Is technology killing nostalgia?

The latest trend among the scions of Generation Z – those born between 1997 and 2012 – is posting ‘throwback videos’ on TikTok. Talk about a snake eating its tail. Having reached the ripe old age of, say, 11, Generation Z is digging through their archives to offer a wan critique of that embarrassing haircut they sported in the dim and distant past of, say, 18 months ago, or reminiscing with friends about ‘Snapchat filters we all used to use’. That’s silly, but it’s also a little sad.

As we ponder world-historical events on a ten-, 20- or 50-year timeline – the long-term effects of Brexit; the resettling of the status quo in European security; even the climate crisis – it’s somehow easy to miss changes that are potentially even more lasting and fundamental. This apparently inconsequential story strikes me as an epiphenomenon of one of them. That is: gradually and without all that much fanfare, a whole generation of digital natives have come to adulthood in a world in which the past is no longer the past in the sense in which we are accustomed to understand it.