80s Nostalgia AI Slop Is Boomerfying the Masses for a Past That Never Existed
AI makes it easier than ever to slip into the comforting glow of nostalgia.
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It's true that this is all AI slop and that they are disgustingly manipulative videos but I do disagree with the notion that the nostalgia and The era was fake and never existed. As a child of the '80s and '90s we really did stay out all day until the street lights came on, and hang out in pizza places and malls and the internet and our screen life has played a major role in changing that. What is heinous here is that people are creating triggers just to manipulate generations. Not the nostalgia.
Yeah, the article repeatedly suggesting it was a disingenuous depiction of the era, but didn't seem to make any attempt to support that assertion.
I'd love a breakdown as to what specifically was disingenuous.
I mean, like any social media, it's selectively showing "the good", and ignoring the bad. Is that it? Like, they can't (and wouldn't even if they could) put the heavy cigarette smell of any restaurant of the era through the phone.
If you watched Stranger Things, the depiction of Nancy going to work and being relegated to making coffee for the boys instead of being taken seriously at an actual job is an iconic representation of women’s struggle in the workplace. Remember, women were only allowed to have their own bank accounts, credit cards, and home loans as legally protected assets, starting in the late 1970s. We were deemed more incompetent, and more wards of our husbands in those respects. Inertia of those notions remained even after the legality changed. That whole bit in Delores Claiborne, where her husband finds her “private”, “personal”, only her name on it bank account and just empties it: real. (That is what RBG had a deciding vote on btw, what gave her such credit back in the day, changing financial freedoms for women to match those of men.)
Yes, this may seem a little focused on women, but it’s a significant piece of the “things were better” push on the right. The right did grow, in part, as a reaction to the loss of the more controlled, traditional, “kept” female. It’s important to keep a full visual of what going back could mean. Roe has already fallen.
Moving away from screen time to more face to face is good. Doesn’t mean texting is bad, it’s fantastic, amazing even, how easy it is to communicate. I love it. But I still drive 10-15min to sit down in a living room face to face with people. I feel little to no stress when disagreement, argument, or even anger occurs. Facing the normal range of human emotion in another doesn’t make me want to hide.
Even just moving back to more long form media would help stop the destructive, anxiety perpetuating, focus reducing rewiring happening. YouTube statistics are now saying anything over 10 minutes is doomed to die based on viewer preference. 9 minutes or less or gtfo. Shorts are quickly taking over and perpetually rewiring people on the daily.
Wow that was well stated. Bravo.
Can be summed up us our time having solved some unpleasant things with computers and networks, and created some other unpleasant things with computers and networks, things that many didn't expect because I don't think in the 80s it was easy to imagine electronics so omnipresent and powerful.
I think it’s like so many things. Sugar. Enjoyable on occasion or induced diabetes. Beer. One on occasion or alcoholism. Dating. Nurturing or controlling/manipulation/obsession. We’re fine until our baser natures take over.
I guess so. This is from the article:
Their political project uses the aesthetic of the past to sell a future where minorities are marginalized, women have no political power, and white guys are in charge. That’s how they think it all worked in the past and they’d love for it to happen again.
What the videos don't show is how bad racism was before everyone is able to record at anytime. Shows and movies were very streotypical. Actually since cancel culture wasn't a thing for not famous people, people were really racists in just everyday conversations.
The government's war on immigrants is very much like the war on drugs with were specifically created to target hippies and black communities while at the same time suppying the communities with the drugs they deemed illegal.
In terms of the environment, lead was banned in gasoline in 1996. I thought it was way earlier than that when I looked it up. Shame really. I am no a scientists and the results of microplastics in our system is still being researched but lead poisoning effects are very well documented and I believe the pernament mental effects of it can be seen in a large portion of the boomer population.
Lead was out of most gasoline in the 70s. It is still available in some, for example airports. The big thing about the 90s was that was when teens and young adults didn’t grow up around it. It’s a long term poison.
Lead was out of gas for new cars starting in the '70s. It wasn't actually banned in the US until 1996 (1990 in Canada). There were leaded and unleaded pumps all through the '80s.
I remember leaded and unleaded gas pumps in the 90s. We never used a leaded gas car, or maybe my parents did before I was born.
One other thing is the gas smell. There was a distinct odor of gas from older cars that I remember. Outside some places it was everywhere back in the day. But not anymore today. That is a good thing.
Thank you for the info. The 70's is what I thought.
Yeah, I kinda imagined this was the nature of the issue.
Not really sure how I feel about the implied argument, though, which appears to be that it is wrong to create period art (or ask an AI to generate a video) which doesn't include some (all?) negative experiences of that period.
May I paint the view from my balcony, omitting the mosquitos biting me while I paint?
I think the crux must be intention... Which is notoriously hard to prove.
