the commodification of nostalgia

Posted by Harbor August 16, 2025

the commodification of nostalgia

Another throwback collection, another easy buck for Hollister, another win for capitalism! Who wanna pop some champagne to celebrate?! All jokes aside, can we please have something fresh for once and not just another redo trend of a trend of an aesthetic two decades ago? No? ok. Well the least we can do is talk about it.

https://www.tiktok.com/@darcymcqueenyyy/video/7530711287794289951

In a world filled with so much nostalgia it is easy to feel nostalgic ourselves. But why has there been a burgeoning in yearning for nostalgia in recent years? Maybe it's because of the fast paced development of our surrounding that leads us to go back to times where in a life-span nothing much changed at all. Maybe it's because in such chaotic oppressive time we want to step back into a simplistic space where our naivety clouded every bad thing in the world. Maybe. But maybe it's a lot deeper than that. Maybe it's systematic. Maybe...it's capitalism (who would've thought)!

Based on the Google dictionary, nostalgia is a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past.

In that sense nostalgia can be seen and felt as such a whimsical feeling (like a time travel machine), so personal to each individual, since the past is subjective to each person, yet universal in the sense that we all experience it. For me, the nostalgia I feel however is not a true reflection of my past. When I'm indulged in nostalgia instead of reflecting on my childhood, I end up romanticizing some other lives projected onto me from social media to simulate the cathartic nostalgia-ness that everyone online seems to have. The poems, video slideshows, the music, the media were too good not to emerge myself into, and in the midst of it all I lost my own past, and was submerged into the public nostalgia pool of us. So even though I am nostalgic, I have no real connection to whatever that is I am nostalgic about. It isn't personal to me anymore but man-made, detached of all the earnest longing and affection that make up the definition. Nostalgia in this way lacks purpose and "rawness", and interestingly enough that is exactly how it was designed to be felt, and consumed.

But how do you consume nostalgia? The wording of it resembles that of conversations on drugs or everyday life products. Isn't nostalgia suppose to be something more sacred in relation to ordinary things? Well, no. To consume something, the object of your consumption has to be a commodity. This means that there is the social relation between producers and consumers present. Basing on my experience with nostalgia, which I stated felt manufactured and artificial, there is the source of producer in the picture. And to follow through on this, I said the video slideshows and music and movie (media in general) aroused nostalgia in me, we could say that the manifestation of these manufactured nostalgia is the media we consume, as consumers. If we apply that logic here, we can assume that nostalgia is a commodity. But nostalgia is one special commodity. It is special because the commodification of nostalgia feels invasive; to have something so personal and raw within me be gutted out, altered, produced and sold back to me. What sucks even more that it is such a lucrative product.

With that in mind, it is no doubt fair then to posit that this personal feeling has in some form been commodified. Has capitalism, after its exhaustion of physical resources, gone inward, into us, and exploiting our memories?

I want to discuss two kinds of nostalgia. One is on the individual level, on our daily lives and varying experiences that make us, us. The second is of the mass, of culture.

With the rise of technology in general and AI in particular has come with an upturn in the ability of these medium to bring nostalgia to the forefront, most disturbingly through "unfreezing time". The concept of this seems magical but in practice it comes out as uncanny, to put it lightly. Like that one trend a while ago on Tiktok where AI was able to make figures in photos move. Many people used this trend to hug their moving, albeit gone, younger self or loved ones out of reminiscence for a time in the past. A picture, something that immortalizes a specific time and space, can now be processed and turned into a moving image, like pressing play on a still. How gross is that? From the grief of us, capitalism takes it and create a product, confident that it will sell, and tells us this is the way to relieve you of your pain, the pain that we created. From an article I read (though I could not find any other sources to verify this data so take it with a grain of salt) it said that a large percentage of AI use was on generated images of users in different era like the 1970s, 80s, 90s, etc. Snapchat also has a new feature on their app (that they don't allow you to reject) called AI Snaps that create generated themed images with users faces on it. The most prominent themes being "80s look" "me as a kid AI" "90's HS" and "Prehistoric". This new application on Snapchat is not surprising though, because social media apps have always reminded us of the flowing passage of time we go through. How insidious then, that our way of communicating, of documenting our lives is just another portal of nostalgia waiting to be consumed. With everything digitalized (our memories) it is rather convenient to heighten our exposure and consequently demand for nostalgia. That is to say we live in a parasitical system that sustain on our memories.

