In January 2024, a comedy routine was released onto the internet produced by an artificial intelligence that had digested thousands of hours of material by the late George Carlin and then attempted to mimic his style and wit while commenting upon present-day issues. This, of course, made headlines across the world, and resulted in a lawsuit against the AI’s creator. But beyond the technical achievement, reviews of the actual content rather unanimously ranked it a disappointment. However, the existence of this routine does speak to a very human longing for those no longer with us. Just as you might wonder aloud, within your own family circle, how your father would have reacted to what cousin so-and-so is doing now, so do we sometimes wonder how our favorite comedians of yore would have interpreted this or that bit of news. Having sent up the first President George Bush for the Persian Gulf War, what quips might Bill Hicks have fired at Bush the Younger’s own invasion of Iraq? What shade might Joan Rivers have cast upon the putative marriage of Donald and Melania Trump?
Most modern commentators on our current ‘culture of nostalgia’ ignore the origins of the word, which is a relatively recent combination of the Greek algos (pain) and nostos (homecoming) and constituted the medicalization of a social problem frequently observed in soldiers, sailors and slaves – literal homesickness. As Grafton Tanner notes, while early psychological research regarded nostalgia as productive of criminal behavior, as the twentieth century progressed nostalgia became a key component of marketing: ‘Whereas positivist discourses targeted nostalgia as a disease to be cured, corporations eventually framed it as a consumable product, and advertisers would eventually discover just how lucrative nostalgia can be as a commodity – because consumers can theoretically satisfy their longing for the past through consumption’ (13). However, in our twenty-first century, we technically cannot be said to live in a culture of nostalgia, for ‘if nostalgia is the emotion experienced when something normally absent becomes momentarily present, in our minds or in everyday life, then the constant presence of the past in the contemporary doesn’t amount to “nostalgia”’ (17).
This constant presence of the past is what Tanner calls foreverism, which he describes as the dominant discourse in contemporary society and politics, a means of eliminating nostalgia while profiting from it, but which mutes both the contentment of finishing something (a book, a television series) and the sadness experienced by its absence. Foreverism is not the same as preservation, as with archives and museums, for as a discourse it ‘maintains that the old can’t be merely preserved or re-released; it must be revived, given new stories, de-aged to provide the illusion of vitality, updated, rebooted’ (30). This is not only the dominant trend in modern popular culture but also the driving force behind social media, the desire to reconnect with high school friends in order to see how those stories ended up, in order to prevent the end of any relationship one might have. ‘Endings,’ writes Tanner, ‘are regarded as uncomfortable shocks, challenges to the technocratic imperative to accept the latest update, the newest development’ (38). This reduces both narrative and relationship to the level of content, rather than story, for stories have an arc, while content is simply the infinite scroll of consumption. (The end credits scene now a staple of superhero movies, especially, explicitly undo the idea that any such story is ever truly over.)
An editor will assert that what makes a story successful is often what is left out – movies like the original Star Wars have been saved from their own creators by the successful intervention of someone willing to make savage cuts to the raw material. A cognitive scientist will assert that our memories, and our very sense of self, are dependent just as much upon what information is discarded and forgotten as they are upon what information is preserved. An archivist or museum curator will assert that the preservation of the past is by necessity selective. But the discourse of foreverism asserts that no such cuts are necessary. In popular culture, this means whole television series that explore the backstory or the future of minor characters from whatever franchise. In our everyday lives, it often means access to a computer cloud infrastructure that incentivizes saving everything, digitizing those old photographs, archiving every email received, because how are you supposed to know what may end up being valuable or precious one day? ‘And yet,’ writes Tanner, ‘the sheer quantity of these “memories” is often so overwhelming that it can cause choice paralysis, preventing us from accessing and remembering them’ (59). And the architecture of this foreverizing infrastructure is hidden from most of us – a culture of disposability results in massive landfills removed from population centers, and so does a culture of foreverizing result in massive data centers, digital landfills, off-gassing their constant noise in rural areas.
