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I often get comments about my site or the videos I put on YouTube from people saying that they like how "nostalgic" or "retro" they feel. Of course these are usually compliments, and I am grateful for and humbled by every compliment I receive. But I'm not sure that "nostalgia" is the main motivator for me. I do feel as though the more we age, the more everyone comes to feel like the time they were a child was somehow the best time to be alive in all of human history. Certainly I cannot say that I am somehow completely immune to this. But I think that there is something sinister behind the whole nostalgiabait industrial complex. Much of this repeats important points from cidoku's excellent article Harmful nostalgia. He explained most of what I wanted to say more succinctly and eloquently than I could, but I still feel the need to emphasize the important points.
When the idea of "nostalgia" was first conceptualized, it was actually considered a serious mental illness, "sympathetic of an afflicted imagination" caused by "continuous vibration of animal spirits" [1]. This might sound harsh. Lots of us love indluging in nostalgic reflections on simpler times when we were kids and so on. I think it is a natural phenomenon that exists to some degree in everyone and always has. But I do think there is a kind of lesson to the diagnosis of it as an illness which is worth remembering.
The reason the impressions we receive in youth are so significant, the reason why in the dawn of life everything appears to us in so ideal and transfigured a light, is that when we then first become acquainted with the genus, which is still new to us, through the individual, so that every individual thing stands as a representative of its genus: we grasp therein the (Platonic) IDEA of this genus, which is essentially what constitutes beauty.
Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Aesthetics" [2]
We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
Louise Glück [3]
The younger we are, the more magical things tend to appear and the stronger of an impression they create. This phenomenon is obvious. For all but the luckiest of us who truly live magical and enriched lives (and the true NPCs who do have absolutely nothing in their heads in the first place), most of our lives are spent trying to recreate the world we inhabited as children. But there is a danger here as well. The extreme version of a nostalgiafag is in a state of complete inertia and regression, unable to contribute to any kind of community at all. He spends all his time bemoaning the present, to the point that reliving the past almost seems more like self-harm to him. The relationship becomes completely passive, like a child sucking on its mother's teat, rather than creative and free, which is what we should seek out of our engagement with art. Living in a way that recreates any sense of childlike wonder requires a lot of energy and passion. The apex nostalgiafag shambles around like an opium addict.
The nostalgiafag is also usually just another form of mindless consooomer. In substance, there's nothing different between the idea of "OMG 90s polygons!!! Give it to me so I can vaguely grasp what it was like to be a child!!!" from the eternal NPC who says "Eww, old-looking graphics!!! Remake it for my slop-consoooming brain!!" In both cases, there's no real appreciation of artistry, of history, of culture, etc. The nostalgiafag is as much a victim of the pop culture industry as anyone. They are the kind of specimens that make it profitable for huge corporations to rape old franchises by making hordes of plastic crap. I don't remember a thousand t-shirts and toys related to the 1983 film A Christmas Story every December in the US when I was a kid, for example. But now that they've realized there's a profit to be turned by appealing to nostalgiafags, they are taking no prisoners. There's no real difference there between making some garbage remake for the same reason. Nostalgiafagging turns everything into slop.
Being a nostalgiafag is particularly dangerous because in a way it sustains a quite artificial idea: that older works of art are somehow "obsolete" or can only be relevant for those who were their "target audience" at their time of creation. Sure, older works of media reflect the time in which they were made. But the idea that the only route to appreciation and understanding of works of art is somehow found in such specific historical experiences seems to me quite restrictive and primitive. This is the story we are told by society. But it is a completely artificial one and only exists to sustain the churning out of plastic garbage.
I used to think it was an exaggeration to say that "trends" are artificial things created by companies to sell bullshit, but now I really do believe this. This is anecdotal evidence and by no means is enough to prove the point, but I attended a language school in another country and generally made the closest friends with students from Russia and China. Why? Because they somehow seemed like the only ones who didn't have the strange piece of NPC dogma in their heads that if some piece of media is more than 5 years old it is somehow irrelevant or uninteresting. They did not have this bias towards always consooooming what is current and "en vogue." In short, they were remarkably unphazed by consumerist pressures.