It's really not. We know foreign countries are using ai to radicalized boomers and incels. So it's just safer to assume the worst until we are back in control of our society
Why does someone have to be in control again?
Because inevitably someone has to be
It's not even just the bad they're not showing, they aren't showing anything outside of a suburban straight white guys point of view. Which does reflect a lot of 80s media but doesn't reflect the experience of a lot of people in the 80s
I think that's an interesting take, especially because it's AI generated.
I think it's fair for artists to depict their own experiences. If these were hand-crafted, I don't think I could vibe on that criticism. I think it'd be truly disingenuous for a white suburban straight man to be creating art of the experience of a rural black lesbian.
But, AI isn't an artist. It has no experience.
What was disingenuous?
It was fucking AI slop posing as real people.
I know I have seen some way off depictions in tv shows and movies.
Sure, but we also drank in parking lots because there was nothing to do, had guys physically grabbing at us instead of just yelling stuff, got bullied in school more, and the violent crime rate was something like 10x what it is now. Oh, and our friends were dying of AIDS as well. And the bay was polluted, and downtown was so dead we could walk around it like a ghost town.
I will never understand nostalgia. There are good things and bad things about every time. But even with the fuckers trying to pull us backwards now, there has been progress.
I will never understand nostalgia.
Yes, I was born in 1996, so not quite 80s, but even my nostalgia being applied to life wouldn't mean mimicking old days. It would mean making some comfortable change in what exists now. Like there's an abandoned cinema building (belonged to USSR ministry of defense, then was a small auto dealership, then was rented to shops and cat owner events, and finally it turned out nobody can untangle who really owns it, and if it's still Russian military of defense or private property) nearby, and the ownership issues with it have apparently been almost resolved.
So there are from time to time posts in our house chat about this or that plan involving something being built in place of that building.
That's not needed. If they demolish it, they can just make sort of an antique amphitheater with low benches to seat on. Just a place with many benches and trees around, formed so that people in it can all see each other. And it's weird, it seems someone doesn't like benches in Moscow, there are fewer and fewer of them on the streets and in parks and everywhere.
I mean, yeah, realty costs are a removed there, but apparently nobody needs that particular place if the building has an owner, but is in fact used as a toilet for homeless people.
Yep, I was gonna say, as a child of the 70s/early 80s, I was a totally unsupervised latch-key kid. The paedophiles loved that. It was a predator’s paradise. Most of us knew kids our age who either vanished or died by misadventure, and many of us were assaulted in some way.
I don’t like helicopter parenting, either, but anyone who sees the Wild West of the 80s as some sort of ideal either has a faulty memory or is deluding themselves.
we really did stay out all day until the street lights came on, and hang out in pizza places and malls
We don’t need AI slop to remind of of this. All it will do is bastardize the memory and replace it with cringy imposters of what once was.
Yep. As a child of the ‘80’s, life was definitely like that for the most part.
A lot of it comes down to both smartphones and the loss of ‘third spaces’ in general. I read an article in Newsweek this morning about an MIT study that analysed footage from between 1978 and 1980 and compared those same spaces today.
It shows people are now walking faster and not hanging in groups as much. There’s less eye contact and less engagement in general.
As stereotypical as it sounds, hanging out with your friends at the mall was just what you did. We spent hours just hanging around game stores and such. It connected you with people you knew and people you didn’t. Hang out with someone in the mall for 30 minutes and you’re now friends.
The current generation is a lot different. There’s no real physical, organic hangout. And when there is, it’s now more often seen as a nuisance rather than an integral part of the social fabric.
I definitely feel like the author of that article posted here missed the mark. The 80’s were definitely radically different from today.
I didn't grow up in the period. I was born in '93. I'm old enough to have seen third places, but for them to be dead by the time they mattered to me. It's not screens that killed them. It's suburbia and also helicopter parenting.
Parents don't feel they can let their kids run around safely because there's no where to go within walking distance, and traveling anywhere requires a car. I'd agree devices with tracking probably do play a role now, but they weren't a thing for me.
Car dependence has created a world where almost everyone goes to work/school, then go home, only sitting in their car between, not engaging with anyone else. We've destroyed any sense of community that used to exist.
I'm certain this is one of the largest drivers for all the issues we're seeing today. It used to be you'd talk to your neighbors and share things with them, but today everyone is isolated and gets everything from the news, which tells them to be scared of everyone else.
We’ve destroyed any sense of community that used to exist.
What's wrong? Paying rent to your landlord once a month isn't enough socializing for ya? Its more then enough for me that's for sure.
The purpose is to gaslight the generations that have known a better world
*Your experiences may differ
I don’t know. I also remember spending summer nights talking under street lanterns, riding my bike around the block, and playing the Snoopy tennis game & watch. But the video I saw did not feel nostalgic. It felt like a TV ad that I didn’t believe even back then. Or worse, it felt like a cult, which was terrifying.