Moving on to our culture. The most noticeable aspect of culture that seems to have been engulfed with nostalgia is fashion. Thank god we live in a society that just knows how to capitalizes on whatever hyper-fixations the public is on at all time, since we're able to relive the past through the million of cores and aesthetics produced and recycled online: 00s core, Tuscan mom core, coastal granddaughter core, global village cafe core, and the countless versions of 70s, 80s, 90s core. The newest addition to this cycle of overproduction and overconsumption is the Hollister 2000s throwback collection. Yet, where do these trends originate from? One possible answer is social media. Tiktok especially, plays a big role in the formation of trends. Stemming out of innocuous videos and slideshows about certain items of the past comes the desire of wanting to be transported back to that specific point in time (because that is how capitalism wired our thinking; to see something different and immediately jump to the conclusion that we need to have 10 of that item or we will die). If these videos gain traction it will boom into a trend. I've seen so much of those "pov: you are a teenage girl in 2008" slideshows on tiktok where they give you a house that fits the aesthetic, and let you choose your clothes and drinks, designing this artificial and short-lived life. The comments under the video would be "i need all of these clothes" "im so jealous of 2000s and 90s teens" "there was just something different in the air" "this style needs to come back" "the life i was promised" "bring this back". Corporations cling on to these desires of ours and give us these 'tools' to allow us to be transported to a different reality, while at the same time physically being in the modern world. This justifies their production, because the demand is there. Svetlana Boym, Harvard professor and literary critic, puts it nicely this way: "technology and nostalgia have become co-dependent: new technology and advanced marketing stimulate ersatz nostalgia - for the things you never thought you had lost - and anticipatory nostalgia - for the present that flees with the speed of a click."

This is dangerous because it falls into the latter version of nostalgia, which Boym calls restorative nostalgia. To Boym, "the danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with an imaginary one. In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die and kill." Though the variant of nostalgia that we experience today is not as polarizing of that mentioned by Boym, it still resonates soundly the phenomenon of the creation of "a phantom homeland", illusory lifestyles that neurotically takes us out of our body. It removes us from the real world that we live in, the ugly place that we try to substitute with a "better past". Boym goes on to say that "While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one's homeland with paranoic determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion. Home, after all, is not a gated community. Paradise on earth might turn out to be another Potemkin village with no exit." We can all long, longing can be healthy, but it is the wanting to come home, return to a made up place, that is pernicious. And it is pernicious because the wanting to come home doesn't stop there for us, it advances with the push of capitalism, to move us there, to trap us there, so that our minds are so preoccupied with playing dress-up that we no longer have the capacity nor ability to realize all the destruction taking place around us. We are not just treading the water in the restorative nostalgia but already knee deep in its water. Or as River Quintana puts it in The Cult of Yesterday, capitalism is "culturally reproducing the past" and its inability to "let go of the past. Like a necromance, it reanimates the corpses of bygone trends, ideologies, and aesthetics."

A prominent work that we can also look to when diving into this topic is Mark Fisher's analysis into culture based on Francis Fukuyama's the end of history, claiming that the proclaimed last stage of human development, that is capitalism, will lead to either fruitless culture growth at best or perennial culture degradation at worst. This is due to late stage capitalism inherent characteristic of placing a monetary value onto anything.

We see here that Fisher's prediction on the fruitlessness of culture growth and its degradation is playing out right in front of our eyes. From his book Capitalist Realism Fisher wrote "capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture...Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable...[it] had seeped into the very unconscious...".

