A World Without Nostalgia

A girl stands next to a paper bin during a cleanup campaign. The Hague, 1961 | Nationaal Archief | Public domain

After the fourth song of her personalised playlist, DJ Livi – Spotify’s Spanish-speaking AI – suggested in her friendly voice: “Okay, let’s go back to 2021 for a while. This is a mix of what you listened to that year.” Then, just as she said, songs that I’d often listened to a few years ago started to play – tracks that I remembered well but hadn’t hit play on for quite a while. It brought back a recent past – too recent to create the effect of nostalgia. The memory brought no melancholy or sense of loss, rather it was faint, like the print of a t-shirt that has been through the wash several times.

If we understand nostalgia as the emotion we feel when the past fleetingly reappears in the present, how could we define the effects brought about by this Spotify feature, in particular, and by 21st century culture in general? What happens when the past never completely disappears, but is recycled into new formats? The American critic Grafton Tanner calls it “foreverism,” which is a way of expressing that the digitisation of the past few decades (memories, artworks, knowledge) sustains the idea of a continuous present, without the possibility of endings. And this premise raises a question about the times: is nostalgia possible if everything remains permanently within reach?

While in the second half of the 20th century advertisers and producers began to see nostalgia as an effective marketing strategy (remember Don Draper and his pitch about the slide projector?), in recent years the entertainment industry seems to have opted for a more ambitious goal: to prevent things from disappearing altogether so that the wheel never stops.

One might wonder what the difference is between this attitude and, say, the umpteenth edition of a literary classic that people have been reading for centuries through successive reprints. The answer lies in its recycling. In Foreverism, Tanner differentiates between preservation, restoration and the act of foreverising something. He gives an example in the form of a legendary rock band. In this case, preserving their legacy would be keeping their studio recordings in perfect condition. Restoration of their work, on the other hand, would amount to enhancing their original material using more modern techniques, for example with a new audio mix, or remastering it to make it sound as crisp as possible, but always with the goal of maintaining the original feel.

Foreverisation, on the other hand, pursues different strategies that attempt to renew the legacy. These could be world tours with new musicians replacing some of the original members, documentaries, musical spin-offs or remix albums by younger artists offering a modern-day take on the band. It is an approach that fosters a continuum of content suitable for all ages – both those who witnessed the band’s heyday and the new generations. An industry that always finds ways to sell us something.

This can also be clearly seen in the major film sagas and in the superhero multiverses. Thanks to an (increasingly distant) initial success, but above all thanks to their legions of fans, universes such as Star Wars or Marvel characters are able to expand through new movies and series, which in turn are nourished by debates on social media, podcasts and fan videos, which makes keeping up with these bloated narratives overwhelming and something only experts can manage. This generates eager, semi-informed spectators who consume this kind of product not as a work of art, but as content.

“Content has no ending. It is consumable but inexhaustible. The production of Marvel films is like the infinite scroll: one watches them in a steady stream, which is always replenishing itself without end. The irony is that content is easily consumed but quickly forgotten,” Tanner writes in his book.

The debate around this last idea has been going on for some time, at least since the internet began allowing virtually limitless consumption of works. Although the web has given millions of people an access to material that would previously have been almost impossible (whether due to costs or distribution problems), the flip side is a weaker and decontextualised type of contact. As early as 2011, the music critic Simon Reynolds pointed out that this omnivorous consumption of cultural information, which he called “xenomania,” could have numbing effects: “[…] it seems to be the case that the slowly gestated mongrel styles of the analogue era (reggae emerging as a form of rhythmically inverted New Orleans R&B, for instance) have more staying power and fruitfulness than the cut-and-paste hybrids of the digital age.”

The issue is how this has been extended to other aspects of digital life. In this regard, Tanner’s comparison with the way we use social media is quite pointed, since this attitude of indifference (the “infinite scroll”) also seems to govern the social relations of our time. Until a short time ago, we could get to know a person, establish a more or less deep relationship, but when the bond ended or faded for whatever reason, we generally never heard from them again. Today we commonly interact with people through digital platforms, even with those we only ever met once in real life. As a result, this bond never fully disappears, because even when we have ended a long-term relationship, whether romantic or professional, we are always able to pry into the other person’s life through their social media profiles. As with cultural works, since there is no end, nostalgia is impossible.

Endings, whether of a relationship or a narrative, are fundamental to any story, because they are what give meaning to an experience – they enable a reflection that emerges after a certain time. “To gain an appreciation of the past, you have to make memories of it. Which means some ties may need to be cut,” says Tanner.

This ongoing narrative is one of the driving forces of the current phase of capitalism. The expiration of a successful franchise is followed by a sequel, a prequel, a spin-off or a reboot, in the same way that physical objects are destined to become new versions or receive updates to their operating system – the machine must keep working, it must create new consumer needs.

Now let’s get back to Livi, the AI DJ who knows our listening history. There is something in that function that is reminiscent of Samantha, the operating system that becomes romantically involved with the protagonist of Her (Spike Jonze, 2013), and not only because of the female voice – both generate excitement through their intimate knowledge of us, gained thanks to their source of data, which in both cases is our digital life history.

The way in which Spotify promotes artists and songs on its platform is another representation of the foreverist scenario, even more so than other music platforms. If one takes a detailed look at the evolution of Spotify’s business model, it is possible to see how it has shaped not only the tastes of its users, but of the entire music industry. What began as a music lover’s dream – to be able to listen to almost any album in a matter of seconds – has eventually become a predictive machine fed by a gargantuan database (one in twelve people worldwide are active users).

No one is surprised at this point that Spotify promotes its own products, such as its podcasts, playlists and the mixes put together by its algorithm, or that it is increasingly difficult to find albums on its interface. But the consequences of these policies are still unpredictable, even when the changes for both listeners and artists are becoming patently clear.

In her book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria Books, 2025), journalist Liz Pelly investigates how these changes to the platform came about and the possible implications of the fact that people continue to rely on it for their music consumption. “During its first two decades of existence, as Spotify moved from in-house playlisting into its next act as a personalization engine, it became increasingly concerned with shaping user behavior on the platform, which is to say influencing listening habits, because Spotify benefits when we stream content that’s cheaper for them to provide,” she writes.

She adds that “Internally, the company looks at a metric called ‘programmed streamshare’ – the percentage of total listening influenced by its recommendations – and aims to make that metric increase. This should concern listeners for reasons that go beyond matters of personal taste and user experience, but also due to issues of power and labor. The goal is to hook us as users, of course, but also to divert overall streamshare toward discounted offerings – works that have been licensed to Spotify at a lower price point, both through its ghost artists program and its algorithmic payola-like practices.”

This is where the great technology of our times, AI, comes into play. With its range of possibilities, it has a very important role in this kind of platform. Firstly, as an algorithm that adapts to our consumption, but which also offers the possibility of generating music on its own. While the combination of digitised files and the P2P revolution enabled the circulation of recorded works virtually free of charge, this new phase could be detrimental not just to the music industry, but to artists – what would happen if both record labels and music platforms decided to do without musicians? There are already tools that can be fed with prompts to create pieces of music, so this is a future that sounds neither far-fetched nor dystopian, at least if music – or the audiovisual industry as a whole – continues to function as a commodity.

This type of autonomously generated content – which requires no human input other than a prompt – reinforces the cultural dynamic in which the context of a work of art seems to matter less and less, and where traditional narratives, with all their historical weight, are losing the battle to a mindless, fleeting entertainment. And this time it is not enough for musicians or screenwriters to speak out against this kind of injustice – consumers also have the right to put an end to that which is seemingly interminable.