Ultimately, this is still a human emotion, which means that different people can direct it,

shape it in a variety of different ways.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Grafton Tanner.

Grafton is the author of The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, The Politics of Nostalgia, from Repeater Books.

You can find out more about that in the show notes,

and naturally by listening to this week's conversation. Grafton and I talk about a lot of different aspects of nostalgia and how it's kind of observed in the technologies that we use, the entertainment

media that we consume, and the politics that have defined the recent past. We discuss how nostalgia is often

seen as this kind of conservative, backward-looking, emotion or way of seeing things, and we

discuss whether it can also be reoriented toward kind of a positive politics that is future-oriented,

you know, obviously with a focus on, you know,

making people's lives better. And Grafton argues that's certainly possible. And, you know,

we can see that most evidently with the Green New Deal very recently and had that kind of tapped

into this nostalgia for the New Deal era in the United States and tried to use that to kind

of build a politics and a movement

around ambitious climate action. And, you know, naturally, I think you can debate whether that

went far enough, you know, what it has achieved, but it's still a good example of this kind of

use of nostalgia for a positive purpose. So I had a great chat with Grafton. I think you're really going to

enjoy it. I hope you do. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing

podcasts that are made in Canada, and you can find it more about that at Harbingermedia network.com.

If you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues

who you think would learn from it. And this episode of Tech Won't Save Us like every episode is

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