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Can someone explain to me why psuedo nostalgia is a fashion trend for underaged's right now?

Part of the package of capitalizing on nostalgia https://thebaffler.com/salvos/404-page-not-found-wagner Fits in nicely with the era of reboots, with the trend of throwing a reference to old shows for "the adults" in cartoons and all that

Isn't it cause the future looks bleak to them? Since you can't idolize the future only the past is left.

>right now You mean, 1980's retrofuturism? 2006's new retro wave? 2013's web punk?

>>32548 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fisher#Hauntology

Probably because the present and future both look as though there isn't going to be any improvement. As a result, the notion there is nothing to hope from the future leads to looking elsewhere. Both those who have never known and those who lived through it have a bias towards misrepresenting the past with positive nostalgia. Hauntology is very much related to this. It also is a lot easier and cheaper to make pseudo-retro digital content than modern content on the cheap with a home PC and freeware. Considering the CRT threads on this forum, among other things, I wouldn't suggest that such nostalgia is for underageds, any real experience with CRTs squares you as either of age or from a poorer background/country.

>>32588 This guy's dead on, read up on this a bit if you want to understand some of the weird bullshit going on around us here at the end of history. People see art and culture essentially standing still and recycling because they're trying to claw back some fantastic period of time when things were improving or at least changing—when the world wasn't yet cold and dead. Same thing happened to Russia when they went through electroshock therapy and transitioned hard from decrepit failed communism straight through failed capitalism and into total corruption and decay. Nostalgia fads erupted everywhere, tinged with sadness. Mourning the disappointment of a future which is merely more of the same, except slightly worse each year. >>32589 CRTs are rad though, I modified one to spray a room with hard X-rays

>now Current nostalgia trends aren't different from 80's nostalgia or beyond. Older decades have also been fetishized by old people, even before current happenings.

Because looking forward is scary and since the free expression of the perceived internet is dying and has changed for the worst with movies and modern gaming it only makes sense that young people want to go back to the past to reclaim a lost feeling even if they never lived it.

Read Capitalist Realism, another lain already mentioned Mark Fisher but this book is a great little read on the state of society at the moment.

>>32591 Not really to this degree. Fashion was cyclical, but it wasn't exclusively cyclical. Degree matters >>32595 I think this cuts way more deeply than people wanting to have free expression and gaming and movies. It's something more sinister and core to our being imho, but that's just me >>32597 Indeed. Sure wish that prick didn't up and kill himself—really kills any credibility I thought he had with his thoughts about wanting a future and rejecting these corpses from the past. But maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe he just ran out of energy searching for a future that wasn't dark.

>>32563 The future is dead in 1999/2000.

For a more philosophical/objective view of the entire phenomenon, refer to Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism", it's the best explanation one can find. Meanwhile, I'll just add my subjective two cents with a lot of odd and maybe anecdotal examples, some of which are based on personal experience and some of which are based on what I learned from other people and history books. It has been pointed out already, but yeah: the future looks bleak and generally non-existent from where we're currently at, and so people are turning to the past and futures envisioned in the past to find some solace and certainty in otherwise uncertain times. In retrospect, I think we've been approaching this state for two decades now, and the primary reasons for that are consumer culture, the Internet and the destruction of the mainstream, and general decrease in technological innovation. Consumer culture has been with us for quite a long time, but its side effects have become more evident just in recent years. Turns out that its throwaway quality, repetition-based nature and lack of originality make for a terrible foundation for further cultural development. It's insubstantial, the novelty it offered ran dry very early on, and yet it's extremely flexible, so it can easily piggyback off of ideas that are actually new and interesting, sapping them of their originality and chaining them to the past. Soap operas, long-standing game franchises and obscenely long comicbook/manga series are a good example of the former, while all sorts of reboots, belated, unnecessary sequels, various "modern" adaptations and constant old media references are a good example of the latter. It's only natural that it would also lead to a lot of media becoming eclectic and kitschy, soaking in elements from different time periods and other works of fiction with little interpretation and editing, relying extensively on retcons and so forth. Crossovers, reliance on "parallel universes" as a plot device, bizarre and clashing design, storytelling choices, mood, etc. are the best examples of this. In the end, you have all those cultural artifacts, works of art and more that are horribly inconsistent and disjointed and yet interconnected, that are everything and nothing. They don't offer a new vision of the future and instead perpetuate the past by simply existing. The Internet and the destruction of the mainstream only serve to compound the problem above. For one, it allows for easy accumulation and sharing of artifacts of the past, which anchors them to the present. Secondly, Internet hampers the possibility of creation of a new mainstream by allowing people the freedom to choose what content they consume, as well as allowing them the ability to share their own creations, resulting in many atomized subcultures and "small mainstreams"; this, in turn, may lead to a situation where they won't be able to oust the last "big mainstreams" and all the related derivative elements from the public mind, even if they tried to. This might mean that the old "big mainstreams" may continue to exist long after the decades they were prominent in are over, serving as a permanent backdrop and partial inspiration to anything that's made. The notion that technology's innovation rates and quality are decreasing is debatable, but that's the impression I have at least. The technological leap that happened from 90s to 2010s was insane, and right now we're simply perfecting what has already been made and trying to make it widely available: we make our screens flatter, semiconductors smaller, core-count more numerous, refresh rates higher and so on, to the point of diminishing returns. Is it exciting, though? We are used to noticable leaps in technology that take roughly half a decade each: we could see cellphones lose their size, eventually drop their buttons and become more than just a phone; video games went from bleeps and bloops, a bunch of low-resolution sprites with an extremely limited color pallete and really basic game mechanics to realistic 3D environments, countless polygons and other elements being rendered in real time, and game mechanics that are a far cry from simplistic side-scrolling gameplay; computers went from a glorified calculator with a wonky interface to an extremely versatile tool that became progressively more user-friendly. The point is, every innovation seemed promising enough to spark immense interest, and then you could see the progress being made in massive strides. All those factors, plus the recent global and local unrest, seem to me to be massive contributors to people retreating into nostalgia and dreaming of futures as they were envisioned in the past. Keep in mind I am not very smart.

to be honest I think it may be as simple as watching old Sitcoms such as Friends.

>>32548 I literally dont know what you are talking about. Give some examples.

What I don't understand with seeing current nostalgic trends as consumerist is the matter that nostalgia has always been a large part of culture even before capitalism and consumerism. Look at the renaissance' cultural output always depicting antiquity in a romantic lens, when humanity was better and more "free". Or in Don Quixote where nostalgia for knighthood and chivalry in the 1600s was satirized. Or during ancient greece with Hesiod and the idea of the "Golden Age" or with most greek art and mythology at the time depicting a fantastical, heroic past. If we're talking about the artistic movement returning to old cultural forms, I think it's similiar to neo-classical movements in architecture in the 1700s, and any kind of "Neo-" cultural movement where we return to old ideas in art, like neo-romanticism, neo-expressionism, neominimalism. If anything, the fact that all we have to do is go back a decade or two to find artistic ideas that could still be worth expanding on through cultural movements should illustrate just how complex and massive contemporary cultural output has become.

>>32733 >If anything, the fact that all we have to do is go back a decade or two to find artistic ideas that could still be worth expanding on through cultural movements should illustrate just how complex and massive contemporary cultural output has become. This is an interesting point.

>>32733 >If anything, the fact that all we have to do is go back a decade or two to find artistic ideas that could still be worth expanding on through cultural movements should illustrate just how complex and massive contemporary cultural output has become. I get it, man, and that's a great point you've made but I as someone who lived through the late 80s/90s and grew up with all these things on which "vaporwave" type stuff is based, I can't help but feel offended when I see some "aesthetic" soykaf made by someone not even in their 20s as if somehow they're "violating my (authentic) experience" in some way, as silly as that may sound.

>>32548 (OP) >>32551 It's not just capitalizing on nostalgia, corps are-appropriating the past so it can be served to every generation after minor adjustments. The goal is living in a permanent now, a rolling release. The early web nostalgia also helps trivialize it and contaminate it, those soykafty Neocities websites are packed with JS and have Google analytics in them. There never was just HTML. >Fits in nicely with the era of reboots The old books and movies will be lost as the archives are taken down in the name of piracy and publishers go bankrupt, all you will have is the updated, revised versions. It's already difficult to search for a movie without stumbling upon one of the reboots. A clueless kid will just assume people were talking about the 2005 version of a movie instead of the original. It's barriers upon barriers upon barriers, people will not pay for anything specific because they'd rather get they consumer slop "free" or at best in a mega-bundle. So all the old things will be lost, and you will have only what's on today's menu.

