightly harder to notice, is that metaphorically speaking, we are all on YouTube now. by which i mean - if anyone remembers the Black Mirror episode where if you don't get enough likes you effectively get socioeconomically fucked - we're all having that same effect on our mental health; of having to be 'on' all the time, lest we look ugly, lest we seem unproductive. every day we have goes on social media. to share with our friends? yes, and others. but the sharing, it's not always intentional. Laina's work was intentional. ours isn't, not always. it's intentional in much the same way going to work at your day-job is, in that you do it to gain capital, but on social media, it's social capital, and the work never stops. not unless you take that risk of stopping the performance. the most extreme example i've seen of this is YouTube creators who will livestream entire days; every interaction, every 'non'interaction; they film their own sleep. not to share with close friends, or with scientists who could find the data found in that mess useful, but for their followers - not friends, followers - to access. where do we end and branding begins, in this 21st century of ours? in the 2000s and 2010s, the internet definitely existed, but not only was being online an intentional decision; it had to be. when you made something and decided to publish it, that was because you knew coding, or if not coding itself, you knew the 'coding' of your decisions; you knew the ripple effect your presence would have, because older forums, classic-Myspace and website-hosting platforms like geocities were far, far more intimate than mass social media apps. you would do something, or make something, offline, and then come online to share it. instead of both the doing and the making happening only for the end result itself. the "third spaces" of the internet, where you would publish what you had made, didn't exist for the acquisition of immediate social capital. you could see comments, but not likes. you were sharing to share; you made content. now? you are content. and again, a third & final time, this has nothing to do with the technology itself, however 'transformed' from however each generation remembers it; phones, computers, video games, A.I., and the bare concept of 'sharing things online because you want to' are not "the enemy;" capitalism is. any tool becomes corrupted by it. which is why you have to confront and choose your liberation. that's intentional, too. rejecting the things i just listed per se is nothing, it carries no meaning and has no impact. rejecting the mainstream use and iterations of those things i listed specifically where you see them being used for profit instead of even something like an artistic experiment, now that's meaningful, impactful. art is fulfilling liberation, profit is draining death.

 2. The Cost of "Progress"

i don't believe in progress. by which i mean, i don't believe that time does only move forward linearly and if you don't match its speed or direction you are primitive or any other variation of inept. that way of viewing time, and life itself, and the 'long arc of justice' is colonial. my indigenous friends have taught me that. i've also been warned against romaniticizing the past, so i won't; at around the same time that i was a year, two years, three years old, Muslims worldwide were not-so-suddenly facing a threat from their own neighbors, after 9/11. a housing recession happened that preceded and made way for this current time of ever-increasing poverty - of the financial, and moral, kind. Palestine was not freer than it is today; Rachel Corrie was killed in 2003, and all this time since the founding of the settler-colonizer state of Amerikkka, where i'm writing from, the land has not been given nor taken back, as would be the right of the many, many indigenous tribes and nations we displaced; to take it. i say all this to try and articulate; harm has always happened, destruction, too. injury & death have always happened. killing is not new. but neither is community, or love, mutual aid, resource-based economics, queerness, fatness, disabity. the cost of progress, i believe, the cost of linear time, whether you're going "forwards" or "backwards," indeed, is that that duality itself, past & future, has separated us from each other. most Westerners, myself included, don't feel much for the victims of an earthquake that happened even a decade ago. our empathy has a timestamp on it. but if you asked anyone from any culture that chooses to honor both ancestors & descendants at once, every disaster is ours. every child and parent is ours, and is us. we are all each other. James Baldwin tells us we could be monsters, and it's all down to intentionality. we're all made of the same things, and those things have a cycle of decay, and growth, and decay, and growth (and perhaps there's another way to phrase that that doesn't feel so dual), but no 'timestamp.' peoplehood has no time stamp. life has no timestamp.

if this generation is resisting capitalism by forming community around a very specific niche in our technological & social ecology; if we're reaching out and touching the world in opposition to something that wants the work of being watched to never stop, so be it. this could mean this grows, gets bigger. that, or maybe it's as simple as, i know who my people are.

comment below with your experiences of responsive retro, if you've had any. feel free to ask questions, and answer them; what you do think of my hypotheses', my analysis? this blog post may or may not be updated, and even published elsewhere (like in my print-only magazine)!