I can't give a full sociological reason for this. I've heard this said about Russians and other Eastern Europeans: when you're poor and The Pirate Bay is your Netflix, of course you're much more likely to stumble on some weird old movie or game. I don't see this stereotype about Chinese as much, but maybe there's something similar where the censors break the flow of the western consumerist "trend" machine. In either case, it is based. Trends are artificial. Plenty of people will play and love old games and movies if they try them. It is only market forces that wage campaigns to convince people that they are somehow "obsolete." If you told Dante that Virgil's poetry was outdated and needed to be "adapted" or "remade" for the 14th century he would laugh in your face... No one thought this way before the modern consumerist slop media economy. It was quite the opposite: what was greatest was what was most ancient and eternal.
No one innovates out of nowhere. We always look back to older models. Even the most "original" artists did so, and especially them. The Impressionists were inspired by Dutch masters like Frans Hals. Picasso looked back to eccentrics like El Greco. We ignore this because we are sold a message that the older something is, the more obsolete it is. This is absurd. Those on the cutting edge of the avant-garde are always those who are looking far enough back to come into contact with the source and thus truly exist in the free and open.
When we look back on those old works that are special to us and recognize that they now reflect a world that no longer exists, we are tempted to become fatalistic. We play into the trap and simply dwell on the fact that they reflect a world that no longer exists. In doing so, we keep them dead because we refuse to give them life. Of course, they can never have the cultural power they had in the exact same again. But as models to use as examples of what could be, they still teem with life and vigor.
What did you like about "the old internet" or "old Comiket" or whatever else you are nostalgic for? Whatever it was, it wasn't created by people sitting around and moping about how the time they lived in sucked. It was created by people who tried to MAKE THINGS BETTER by creating. This doesn't mean that you have to disregard the past. Quite to the contrary. Being a historian and documenting is an important part of creating. Naming what was great is a way to direct yourself with greater awareness.
This is perhaps the important point: being discerning. In my case, for example, I love a lot of things about old internet webpages. I love seeing people make websites that are more minimal, stripped-down, compact, etc. But even though it is very authentically "old-fashioned," I really don't like modern webpages that try to recreate that gaudy animated .gif overload look from the 90s and early 2000s [4]. It's not an arbitrary date attached to the style of HTML that makes it good or bad, but the essence of my values about web design in general.
Personally, what I appreciate above all else about things like "old" Comiket or the "old" internet is that people were authentic. I often look at images of old Comiket attendees or other old Japanese bits of otaku culture like that. Those guys, all things considered, are usually pretty normally dressed. They don't spend half their time on their appearance, making every single person aware that they like anime. They're already at a con for it! They didn't do this kind of stuff to look cool, because none of it was cool! Their focus is on creating, not consooooming, and especially not on presenting themselves. It's not about being a rebel or making a fashion statement. It's about contributing to something greater and doing so in the most authentic way possible, freed from the artificial restraints of society. It was for weirdos and enthusiasts who chose to be outcasts because of their passion. And that is what it was really about. This kind of environment is the essence of all real, heightened cultural activity. And it cannot be forced. It can only evolve naturally.
So TL;DR: Stop being a nostalgiafag because you look silly and it's keeping you stifled. Stop playing into the narrative that past media is constrained by its time period and thus somehow irrelevant. Creatively appropriate the works of the past and be explicit about what is good about them. I try to do that at least, although I can't claim to be perfect at living up to my ideals. I get those warm, melancholic feelings when I watch old anime from the 2000s as much as anyone.
1. Lisa Winter, "Death by Nostalgia, 1688", TheScientist, 2022/02/01
2. Arthur Schopenhauer [trans. R.J. Hollingdale], Essays and Aphorisms, "On Aesthetics," Penguin Books, 1973, p. 160
4. If you want an example of what I'm talking about, see for example icum.to and Ashley Jones. Although in her case I actually like a lot of things about her site and I believe she does her thing in a very authentic way, which is ultimately what is most important. I will grant that I can also see something of an appeal in these sites in that modern computers and internet speeds can make them much less cumbersome to load and interact with. And they still load faster than most modern news websites, which would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad...