Machines, Memory, and the Acceleration of Digital Nostalgia
I'm back baby!! And I#M WORSE THAN EVER
After months of thesis-induced radio silence, I’m finally re-emerging, ready to open the left-open forgotten tabs in the browser of my own life. Writing a thesis, if done right (or maybe very wrong _ I will know in February), makes your thoughts spiral into increasingly niche rabbit holes. Back in the rhythm of blogging, I’ll be trying to untangle everything I’ve been thinking about.
You can catch more of my musings over on my Tumblr, laramzp.tumblr.com, or on post-everything.online, where this essay will be uploaded alongside glimpses of a new multimedia poetry project I’ve been working on. It’s on guilt, memory, and the inescapable weight of digital permanence _ the usual.
I’ve spent months writing my thesis, but I’ve been circling these ideas for years. It’s not like I stumbled upon some grand epiphany in the academic trenches, my thesis was just me putting it into words that sound respectable enough for a bibliography.
Amusingly, I was formally writing about the internet while being completely trapped in it. I’d sit there, typing about recursive machines and algorithmic dreaming, all while doom-scrolling through my own archives, like a mirror ghost haunting the digital graveyard of my old posts.
Every notification asking me : “remember this?” felt less like nostalgia and more like a reminder that my past doesn’t belong to me anymore. Writing about it didn’t make that any easier to live with. If anything, it just confirmed what I already knew.
No Escaping the Dreaming Loops
The internet is a recursive machine. It stores, scrambles, and resurrects memories, twisting time into a loop where past and future dissolve into an endless now. Cyberspace-Nostalgia transforms from a recollection into an algorithmic dreaming where fragments of history are reassembled, distorted, and projected forward.
The digital archive is alive, reorganizing itself, and feeding on the data it consumes. Memories are no longer linear or even human _ they are flattened into nodes in a network. The internet’s infinite storage is a paradoxical void, a place where everything is accessible, but coherence is lost. Nostalgia becomes a pervasive sensation embedded in the algorithms that define our digital experience.
This new memory, ripening the networked chaos of cyberspace, reframes how we think about the act of remembering. Remembering has become equivalent with the constant reconfiguration of information. In this way, nostalgia becomes a kind of digital dream state _ fluid, recursive, endlessly generative.
Not in the sense of science fiction fantasies but as an emergent property of its design _ the internet dreams through us.
The accelerationist reality of the internet absorbs time itself, turning history into raw material for endless remixing. Memory is commodified, sold back to us in curated playlists, retro-themed aesthetic trends, and AI-generated nostalgia filters. This is a utopia where time collapses, yet the machine never stops generating more of itself.
Digital culture in this state doesn’t just compress time _ it shatters it. The past becomes inaccessible even as it surrounds us, because it is constantly reshaped by the demands of the present.
The machine doesn’t care about sentimentality _ it consumes memories and spits them out as content. So maybe this cycle creates new ways of connecting to time. The glitch becomes a tool, the error a window into something deeper.
As machines grow smarter and the boundaries between human and digital blur, nostalgia will advance. This is the end of remembering what was _ in this we are left with imagining what could have been. It is not our past that haunts us _ it is the futures we’ve abandoned in the name of speed.
As we aim to build a collective consciousness, outsourcing our identity to the algorithm, artificial intelligence is beginning to create synthetic memories, fabricating histories and futures that merge into the digital ether.
Should be care about what happens when the machine’s memory replaces our own?
If memory is no longer human, can nostalgia still belong to us?
Digital nostalgia reveals the ghosts within the system: the lost futures, forgotten dreams, and fractured identities stored within the network’s loops.
The internet has become a mausoleum for lost futures _ those we abandoned in the name of efficiency, and those we never dared to imagine at all.
Nostalgia fills the void left by our failure to dream forward, a feedback loop of curated memories. It pretends to connect us to the past but only ever feeds the present, a present that feels infinite. This is the utopia of the endless now:
„ […] paradoxically, it is the real that has become our true utopia – but a utopia that is no longer in the realm of the possible, that can only be dreamt of as one would dream of a lost object.” (Baudrillard, Jean (1981): Simulacra and Simulation, p.123)
Time, instead of propelling us forward, is collapsing into itself behind the screens of a population that no longer dreams _ one that has left the dreaming to the machines.
I wish my writings didn’t end here but for now they do. I’ll be uploading my book recommendations for this year soon. Until then _