Foreverizing obviates the idea of growth, punishing people who have strayed too far from the brand they work so hard to embody. In like manner, ‘capitalism maintains growth of profit for elites while telling the rest of us that insignificant, incremental updating is the best that can be done’ (65) – social change as a series of tweaks to the operating system. Not only is the present updated in this manner; so, too, is the past, as represented by Tanner with the present preoccupation of removing from ‘classic’ texts passages now deemed indefensible. In this manner, ‘foreverism frames the problematic aspects of the past – its nightmarish realities unforgotten by so many – as throwback traits that have been bred out. Now you can consume the past without worrying that you might be ignoring the injustices of history’ (108). And the erasure of these problematic aspects not only enrages a far right nostalgic for the past but also mimics their own strategies for de-problematizing our earlier history and thus problematizing the whole idea of progress. A golden age can be rebooted, and if this reboot is not successful, we can try again.
Tanner’s book is compelling, short enough to be read in one sitting but chock full of ideas that will keep spinning on long after the last page is turned. But a fundamental question plagues the book. Is foreverism actually that novel? Tanner draws attention to the growth of cinematic universes, but Batman and Superman, as characters, have been in circulation since the late 1930s, their own environments and storylines occasionally updated to keep pace with the passing years. Even before this, though, we can see strains of foreverist tendencies, especially within religions. For example, in the early centuries of Christianity, there circulated a number of apocryphal gospels and apostolic acts, and a growing body of legend throughout the Middle Ages, with miraculous stories of the deeds done by the Virgin and other saints centuries post-mortem, preserved the relevance of those characters as actors in present dramas. We might regard the Reformation and Counter-Reformation as debates about how to keep this Intellectual Property called Christianity relevant for a population that had grown weary of the brand, especially after the Western Schism with its rival popes and antipopes. Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon could be regarded as a reboot of the faith that places Jesus at the center of American prehistory. In like manner, the replacement of the Tridentine Mass by the Pauline Mass, especially with its use of the vernacular rather than the traditional Latin, could be regarded as a soft reboot of Catholic liturgy meant to make it all more relevant for today’s parishioners. In fact, the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation has kept Jesus literally present in the here and now for nigh two millennia.
The sacred is timeless, even if it must now and then be reinterpreted for our own times. And so foreverism might be regarded as the application of this sacred discourse to our secular lives. Tanner points at fandom as a feature of foreverism, noting how the range of social media accounts, websites and podcasts devote endless attention to the latest developments in their favorite franchises ‘to keep the intellectual property alive, and also to salute it as one would a flag or a leader – to honor the great works of the past as if it were one’s duty’ (74). Has this not been the role of the theologian through the centuries? To seek out the proper interpretations of canonical texts, to keep them alive and relevant for newer readers, perhaps to add an unexpected spin on ancient ideas and motifs. Only now, everything is canonical. St. Peter and Peter Parker, side by side.
Yet there is solace for the individual in the notion of perpetual preservation. As Daniel Tutt notes in How to Read Like a Parasite, we inhabit a particularly Nietzschean era, with even many on the left driven by a pursuit of self-discovery coupled with a belief that only a handful of genuine geniuses will ever master it (Tutt 2024). Everyone ‘creating content’ makes that content less valuable, and the chance that any one individual will be recognized less likely. But at least that content will be forever preserved – long-term relevance no longer dictates what is retained, and talent and chance have ceased to be the exclusive drivers of immortality.
‘Because in drawing near to its desire / Our intellect ingulphs itself so far, / That after it the memory cannot go.’ Thus did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translate some of the first lines of Dante’s Paradiso, and thus do these lines speak to the nature of foreverism, and how the desire for the eternal obviates the intellect and marks a boundary for memory. This was the culmination of a mystical vision for our Italian poet. But as Tanner so ably reveals, that line of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘on earth as it is in heaven,’ can constitute not a call for justice, but merely a satisfied grunt at more of the same thing served up for our tireless consumption. Again and again. Forever and ever, amen.
Reviewed by Guy Lancaster