>>32733 >If we're talking about the artistic movement returning to old cultural forms, I think it's similiar to neo-classical movements in architecture in the 1700s, and any kind of "Neo-" cultural movement where we return to old ideas in art, like neo-romanticism, neo-expressionism, neominimalism. All the Neo-s of the past did invent something, did create something, made something new. The current nostalgia is perceived as purely consumerist because it is. Case in point, Don Quixote is an original work. What are these people creating? Is there anything new coming out of this movement except empty references? Remember PRODUCT? I liked PRODUCT so much. That's what it is. The crap that is happening today is unprecedented in human history.

The kids who grew up on social media see older people reminisce about the days before they were born, and try to fit in to seem more mature, is my guess. I think a lot of us can say we were using imageboards in our early teens - someone that age now has never experienced life before Facebookshit. most of the people posting "sad windows 98" edits were introduced to computers on windows 7 or later. What were you doing in 2006? these posters were just being born. time flies, I guess...

>>32834 >The kids who grew up on social media see older people reminisce about the days before they were born, and try to fit in to seem more mature, is my guess. Other than >>32808 >>32807 I forgot to say something. The late 80s and early 90s had an air of positivity, creativity and enthusiasm to them and people were spending a lot more. Longing for the 80s is not just a product of nostalgia, companies want to get that spendy vibe going to counter the global depression that is happening right now.

Because the present lacks style. The 2010's were focused on minimalism.

>>33018 Jony Ive has a lot to answer for. That bastard did more to destroy creativity in visual style than anyone else this century.

I will present an alternate view, that people are afraid of the future, granted, but this is from Dr. Tim Leary PhD Up until the present, human beings have been neurologically unable to conceive of the future. This inhibition (Neo-phobia) is genetically imposed. The larval nervous system creates earth-bound realities. For the caterpillar to "think" about flying would be survivally risky. Indeed the caterpillar cannot "think" about flying because it has no wings. We assume that pre-human forms of life have no awareness of time, no ability to look into the future; that mammals operating with the two immediate survival circuits have no conception of the evolutionary plan. The key to evolution beyond the larval forms is the understanding and control circuits of time. The emergence of the laryngeal-manual circuit, the paleolithic unfolding of left- hemisphere symbol-manipulating and logical-ordering allowed humanity to transmit vocal, written and artifactual time-signals across the generations. Operant conditioning, instrumental learning assures the transmission of culture from the past to the present. Larval time-binding involves very short periods and narrow perspectives. The farmer looks to the next harvest. The politician looks to the next election. The bureaucrat looks forward to payday, to the weekend, to the summer vacation. Parents look to their children. Larval civilizations operate on the basis of calculated ignorance about the future. The four-brained person does not want to know about the future because it threatens the stability of the reality imprint. Four-brained societies do not want to know about the present, because prospection would lessen the motivation to work blindly towards organized uncertainty. There is a taboo about future forecast. The book Future Shock seems to be more about present shock and describes the terror and confusion created by a world which is different from the past; i.e. different from one's childhood imprint realities. Pro-phobia is so intense that the future cannot be faced in a best-selling book. Even the scientific groups who try to project the future are curiously unable to foresee an evolving neurological-mutational change. The Club of Rome, the RAND Corporation, Herman Kahn all present statistical extrapolations of material trends of the past projected to the future. Thus we are told that the future will be a global extension of a Swedish Los Angeles. All the current predictions by "futurists" forecast ant-hill world in which personal freedom, creativity are limited by population pressure, scarcity and restrictive social control.

