Foreverism - Grafton Tanner

In Foreverism, Grafton Tanner, examines the push towards nostalgia shown in society today. From endless reboots, which are safer than new properties thus more likely to profit, to gadgets that continue to get improved so that we always have a fresh one to purchase, capitalism doesn't want our consumerism to die as that would stop profits for companies.

Tanner explores how companies are always supposed to grow, forever growth, while we're supposed to forever purchase. The only part of the equation that has a lifetime is the stuff we buy that should age out so we have to purchase the next one.

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- [[nostalgia]] has an uncanny ability to wrench people from the present and into an idealized reflective moment in the past. Pg 6
- this posed a problem in [[WWI]] as it reduced the effectiveness of troops when they focused on being back home and not in war and was thus deemed a malady and treated as a sickness to be eradicated

- [[eugenics]] Pg 10

- [[eugenics]] was tied to nostalgia as we tried to breed it out of minority populations that white people felt were backwards for not wanting the progress that white people valued. Pg 10, 11

- the author defines [[foreverism]] as our societal tendency to continue to look back to the ideal past and keep it in our current discourse as something that is desirable today because it was "better" Pg 17
- of revitalizing things that have degraded through [[Ai]], voice cloning to never letting anything go
- the continual film reboots instead of making something now
- sharing your digital self and always keeping it updated with any current trend as part of [[personal brand]]

- when nothing ends the feelings that go with endings are muted and we have no closure. Pg 24, 25
- this feeds into [[consumption]] culture and [[consumerism]] as we must keep purchasing the next version or binge the next show. We now have a new iPhone every year to keep purchasing instead of a phone we bought and hung on the wall for 10 years. We now have Saturday morning cartoons that never end

- the process of continual update and change of items to stay up to date invokes images of the [[ship of Thesius]] . Is a band like [[Lynard Synard]] still the same once remastered and all members have changed as they have died off and needed to be replaced. Pg 28, 29
- is a show rebooted with new actors still the same show we once fell in love with?

- with [[Disney]] continuing to add to [[Star Wars]] it's never out of sight and we never have a chance to build any longing for it. Pg 35
- we don't have time with our imaginations to dig into what it could be

- [[Nostalgia for Nostalgia — Real Life]] Pg 36

- our economic system expects continued always growth from companies. But nothings lives forever, which is how we get to firms buying out firms to suck them dry and cast them down the chain until there is nothing left worth saving and they layoff all the employees who worked for less and less just happy to have a job while executives got massive pay for extracting a bit more. Pg 51
- [[capitalist|capitalism]] wants to throw a healthy vibrant company out, because it just wants growth. Remember unchecked growth is cancer
- at the same time as wanting companies to live a growth model forever, it wants planned obsolesce for it's consumers so they can never rely on the stuff they buy lasting forever
- yet those disposable purchases never go away. They become [[microplastics]] and other environmental harms. The only part of a purchase that companies want to end, is its utility to you

- [[data centers]] have a similar [[personal carbon footprint|carbon footprint]] as the airline industry and it keeps growing. [[Ai]] is accelerating the growth of the massive energy usage in data centers. Pg 56
- see [[Sam Altman's self-serving vision of the future]] where he says we need an energy breakthrough to support [[Ai]]. He doesn't know where it's coming from or what form it will take, and he's not financing the research to make it happen. It's a magic frame from [[Dark PR - Grant Ennis]]

- [[Road to Nowhere - Paris Marx]] Pg 59

- the ideal of foreverism means you live with the stasis of never finishing anything while also always having to grind so that you are improving yourself. You must always be doing something to improve and turning a [[hustle culture|side hustle]] into your next thing. Pg 63

- [[capitalist|capitalism]] pushes growth for elites while telling everyone else that incremental, insignificant change is all that is possible for us to expect. Pg 64
- exponential profits of billion for companies, but our tech will get just a bit faster, and it's going to give them more data on us to let them make more money on our backs

- [[Redshirts - John Scalzi]] Pg 68

- online platforms clami to democratize speech, but only if it serves the [[data harvesting]] and [[ad targeting]] needs of the platform owner. Pg 75
- you must communicate on their terms alone.a