The Age of Adapted Nostalgia
The past has always been more malleable than we would like to believe. Our minds constantly edit our memories and we can have false events implanted or suggested. Our individual memories are a moving canvas of ideas and concepts that shift and change.
Collectively we hold nostalgia for moments and golden ages that never existed. We miss a past that we never saw. This type of nostalgia was coined in 2012 as “anemoia” (a longing for a time that you’ve never known).
This type of nostalgia isn’t new, but the commercialisation of anemoia has never been more active. From products that evoke a past that never happened to branded cultural ecosystems powered by nostalgia and tools that give anyone the ability to world build with the past – we’ve fully realized an age of adapted nostalgia.
Products like Homesick candles don’t just sell the olfactory experience of fictional locations, like the ‘Millennium Falcon’ or ‘Ravenclaw Common Room’, but also idealised nostalgic life moments and locations, like ‘Bonfire Night’ or ‘Citi Field’. As a Mets Fan, if it doesn’t have notes of hope and later, desperation, it is truly editing the past.
Heritage brands have moved beyond just bringing back products and styles from another era to actively remixing what consumers know. The return of Crystal Pepsi, the Chili’s ‘Babyback Ribs’ jingle or a Nerf Blaster might dust off the past and polish it, but increasingly it’s a platform for building something new. Often, like a movie or TV show that reaches a new generation in chunks on TikTok, nostalgia is being served with a twist and often with its original context stripped away.
From alcoholic ‘Sunny Delight’ to old school shoes from new school brand Vessi, brands are serving something that feels familiar and new simultaneously – taking elements of the past and editing them in their presentation. This changing face of heritage calls into question how brands must honour any potential legacy they do have. Heritage is increasingly a tool for creation vs. a destination to return to.
A brand such as Coca-Cola can cherry pick using ‘Holidays are Coming’ in December, while still offering up a richer back catalog of assets for users to create with in Generative AI. Indeed, as technology advances, the nature of heritage seems more about what you allow users to make going forward.
Ryan Reynold’s cultural empire powered by ‘Maximum Effort’ uses his own and other assorted nostalgic references in new ways – tying together the familiarity of Betty White jokes and Deadpool with the lesser known, such as 2005’s ‘Just Friends’. All exist in a newly arranged, but haphazard pile of nostalgia without context.
As technology allows users to seamlessly remove people from their photos, generate fake historical moments or create collaborations that never existed – brands will continue to follow suit. The shift back towards realism and non-editing that came out of the filter boom seems far off when it comes to referencing the past – especially in the face of a tide of new innovation.
From a Curated Present to an Edited Past
Technology already fundamentally changes the way we perceive the world daily. Content algorithms in social media curate what we see, while others drive discovery. Politicians accuse stories of being ‘Fake News’ and talk about multiple truths. Our view of the present is becoming more personalised, curated and splint into echo chambers confirming what we already believe and minimising what we don’t.
As the book, The Attention Merchants, put forward, when media is incentivised towards time on platform and capturing attention, users will receive content that keeps them fulfilling these metrics on platform. A bye-product is wildly different perceptions of society and the world.
While we individually interpret our own version of the past – cherry picking the news, moments and content that can confirm it, there are limits on how much we can convince others of our view. Organizations with a platform and nostalgic IP, from media owners to brands, can rally us around a version of the past, but individuals have lacked that scale. We previously didn’t yet have the tools to create rich memories that others can share, experience or live in as we do.
World building around the past in a believable way that departs fantasy is difficult. We often have to suspend belief and become more ‘Renaissance Faire’ than real. Hoax content shared on Facebook or X often runs into enough fact checking and quality issues to limit its reach over time. In fact, fact checkers are increasingly weaponising in calling out lies and half truths on social platforms.
However, as content creation tools become more advanced and available, with everything from realistic image generation to deep fake videos quickly advancing beyond their countermeasures – we face a world where one person’s view of the past can be rapidly shared, believed and followed. Where tools previously available to a smaller group with specialised skill could be countered, a flood of generative content quickly made by many can overwhelm. One person’s edited nostalgia becomes many people’s preferred history – pushing disinformation further into collective perception.
Can We Stop What We Secretly Want?
While the edited past is a key part of the marketer’s playbook, the democratization of the ability to shape and scale a version of it technologically is inevitable. Nostalgia in economic downturn and times of conflict is even more powerful and destabilising. So will anything stem technology’s increasing power to help make an editable past?
Content fact checking and water marking is the most obvious check on AI disinformation. Meta has announced its intention to tag all AI generated content on their platforms as such, as well as detecting synthetic content that has attempted hide its metadata. Google and Adobe have taken similar tacts in recent time, with measures to indelibly watermark Gen AI content.
On the supply side of Gen AI, the push to weaponise and poison data ingested by training models is indirectly attempting to limit content creation capability. Technologies such as Nightshade and others give content owners the ability to ‘poison’ training data, convincing LLMs based on it to create incorrect content. After 100 training sessions on poisoned data, a Gen AI model asked to create a cat may instead provide a dog.
However, despite these operational and technological barriers to the capabilities Gen AI can offer, the biggest challenge may lie in ourselves. Do we want to stop something that can help us rethink the past?
In the face of shifting economic conditions, life challenges, growing wealth gaps, political and social conflict – do we secretly want something to help us craft a past and a present more to our liking? In countries where politics is increasingly tribal and identity based, do we secretly want a tool to ‘own’ the other side? For those that want to wield culture as a weapon, why would we turn down more ammo for the gun?
Government and the technology sector have to help create the conditions to answer these questions through regulation and innovation. However, marketers also have a role to play. Marketing is one of the largest forces in driving technological adoption and it serves as one of the largest cultural platforms and content sources for creation. Deciding how to provide a platform and set the tone for Gen AI when it comes to nostalgia will contribute to the overall situation the technology can create.
You Can Never Go Home Again, But You Can Make Improvements
Indeed, the only thing that will stop an editable past is a growing desire for authenticity. Similarly to how edited photos and unrealistic body standards created a call for authentic representations of health and beauty, a call for a real, ugly or unpolished past may come at some point.
However, similarly to the beauty standard debate, the genie is increasingly out of the bottle and balance, not a shift back to where we were before is all that’s possible. Just like the past itself, we can’t ever go back to where we came from, but we can make something better if we want to.