>>32682 >The notion that technology's innovation rates and quality are decreasing is debatable, but that's the impression I have at least. The technological leap that happened from 90s to 2010s was insane, and right now we're simply perfecting what has already been made and trying to make it widely available: we make our screens flatter, semiconductors smaller, core-count more numerous, refresh rates higher and so on, to the point of diminishing returns. Is it exciting, though? We are used to noticable leaps in technology that take roughly half a decade each: we could see cellphones lose their size, eventually drop their buttons and become more than just a phone; video games went from bleeps and bloops, a bunch of low-resolution sprites with an extremely limited color pallete and really basic game mechanics to realistic 3D environments, countless polygons and other elements being rendered in real time, and game mechanics that are a far cry from simplistic side-scrolling gameplay; computers went from a glorified calculator with a wonky interface to an extremely versatile tool that became progressively more user-friendly. The point is, every innovation seemed promising enough to spark immense interest, and then you could see the progress being made in massive strides. The idea that technological and scientific advancement is slowing down due to the nature of innovations seems like absolute bullsoykaf to me, we live in an age where collaboration, education, and drawing on others' works has been made far easier than ever before. Most all scientists have access to the internet now, i.e. they have a repository of almost all of humanity's knowledge at their fingertips, and yet our rate of progress is slowing down from a time when all of the above was rudimentary to nonexistent? It makes no sense at all. The reason why progress is slowing down is because of a failing, or rather many failings, on the part of academia. A good half of the results you see in medical journals are bullshit because the results obtained cannot be reproduced [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis]. You can see this especially in oncology and psychology, where the bullsoykaf spewed just feeds of itself and grows to dominate the field. The humanities and social sciences are a total joke now, that much is evident, and the spread of critical theory is only going to make it worse. Even the hard sciences are falling victim to this bullsoykaf as critical theory grows to dominate academia. Academia itself is deteriorating as universities become more and more bloated at the administrative level while new professors are reduced to being permanent adjuncts working for peanuts. Nobody wants to be a professor anymore, industry pays more and treats you better, though not by much. This might be a bit of tinfoil-hattery, but I'm convinced that our governments also suppress or hide research that could benefit them if kept hidden. It's obvious that programs like MKULTRA never ended and I'm certain that there's more like it in black agencies and the like. The best talent and research is probably poached and directed there so as to benefit state interests. Meanwhile, most of the U.S.'s "open" governmental R&D programs seem to be in a state of decline as more and more is contracted out, which poses another problem in that this research doesn't belong to the public, it belongs to whichever contractor won the bid. Our money is going to pay for other people's copyrights. The sad fact is, our research system is rotting from the inside out. Elite universities care more about the next raise for the dean or what balance of minorities should attend so the legacy admissions can feel good about themselves than actual research. Journals are full of bullsoykaf that you have to pay out of the nose to even look at, and it gets even worse for the "softer" subjects. The government has only grown more venal, avaricious, and incompetent on the surface as time passes, and it's probably pulling a fast one on us when it comes to its hidden research. With a system like this, it's no wonder that things have slowed down in our view, even when the exact opposite should be happening given the circumstances. Hopefully, we can come to our senses about this, but I highly doubt it given how handily most folks have accepted the current narrative of "development has slowed down because of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯." Apologies for the soykaffy rant, I just feel strongly about the subject because it's quite the deception and it makes me mad to think of what we could've done and where we'd be at in a better system.

>>33881 >The humanities and social sciences are a total joke now, that much is evident, and the spread of critical theory is only going to make it worse. Personally, I would attribute this to the lax standards for what constitutes a professional in a field. The barrier to become a "professor" is so low that instead of the greatest minds competing to teach and create the next generation, people want a fancy title and the ability to be called an "expert". It might just be nostalgia kicking in, but when I read about scientists in generations past, it sounded like their entire goal was to tell each other to fuarrrk themselves because their idea was more efficient at solving humanities problems by refining complex theories of math and science to an industrially practical state versus the current state of showing how "bad" the state of society is and how we need to fix it in some politicized way I know several people who had the validity of their research questioned because they were white and somehow that made them not able to conduct research on racial differences or topics that included race. In recent news we have seen developments of the socialization of STEM fields to capture what people call "racism and discrimination" in math and science. I find this hilarious considering the standard for mathematics is now so low with internet training that you have people trying to turn math into a social science because feelings. Another professor went viral after saying that merely seeing trump signs and national symbols (American flags) is traumatic to African Americans. I am deeply concerned by how weak minded such people are. I dread that in the coming years when wars are started over resources societies will collapse due to their inability to work together or even share a common identity . >This might be a bit of tinfoil-hattery, but I'm convinced that our governments also suppress or hide research that could benefit them if kept hidden. This goes beyond conspiracies, many ideas just "disappear", especially once they are proven to be functional. I remember projects listed publicly on DARPA that are no longer listed, but continuations have been announced in defense news as "new products." The rule of thumb is that anything you see publicly announced is generally 20 years behind what actual capabilities are. IIRC a few years ago someone demonstrated the actual capabilities of US spy satellites because of an image the president posted because he used the size of an object to calculate the resolution of the camera. Also the British are notorious for hiding their crypto capabilities, notably in WW2 with the zimmerman note and the enigma. >Meanwhile, most of the U.S.'s "open" governmental R&D programs seem to be in a state of decline as more and more is contracted out, which poses another problem in that this research doesn't belong to the public, it belongs to whichever contractor won the bid. This is a common strategy in the USA, presidents are quick to say they are "downsizing" government, but the jobs are replaced by contractors, who now have less regulation as private companies and require little oversight because it "isn't the government." Reminder that Snowden worked for Booze-Allen. The nostalgia trend is a common observation that soykaf is fuarrrked, and it was just a little less fuarrrked 20 or 30 years ago. Also collectively, people tend to block out bad memories in favor of preserving good ones, call it a biological defense mechanism. People don't "want" to recall growing up in eastern europe during the cold war, but they do want to remember that cool moon landing. I see a lot of NASA/space merch where I am, despite the fact that musk is trying hard to privatize and monopolize the US space program. 80/90s music was trashy, but the few gems of music get played ad nauseum. Also note that products designed during the cold war and shortly thereafter were designed either intentionally or unintentionally to last. People were still worried about WW3. With megacorps like amazon et al. the design for supply chains is to push as much product out becasue it generates revenue. Apple got in trouble for putting software "glitches" into its products to force consumers to upgrade with non-functioning devices. Pic related shows how delusional people are. Not just gender, but ethnicity (not really religions anymore), but I could just relabel the picture and it is still mostly accurate. The top 10% complain to the top 3% that they are better off then they are.

Why do people like the Ancient Roman aesthetic or Gothic literature? Because it still has a unique appeal. Being old doesn't magically make it bad.

>>33898 >Personally, I would attribute this to the lax standards for what constitutes a professional in a field. The barrier to become a "professor" is so low that instead of the greatest minds competing to teach and create the next generation, people want a fancy title and the ability to be called an "expert". That and the fact that the social sciences and humanities are vulnerable to bullsoykaf by their very nature; the inability to use the full array of techniques possible in the hard sciences limits the study of the field. Consequently, it's very easy to politicize these fields due to their relevance to politics and the ease of making up bullsoykaf in them, and the general truth that colleges are and have been Marxist indoctrination camps leads this politicization to the left. The harvest of today was sown in the previous generation; these insane "x Studies" activist leaders and professors were molded into their current form by existing currents in their field. It's these reasons why the hard sciences have taken longer to fuarrrk up, less falsifiability and a climate not conducive to this sort of soykaf made it a tougher nut to crack, but the critical theorists are smart enough to know that they can break through with the full pressure of the rest of academia bearing down on them. >I am deeply concerned by how weak minded such people are. Honestly, it's not at all exceptional. Had I the "Lemmings" infograph on me, it would be a fitting reply to your statement, but I'm phoneposting (sorry) so I can't pull it up. Realistically, most people cannot be directed to care deeply for the state of the world beyond perhaps their immediate locality and surrounding communities, it's why America has deteriorated to the extent that it has as more power has shifted from lower levels to higher levels on the political pyramid. I don't think it's wrong to be so or even puts them below us, but these people will never break the status quo, or if they do it is only to conform to another status quo a la hipsters. They should be protected and prevented from being influenced by this sort of propaganda because frankly, they'd do a lot better if they don't have to deal with all this bullsoykaf. >I know several people who had the validity of their research questioned because they were white and somehow that made them not able to conduct research on racial differences or topics that included race. Mind giving me the stories? I haven't heard much from social scientists that hasn't happened to be batsoykaf crazy. >In recent news we have seen developments of the socialization of STEM fields to capture what people call "racism and discrimination" in math and science. The whole 2 + 2 = 5 bit for example, it's such pointless bullsoykaf, exactly the kind of thing that you'd hear from critical theorists. >Another professor went viral after saying that merely seeing trump signs and national symbols (American flags) is traumatic to African Americans. I dread that in the coming years when wars are started over resources societies will collapse due to their inability to work together or even share a common identity. America and the rest of the Western world, quite simply, does not have a culture more substantial than the superficial level. If you look past traits that are relicts of older times or adaptations to regional conditions, there is no difference in mentality, no loyalty to the region, and it's been this way for far too long of a time. I read Gore Vidal's "Messiah" a while back, and in it he remarks on the obliteration of the regional differences in America in 19-fuarrrking-50. We're nearly three-quarters of a century past that and it ain't looking good in that manner. This same obliteration has spread to the international level, as the cultural leveling within linguistic and economic spheres indicates. All of this has been perpetuated by a mass media designed to program us to care only for consumer goods and media products; the rise of "pop culture" as anything more than a small aspect of culture as a whole is the best indication of this. Racial differences being exaggerated is only another symptom of this, as subtle distinctions of culture are eliminated, more superficially evident characteristics must be used to determine groups. Fandoms and subcultures in the modern day often dress or act in a specific manner as an aspect of this. >This is a common strategy in the USA, presidents are quick to say they are "downsizing" government, but the jobs are replaced by contractors, who now have less regulation as private companies and require little oversight because it "isn't the government." Reminder that Snowden worked for Booze-Allen. Lots of grift in the system as well, many of the legislators that support privatization land a cushy job at some consulting agency, think tank, or contractor affiliated with the government and make quite a bit there. >People don't "want" to recall growing up in eastern europe during the cold war, but they do want to remember that cool moon landing. I see a lot of NASA/space merch where I am, despite the fact that musk is trying hard to privatize and monopolize the US space program. Aye, I find that despite all the privatization and corporatization going on, people only reluctantly look to corporate figures as idols. Despite the appeal of Musk, there's something infinitely more appealing about the narrative of the people putting a man on the moon rather than some company bigwigs doing so. >80/90s music was trashy, but the few gems of music get played ad nauseum. Commercial vaporwave is exactly this, just aspects of neo-fin-de-secle culture repackaged in a manner deliberately designed to invoke feelings of nostalgia, which completely ignores the critique of both the past and the present that previously existed within the genre. >The rule of thumb is that anything you see publicly announced is generally 20 years behind what actual capabilities are. That's honestly a very optimistic estimation. For the "surface" parts of the government that might hold true, but black programs are far ahead of that. Again, MKULTRA never ended, it's likely that they've only advanced further. The governmental capacity for information manipulation is frightening and almost entirely unheard of due to its cladestine state and frightening nature. >Also note that products designed during the cold war and shortly thereafter were designed either intentionally or unintentionally to last. People were still worried about WW3. With megacorps like amazon et al. the design for supply chains is to push as much product out becasue it generates revenue. Apple got in trouble for putting software "glitches" into its products to force consumers to upgrade with non-functioning devices. Aye, things like "software as a service" and "subscription" services are all a veneer of bullsoykaf designed to distract us from the fact that nothing we own is permanent anymore and that we're paying more for things that are only temporary. Not to mention we're fuarrrking over our planet with all the waste this consumption makes. >Pic related shows how delusional people are. Not just gender, but ethnicity (not really religions anymore), but I could just relabel the picture and it is still mostly accurate. The top 10% complain to the top 3% that they are better off then they are. I can't blame them, to be honest. This society will give them everything they ask for, given that they demand and whine enough about it. Who wouldn't use that opportunity to advance their station without lifting more than a finger?

>>33898 >This goes beyond conspiracies, many ideas just "disappear", especially once they are proven to be functional. I remember projects listed publicly on DARPA that are no longer listed, but continuations have been announced in defense news as "new products." The rule of thumb is that anything you see publicly announced is generally 20 years behind what actual capabilities are. IIRC a few years ago someone demonstrated the actual capabilities of US spy satellites because of an image the president posted because he used the size of an object to calculate the resolution of the camera. Also the British are notorious for hiding their crypto capabilities, notably in WW2 with the zimmerman note and the enigma. I would wager 50 is a more accurate real estimate, semiconductors and fibreoptics go back to almost the 50s, even some indication of nanotechnology can be traced back to the 70s. Look at their modern robotics and cybernetics programs, those have been know about and developed for a long time. Its not so much that they keep their technology hidden, but the sheeple dont take an interest, its mostly fringe knowledge that only a select few made popular knowledge by now. The cia didnt pettle around smack and acid just for the fun of it and they didnt blow the cash on blackjack and hookers either, those guys know their soykaf tight. Who knows what sort of things they have stashed in their closets, word is they have a huge arsenal of super futuristic weapons that you cant even prove they are weapons. Not like any of this is really new, they have been doing this since forever, just look at mk ultra and project stargate to figure out how far they will go and where its all headed.

>>33899 I'm not well versed in literature so can't comment on gothic lit, but the "roman aesthetic" isn't really unique. Literal centuries of influence on western art has made it pervasive in all creative fields, especially during the Renaissance. And they even the Romans themselves acknowledged how they were basically ripping off Greece.

>>33912 Sure, poor choice of words and poor example. Their culture is very derivative of others and has influenced others so it's not particularly unique in that sense, but it still has certain appealing features not common in contemporary modern cultures. My point is it's different to now and being old doesn't make it worse. >>33911 >The cia didnt pettle around smack and acid just for the fun of it and they didnt blow the cash on blackjack and hookers either, those guys know their soykaf tight. Eh, that, Stargate and MK were more failed R&D experiments. Not a good example of them 'knowing their soykaf tight' at all but it does show that they have their hands in many experimental fields and are willing to invest early in any project that may be useful, no matter how absurd it sounds, just in case it really does work. >word is they have src?

>>33904 >Mind giving me the stories? I haven't heard much from social scientists that hasn't happened to be batsoykaf crazy. Most of them pertain to either social science majors who wrote about the relevance of race as it pertained to x event or view of history, which are imo what the social sciences are there to do- to figure out the social aspects present in human achievements or certain events using the best empirical methods available. One person was flustered and shocked that the professor assessing a presentation said "As a white person, what makes you think that you are qualified to talk about race in this way" when it had absolutely zero bearing on the presentation, and they were afraid they were going to fail. I have personally taken classes where I thought that I would be learning about humanities, but 80% of the papers I wrote were about how the "event" made me feel, and the questions were subjective to begin (but I didn't realize it because it seemed straightforward enough) like "Explain why x race is marginalized when people do y" which I actually got grades deducted from citing research papers and peer reviewed texts because they were not opinionated first hand sources. Nothing but cherry picking sources that fit what the professor wanted us to know. It left a pretty bad taste in my mouth when I think of humanities to be honest. I know other people who quit participating in discussions and meetings with their peers after it turned into a flame war over someone saying that the older men in the group had no qualification as "rich white men" despite their 30+ years of experience in the field, and anything they said was invalidated by their white privilege. This turned into a young woman with less than 5 years in the field berating an old man, and getting praised for it by her peers. I gave humanities a try, never again. While I love the social sciences, I can no longer stand to be around it. >>33911 >The cia didnt pettle around smack and acid just for the fun of it and they didnt blow the cash on blackjack and hookers either, those guys know their soykaf tight. >neurosuggesting people won't willingly take advantage of unlimited funding and absolute secracy Occams razor: The CIA had so many projects going on that mismanagement and no oversight were (and likely are) pretty normal at the time. During the Vietnam war, the CIA had covert training camps that nobody talked about until decades later when people found out that agents turned themselves into warlords under the guise of it being "secret-no-i-cant-tell-you" way of fighting the communist. >Who knows what sort of things they have stashed in their closets, word is they have a huge arsenal of super futuristic weapons that you cant even prove they are weapons. Remember when the US talked about directed energy weapons and hyper-sonic glide vehicles? Oh wait, those pages are 404 now after the idea was introduced over 10 years ago, and even then it was just a soykafty concept art with 3 sentences about "our research." >also believing that things were actually gotten rid of because a piece of paper said so. I often wonder how many weapons that were supposedly "destroyed" after the cold war actually were on all sides. All of these things people look back on with nostalgia goggles and think that it was somehow a great time to be alive, but fail to realize how horribly fuarrrked up the world was. to be honest i dont think the world has stopped being fuarrrked up since astrolopithicus rose up from the primitive state of natural ignorant bliss. I also think like other lains said that Nostalga sells, because young people are too young to remember the original, and with modern technology, you can reboot things with better effects and at lower cost.

>>33911 >Its not so much that they keep their technology hidden, but the sheeple dont take an interest, its mostly fringe knowledge that only a select few made popular knowledge by now. Partially, while only large organizations can look into the breadth of things that the government does, they still keep a lot close to their chest. Modern public research is also utter soykaf, there's nothing much of value coming out of academia. I wouldn't be surprised if the government poaches the best talent via contractor and universities get stuck with the second or third tier. >The cia didnt pettle around smack and acid just for the fun of it and they didnt blow the cash on blackjack and hookers either, those guys know their soykaf tight. No, they definitely got to play, it's just that they managed to do work as well. Smack destroyed inner cities and made the glowsticks bank and acid was a key part of consciousness manipulation, but they're both a whole lotta fun to do kek To add, there are far better things out there than blackjack and hookers for a glowie. >>33913 >Eh, that, Stargate and MK were more failed R&D experiments. Not a good example of them 'knowing their soykaf tight' at all but it does show that they have their hands in many experimental fields and are willing to invest early in any project that may be useful, no matter how absurd it sounds, just in case it really does work. You only know about the stuff that they didn't care enough or weren't able to to keep a tight lid on, that's the thing.I definitely agree that those programs were more exploratory than anything else, they threw everything at the wall and used what stuck for further testing in black programs, which benefit from far fewer points of failure/people involved. The deeper government can certainly keep a secret from the public if needed, good opsec goes a long way. >>33914 >I have personally taken classes where I thought that I would be learning about humanities, but 80% of the papers I wrote were about how the "event" made me feel, and the questions were subjective to begin with... Nothing but cherry picking sources that fit what the professor wanted us to know. It left a pretty bad taste in my mouth when I think of humanities to be honest. kek humanities and the social sciences are nothing more than vehicles to deliver political propaganda, they're the best ways to do so and so they will continue to be so sadly. It's best to separate your study of the soft subjects from the mainstream sources of education, the day of a reasonable and scientific study of these subjects in a university has long passed while the availability of resources to do so on your own has only grown. I hope all that bullsoykaf hasn't discouraged you from the field entirely, there are some amazing things you can do and understand should you learn it. >I know other people who quit participating in discussions and meetings with their peers after it turned into a flame war over someone saying that the older men in the group had no qualification as "rich white men" despite their 30+ years of experience in the field, and anything they said was invalidated by their white privilege. This turned into a young woman with less than 5 years in the field berating an old man, and getting praised for it by her peers. While I'm not normally inclined to think kindly of the older professors that allowed this to happen, I can't help but sympathize with the poor folks. They probably thought they were doing good by allowing for more "diversity," yet the same people they gave a hand to uplift blacked their eye once they got on an even level. >I gave humanities a try, never again. While I love the social sciences, I can no longer stand to be around it. Props to you for trying, the insanity surrounding those fields is enough for me to give that area a wide berth academically. I'd love to make a career in history or the like, but we all know that the reality of the situation means that it ain't even worth trying. >Remember when the US talked about directed energy weapons and hyper-sonic glide vehicles? Oh wait, those pages are 404 now after the idea was introduced over 10 years ago, and even then it was just a soykafty concept art with 3 sentences about "our research." Those are memes more than anything else, sci-fi soykaf like that turns heads and excites people, but it's almost always impractical and inferior to more subtle alternatives. The real weapons are the tools that the government and elite use to manipulate populations and communities into dancing to whatever tune they sing without their knowledge. Why bother making weapons for a war when you can just coup the opposing side and manipulate them into peace? War is expensive and messy these days, and the contractors are fat and happy with whatever happens to be going on in the Middle East at the moment. The biggest threat to the current system isn't directly external, it's internal rebellion, whether fomented by outside actors or legitimate. >also believing that things were actually gotten rid of because a piece of paper said so. I often wonder how many weapons that were supposedly "destroyed" after the cold war actually were on all sides. A fundamental principle of governance is that a government will almost never willingly give up power. Temporary measures are always permanent ones in the making, and the abrogation of a right sets a future precedent. Granted, in some cases it may have just been cheaper to mothball old equipment, but they certainly wouldn't have done so without an ace in the hole.