The rife commodification of old, hitherto art, music, literature, fashion (culture in general) strips away the ability to imagine a society of the cultural novelty. The reality of capitalism swings and mingles between "the ultra-modern and the archaic" according to Fisher in Capitalist Realism; it juggles and deals with the never stagnant shifts of time by assimilating it to historically sound elements of the past, with the two never able to be autonomous. One can argue that autonomy is crucial for the progress of culture. Without autonomy we remix the past forever. With this logic we can see how vintage shops gain surplus from selling old clothings niche to an audience, of whom with no alternatives due to the systemic interconnected of the past and present indulged in these pieces. That's just one example of the lack of autonomy within one facet of our culture.

"What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead...the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture" aka capitalism has amalgamated parts of culture that are anti-government and punk into mainstream media, byt that diluting it of its true purpose. Things that we take as parts of aesthetics were once meaningful and representative. That is the power of capitalism, to commodify and with that extract the soul of 'products' what were once tools and emblems of a greater cause. Capitalism takes an active role in shaping our dreams because it dictates our culture.

Fisher made another interesting remark about how deceiving culture has become, how the supposed inconspicuous styles like "'alternative' and 'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream". The example he have was Kurt Cobain and the Nirvana. "In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to a despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened." Cobain embodied the generation in the wake of postmodern capitalism, the generation of surveillance preceding the rapid technological advancements. With the helping hand of technology, they, with ease, spoon feed us manufactured thoughts, emotions, ideas to us before we get a chance to think independently. I also love the phrase "objectless rage" because it is a lucid visualization of what the commodification of nostalgia is: regurgitated culture without the rebellious nature and intellectual depth of it; the strumming of a guitar by a soulless artist.

Kurt Cobain

"Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliche scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliche..." Cobain understood he was just another piece of entertainment that the capitalist culture had made him out to be, that corporations like MTV make profit off of him being a spectacle, here in the form of protesting against MTV. A seemingly radical act renders to being performative, by default, because everything that comes out of the postmodernism capitalism sphere is performative at best. And what I mean here by performative is not necessarily that it is soulless (though that is very much a salient aspect) but that it literally a performance which leave not a single trace of impact behind. It is a performance that is watched perceived, profited from, and forgotten.

Another angle that we can look at the quote "...nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV.." is how great of a culture capitalism has built, in that it allows us to criticize and badmouth the system. This feature tames us, it makes us have less furry bottled up that could erupt into concrete change. It gives us just enough freedom, that slight margin, to speak out because it knows (by it I am talking about governments, billionaires, corporations specifically in the global North) this activism will never surmount to real change. So even though no radical change will come, we feel less guilty about not only living but indulging in the ways of life under capitalism, because we went out to a protest. "The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself."

Anti-capitalist art are capitalistic because they preclude real actions that are genuinely anti-capitalist. So when we're watching anti-establishment films and anti-capitalist media produced by the capitalists, do not be mistaken by its messaging. It is satire, and we have been satirized as well, consuming the anti-capitalist movies as the capitalists make big bucks, raving about how empowered the movies made us felt. Can't you see through it? They're laughing at us. The nostalgic feelings you have are lining their pockets. We are the satire. "We participate in capitalism ironically but that's still participation" in the words of Chris Gregory from chrisgregorybooks.

"...like postmodern culture, in general, Cobain found himself in 'a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, [where] all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum'. Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed."

Bringing the discussion to a greater relevancy to us, let's take Indie Sleaze as an example. "Mark answered "I think it's a good sign for the culture, because as much as you wanna say it's about the music, the fashion the this- I think it's a really important thing to touch on how, for me at least, it feels very welcoming. You can express yourself how you wanna be...Whereas what happened [in the 2010s] with the 'Kardashian effect' and what they call the McBling [in the 00s]. Where everyone had to be pretty, and tan, and buff, and have tons of makeup on all the time or whatever, this 'indie Sleaze' is the exact opposite. You can dress the way you want, you can act the way you want" says Mark Hunter, aka the cobrasnake, the photographer of these pictures here in a conversation with final digital girl on substack about Indie Sleaze in the larger context of cultural growth.

