But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

Even when the Internet appears to be nostalgically churning through the cultural past, it’s still hunting for “old newness.” A familiar video clip from 1986 does not possess virality; what the medium desires is an obscure clip from 1985 that recontextualizes the familiar one. The result is a perpetual sense of now. It’s a continual merging of the past with the present, all jammed into the same fixed perspective. This makes it seem like our current, temporary views have always existed, and that what we believe today is what people have always believed. There is no longer any distance between what we used to think and what we currently think, because our evolving vision of reality does not extend beyond yesterday.