Indie Sleaze itself was seen as part of the post-punk revival scene. The style and its participants, musicians and artists, took heavy influence from the 70s and 80s music landscape (We could say then that Indie Sleaze was a throwback of the 70s/80s itself, a recycling of the punk hipster culture that preceded it). Set in a context of the Great Recession and post 9/11, the intense partying culture and usage of drugs that define Indie Sleaze could be seen as a way to block out the uncertain reality at the time. The perceived freedom and superiority of the Indie Sleaze era compared to the 2010s and the 00s plays right into capitalism playbook. It wants you to think that by being allowed to dress "the way you want, you can act the way you want" that you are liberated from the oppressive establishment that you live under. It does nothing but injects that fabricated sense of freedom and free will, a high you will never want to get off as the world crumbles around you. Indie Sleaze to me incapsulates that one iconic quote:

From this we can see a parallel between the present in the political and social context, and how it mirrors that of the era of Indie Sleaze: whether that is the Brat era, the renditions of Indie Sleaze itself. However we are not mimicking simply the overall lifestyle of Indie Sleaze as a mass, for instance, but intentionally acting out their every move on an individual level. As final digital girl on substack puts it "They're acting like people at a party instead of being people at a party". So meticulous in our curation of the past that instead of being our own selves, we fully masked into how we think people of the Indie Sleaze era act. Moreover, who to say the Indie Sleaze crowd did not copy the behaviour of the 70s/80s punk?

Are we, then, incapable of eliciting a new channel to face our problems because of nostalgia? Has nostalgia made us stuck in this culture loop forever?

River Quintana writes "Capitalist necromancy thrives on constructing ideological fantasies around nostalgia, presenting a distorted perception of history that inspires sentimental longing for a time that never truly exists. This construction of nostalgia serves as an ideological fantasy that perpetuates the illusion that capitalism is the solution to our deepest desires and aspirations." Carefully crafted imagery and narratives have passed over the contradictions of the system and reinforced its supremacy. We stay in this "comforting loop of the familiar" because we are blinded with nostalgia.

Baudrillard adds to this by saying "When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning". When we become one with this world of the past, we replace experiencing our reality with the consumption of nostalgia. We as the mass culture consumes itself over and over again chewing and eating until whatever remnants of "culture" that is left disappear too.

Fisher strikes again with the idea of deflated expectations of the mass regarding new media in comparison to all the "greats" of the past eras: "The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges' Funhouse or Sly Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of 'nostalgia'. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia." Fisher mentions the impotence of artists tho manifest new styles based on the reality of the now, instead of relying on styles established long ago. He argues that this "grip" that nostalgia has on the current moments has something to do with the rise of the internet and communication technology: "In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there's an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore." What is the present if we are living through renditions of the past? Are we stuck? Stuck in a cycle of eating and vomiting back out the cultures of the past 50 years?

I would argue that our lamentation for the past, for nostalgia, has been used to keep us distracted, from seeing what is actually going on in the world. Genocides are taking place across the globe, the gap between the rich and poor are getting wider by the second, billionaires are killing our grandmas and exploiting our labor, to then use that money to tell the government to bomb kids and pollute further. It is now more than just a longing of the past, they are trying to keep us there. They keep us numb with made-vintage media and manufactured-vintage lifestyles to blind us from having to face with the material reality that we live in, to numb us of our daily sufferings. The truth is, though, consuming nostalgia will never ever get you out of your misery. This consumption can drag you deeper into it.

"By commodifying nostalgia, it offers the illusion of satisfaction through the consumption of simulated experiences and hyperreal replicas of the past" as River Quintana wrote in The Cult of Yesterday. It is no longer organic, the way we deal with feelings, the way we handle nostalgia because before we are able to process what the hell is going on in our mind, capitalism has already managed to spin out a million products renditioning whatever was on our mind and has pushed it onto us. This is because we need to be kept at bay. If we are able to digest our feelings and thoughts we will come to radical revelations that goes against the interests of the bourgeoisie and consequently revolt against them.

A quote to end this essay, from Midnight in Paris that I think is relevant to the fight against nostalgia, a reminder of what to do when nostalgia comes back, like it always does, haunting your every thought:

"the artist's job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence"