A Requiem for Techno-Optimism
Part 2.5: All that is solid melts into air
Well, this one blew right through the email length limit. So be it.
Let’s have an excerpt from novelist Gary Shteyngart’s famous 2010 New York Times piece by way of an epigraph:
“This right here,” said the curly-haired, 20-something Apple Store glam-nerd who sold me my latest iPhone, “is the most important purchase you will ever make in your life.” He looked at me, trying to gauge whether the holiness of this moment had registered as he passed me the Eucharist with two firm, unblemished hands. “For real?” I said, trying to sound like a teenager, trying to mimic what all these devices and social media are trying to do, which is to restore in us the feelings of youth and control.
“For real,” he said. And he was right. The device came out of the box and my world was transformed. I walked outside my book-ridden apartment. The first thing that happened was that New York fell away around me. It disappeared. Poof.
Picking up from where we left off: let’s talk about the idiosyncrasies and aesthetic tropes of the vaporwave aesthetic (and in this we’re including its associated or spun-off genres like mallsoft, night drive, synthwave, and city pop), and what they might indicate about our end-of-the-millennium nostalgia and our attitudes toward the present.1
I. LESS THAN ANONYMOUS
Early on, vaporwave artists put out tracks and albums under sardonic pseudonyms and conscientiously kept out of the spotlight—a throwback to internet mores before MySpace and then Facebook arrived on the scene. Even in the early 2010s it must have been refreshing to see artists who weren’t anxious to accumulate clout under their real names or circulate their shopped & filtered mugs.
The early internet was anonymous. If we’d like to sentimentalize it, cyberspace was like a virtual masquerade where participants took another name, perhaps chose some low-resolution icon as a mask, and projected themselves (or an idea of themselves) into a two-dimensional pseudo-world of geometry and pictures and words. Nobody knew what anyone’s real name was and nobody knew what anyone else looked like unless they became confidants via private messages. For a while it was considered uncultured to throw around one’s real name or post personal photographs in excess. The part of life that occurred on the internet was compartmentalized, manageable, and low-stakes—due in no small part to the conventions of anonymity, which helped to prevent online affairs from unwantedly leeching into the domain of IRL.
Web 2.0 changed all that. “I exist in the world; therefore I can be on social” became “I am on social; therefore I exist in the world” astonishingly quickly. It is fast becoming a (spurious) truism that the only way to be someone who matters IRL is to matter on the internet.
A recent Harris poll found that one in five employers won’t contact a job applicant to schedule an interview if they can’t find him or her on social media. College admissions departments check prospective students’ social media profiles. Caught the eye of an attractive new coworker? If you’re not as fascinating on the digital page as you are in person, her or she might well write you off before you even have the opportunity to propose meeting for coffee. A 2019 article published in Business Insider advises readers on the dating scene to look out for eight social media red flags: among them are “your date has a really small amount of followers” and “your date hasn’t posted a photo in a while.” I’ve said before that if you’re an author with a book to pitch, you can expect literary agents to take an interest in your social [media] stature. Social media is both a résumé and job. It’s the new keeping up with the Joneses.
In college I read papers and listened to lectures about feminism, but what made it viscerally click for me was glancing at the cover of Cosmopolitan in a supermarket checkout aisle and thanking my lucky stars that there was a whole world of appearances that I, as a male, didn’t have to give a shit about keeping up. On this point I agree with the radical feminists: female beauty standards and the universe of consumables one is obligated to purchase to meet them are so many glossy pink manacles. Looking cute and fashionable and youthful isn’t freeing if it’s compulsory, and for most women it effectively is. Similarly, the internet’s emancipatory pretensions began to ring hollow as it became a whole new field in which one’s life-performance could be judged and IRL social pressures applied.
The early consumer internet, the version in which commonplace wisdom held that one should not carelessly divulge one’s real name or reveal one’s face, was much less crowded, much more decentralized, and didn’t promise much in the way of fame and fortune for being good at projecting one’s personality or issuing hot takes. (“Internet famous” used to be a joke.) There was less jockeying for attention and status, smaller and more intimate venues for conversation, and the sense (perhaps illusory) that even relatively high-profile content creators were addressing you on an eye-to-eye level rather than standing over and apart from you and discoursing to a massive, indistinct crowd that you just happened to be a part of.2 Ironically, the internet felt much more personable during its anonymous days.
(Incidentally: in arguing that vaporwave had jumped the shark, one piece of evidence Van Paugam adduced back in 2021 was the scene’s new focus “on personality as opposed to anonymity.”)
II. WIREFRAME WORLDS
While there are a hundred good reasons for why someone might feel nostalgia or an antiquarian fondness for 1990s GUI imagery and video game graphics, the one I’m concerned with here has to do with that old barrier between solid life and cyberspace, which was once assumed to be impermeable.
Just as faceless anonymity erected a barrier between one’s relations and activities on the internet and IRL, the austere forms and colors of 1990s computer interfaces and the low-resolution unrealism of video game graphics were a reminder that that the “place” on the other side of the screen was something other than and apart from reality. Something less than reality. To the imaginative mind of the early internet enthusiast who’d read a lot of cyberpunk novels or played too much Netrunner, it was easy wax romantic about surfing the web—you were taking a plunge into a luminous and uncanny ocean out/down/up/in nowhere space, and it was inevitable that you must come up for air, return to shore, and towel off in the material world.3
Some years ago, a YouTuber put out a retro rendition of Westworld’s opening. Though it’s not vaporwave, it draws deeply from the same well, and it might clarify what I’m trying to get at. Give it a quick look. It’s basically a reconstruction of how cyberspace qua space was envisioned in the 1980s, and the trailer for an alternate-timeline version of Westworld that aired in 1984 and was about a virtual amusement park where a ticket bought you a private booth and a rental of a neuralinked VR headset.
There’s no verisimilitude here: it’s patently otherworldly in its artifice. The music is machine music, and it can’t pretend to be otherwise. One imagines the wireframe figures are like deep-sea tube worms: as “alive” as they can be when they’re in their “natural” habitat, but certain to disintegrate if taken outside of it. The digital world gives the impression of mystery, vastness, and a profusion of esoteric knowledge and lurking dangers, but all of it is contained. Powerless to operate upon solid life. We can visit it, but it can’t intrude on us. It goes away when we log off, power down, and walk away from the terminal, and it doesn’t follow us out the door. And there’s something reassuring about old computer graphics’ inability to pass for real objects and real scenes; there’s never any ambiguity as to whether you’re looking at something that exists independently of the digital world or something exclusive to it, and preeminence is naturally ascribed to entities of the first category.
If you’re under the roof of a one-story house with its front and back doors shut and windows closed, there’s no question that you’re inside. If you install wrap-around window walls, replace most of the ceiling with skylights, and open them all at once, it’s harder to say that you’re still inside. That’s about where we’re at with cyberspace: it’s no longer so outside as it once was. It is so everywhere, so coherent and high-resolution, and so near to solid life as to simultaneously replicate and intensify its banality.
The internet’s reference point was always IRL, but now IRL’s reference point is the internet. An infinite regress between the reality of the map and the accuracy of the territory.
You can see more of and do more in the world by staying in. If you’d rather purposelessly fritter away some hours of your life in solitude, switch to airplane mode and leave the house.
III. BOOM ANIME MABOBS
I can think of three good reasons why anime from the 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s might be such a common ingredient in the vaporwave bricolage. The first two I’ll address here; the third will appear parenthetically later on.
First: come on, it looks great. The 1980s and 1990s were the blazing sunset of cel-based animation, and you can’t tell me that anime generally looks better after the switch to digital production methods. More analog nostalgia.
Second: the 1980s were peak Japan. Its economy was the envy of the world. The durable goods it manufactured and exported were second to none. International fascination with Japan reached a limerent pitch. Japan’s enduring reputation as a nation twenty years ahead of the rest of the world began here, and for the purposes of the vaporwave collagists and compilers, 1980s anime is the spitting image of the imagined future we Americans believed was in store for us circa 1990-something.
Japan’s roaring eighties were a time of conspicuous consumption, and high-end animation of the time spares no effort lavishly depicting technological appurtenances (such as the stereo in the screencap above). There’s no enthusiasm for dinky compact gizmos. Drinking in the spectacle of impractically muscular military hardware, sexy cars, bulky spacesuits, towering mechanical edifices bristling with inexplicable widgets, and protuberant control systems studded with blinking lights, you can practically feel the animators’ pants tightening from their hard-ons. The tech in 1980s anime has girth. Writ large in all the turgid robotics, sparkling metropolitan vistas, intricately textured urban neighborhoods and interiors, lambent elevated highways, and doe-eyed action girls, one sees the virile self-confidence of a nation in the green summer of a brief golden age.4
And for the American viewer who in the back of his mind assumed that technological progress meant a future that looked like Japan’s celebratory vision of itself—grandiloquently urbanist, materia[listica]lly abundant, and crackling with excitement and purposefulness—it might have been hard not to feel let down by how things actually shaped up. His disappointment is a variation of the hackneyed lament about expecting flying cars and hoverboards and instead getting Facebook and Alexa, or the fashionable observation that historical progress did indeed deliver us unto a corporatocratic cyberpunk dystopia, only it’s fucking boring.5
Nostalgia for the future that wasn’t bites harder for the knowledge that our anticipation of it was predicated on a misapprehension of the end-of-the-century present. Trusting financiers, Silicon Valley capitalists, and the politicians administering the stupider of the two forms of state capitalism to guide us to any future most of us would want to live in was a bad idea from the beginning.6
Japan had a head start on us in this, too.
IV. “Any ad put into a new setting is funny.”
I’m actually going to back out of this one because it really ought to be the subject of a separate writeup. It will just suffice to say that TV commercials land differently when viewed three or four decades after they aired, and it’s something worth examining.
Honestly I’m just kind of enamored of the screencap that I took and didn’t want to get rid of it.
V. THE ATRIUM OF BROKEN DREAMS
This is the big one.
This Christmas I did something unusual, something I haven’t done for many, many years. On December 23 I went shopping for gifts at the mall—the Rockaway Townsquare Mall in Jersey, the mall I loafed around in and then worked at as a teenager, and which I later fictionalized in The Zeroes.
In a word, it was pitiful.
Two of the four anchors are dead limbs now: Lord & Taylor and Sears. The parking lot outside of what used to be Sears’ automotive wing is cracked and deserted. Macy’s is still hanging on, but its exterior is in dire need of a power washing.
(Something caught my eye inside of Macy’s: a miniature Toys R’ Us exclave. The original big-box toy store reduced to a few square feet of retail space on the salesfloor of a moribund department store.7 How tenaciously do even abstract entities cling to life.)
It was Saturday evening, two days before Christmas, and the Rockaway exit on Interstate 80 wasn’t backed up in the least. When I worked at the mall during holiday season 2000, I could have expected to idle for ten minutes before getting on the ramp. The parking lot was moderately full, but only about at the level it would have been on any given weekend in the 1990s. We didn’t have any trouble finding a space. The no man’s land outside Sears could remain a no man’s land.
Obviously the composition of the tenants has changed in the last twenty-five years. Any retailer that sold something now available in digital form is dead. No record stores, no video stores, one emaciated GameStop (down from three), and a Books-A-Million that probably needs only one more economic downturn and a dip in manga sales to give up the ghost.8 Any retailer selling anything that can be more conveniently and cheaply purchased on Amazon has either washed away or is swimming in place against the inexorable current of obsolescence.9 The upscale-ish specialty stores like the Nature Company, Wilson’s Leather, World of Science, and Brookstone are all either altogether defunct or elsewhere reduced to temporary pop-up kiosks, airport locations, and online sales. Like the beleaguered department stores, they depended on the patronage of a category of middle-class spender that’s in increasingly short supply, and the ones remaining generally prefer to buy their telescopes, geodes, leather jackets, and not-for-masturbation vibrating devices online.
Replacing these were a whole lot of “gift shops” with different names that all sold exactly the same collectible gimmicky crap. (Just like boardwalk retail, though a sliver more upmarket.) Shops like these are relatively safe because they’re peddling inexpensive wares that aren’t the kind of thing you’d intentionally punch into the Amazon search bar, but might buy on impulse since they’re already in your hand and look honey, they’ve got Dungeons & Dragons socks!!! It was in FYE—a chain that used to sell CDs, movies, and video games, but has preserved itself by downscaling and moving into the “gifts” market—that I came to the sober realization that anime has at last penetrated so deeply into the American mainstream as to become kind of trashy. Inuyasha energy drinks, Nezuko body pillows, Naruto Funko Pops, all manner of Hatsune Miku gewgaws, figurines of Misa from Death Note, etc., etc. This stuff was everywhere. Everyone was selling it. Anime is the new Garfield.
(I suspect another reason why vaporwave artists and compilers have a penchant for 1980s anime is because they’re a relic of the time when anime still had the mystique of exclusivity and exoticism in the West. That which belongs to the in-the-know is never regarded as cheap.)
The longest line we stood in was at the dollar store.
I wish I’d thought to conduct more of a survey in the apparel stores. I understand a lot of them are striving to attract persons carrying credit cards by offering Instagram opportunities. I have noticed that in Philadelphia’s Fashion District [mall], which I occasionally visit to see a movie or pass by on my way somewhere else, the only time I’ve ever seen a queue was for an “Instagram-ready” pop-up. At Rockaway we did find a cotton candy vending machine that had some sort of TikTok-related QR code on the glass—but neither my wife nor I use TikTok, and I think the machine might have been broken.
Any place in solid life is only relevant to the extent that it can be sourced for digital content. Otherwise there’s just no good reason not to summon the Amazon delivery van or the Uber Eats and Gopuff helots.
And this is part of the American mall’s death spiral. A mall needs to extract rent from tenants. Those tenants need to sell things to customers to pay rent. Now that shopping for shoes, scented candles, video game consoles, yoga pants, kitchen appliances, etc. is done much more quickly and cheaply online, customers need some other reason to go to the mall. The place needs to sell an experience. An ambiance. It needs to make itself into a place people want to be. That was always integral to the business model.
But it doesn’t have the resources to do that anymore because nobody wants to go to the mall, and they don’t want to go to the mall because these days the average mall has as about as much charm and particularity as a hospital. It’s an uninterruptible vicious cycle.
Yes, that’s a very young Sara Jessica Parker, featured in an obscure movie that recorded a scene in the Rockaway Mall. It came out when the mall was less than a decade old, and when I was still preverbal and living in Maryland. It’s the only image of the mall’s early days that I’ve been able to find.
Some features to notice: the ficus tree to the left. The ornamental lamp post to the right. The yellow object, reflected in a mirror and partially eclipsed by Parker’s head: a two-story sculpture by one Rita Blitt called Stablitt 55. She had a total of five pieces installed in the atrium when Rockaway Townsquare opened.
The ficuses growing out of radial grates on the lower level, and all of the lilies and dracaenas in planters distributed throughout the atrium, are all long gone. Stablitt 55 has been moved outside, but the other Blitt sculptures were evidently sold off. Those charmingly garish lamp posts were dismantled before I was old enough to be dropped off at the mall by myself. The fountain was uninstalled at least fifteen years ago. So were the neon lights spangled all across the food court. All of these niceties cost money to maintain, and it is incumbent upon the Simon Property Group to minimize expenses and inspire optimism in its shareholders.10 So now everything is stark white and blank. A terminal without an airport.
There were very few holiday adornments in the atrium when we visited. Simon was obligated to host a Santa, and there was a dwarfish Christmas tree or two in his vicinity—but the days when the mall could splurge on festive seasonal décor are long past.
I have been critical of the shopping mall. In a more sensible world there’d have been no reason for it to be invented. The solution to the postwar housing crisis would have been dense, walkable, and planned mixed-use suburbs supported by a robust public transportation system. Instead we got the Levittown template and all of its consequences, which included a latent demand for something to cure or at least to palliate the alienation and decentered nowhereness of the residential sprawl and the ugly, overcrowded and congested commercial corridors bracketing it. The mall was a seemingly plausible solution to a real problem—a misguided and misapplied solution that tended to exacerbate the issues it was supposed to fix, but for a while and to an extent it sort of did what it was supposed to do. It was a place to go and be with other people.
In a way the mall is a bit like the (somewhat mythical) Soviet breadline. One is a distinct product of American capitalism and the other an unfortunate emblem of Soviet communism. The mall offered something sort of like a community space, but not really, not truly. The the Soviet system produced and distributed food, keeping people fed, but not terribly efficiently. Neither was ideal—but people nevertheless relied on them, and the political and economic situations of each nation precluded any other alternative.
My sister still lives in my old hometown; after breaking up with her boyfriend she moved back in with my mother, and helped care for my stepfather as he wrestled with pancreatic cancer. She works from home, having converted my former bedroom into a workspace. She doesn’t date; I understand she was on Tinder for a while, but apparently gave up on it. I haven’t heard any reports of her spending time with friends in a very long time. I’m pretty sure she typically only leaves the house to visit Wawa or the grocery store. She’s addicted to Amazon shopping. Whenever I visit for two or three days, I reliably scoop up about as many packages addressed to her from the doorstep. Most of it seems to be stuff for her home office or bedroom; additions and enhancements to the small, enclosed spaces where she works, sleeps, and scrolls through TikTok.
During my Christmastime visit she told me she has no idea where she’s supposed to meet people her own age.
I don’t think her case is an exceptional one.
(Elsewhere—one the one side, our cities are falling apart. On the other, they’re sprouting with insipid boxy buildings eerily redolent of modern website and app GUI design. Wan, flat rectangular panels. I wonder if that’s a coincidence?)
The nostalgia of vaporwave is directed towards a vanished world of people, places, and the old relations between them. Having been pioneered by millennials, its reference point is the period right before solid life derezzed. After the 2000s it went, as Shteyngart says, “poof.”
Through the second half of the twentieth century, Debord’s spectacle mutated into the hyperreality of Baudrillard, and during the 2010s it achieved the next stage of its runaway evolution. The conditions of cyber-realism not only distract, distort, obscure, and bestow the semblance of substance upon the illusory, but have geometrically increased the spectacle’s power to impoverish those parts of the world it has not yet taken under its control. It eats away at them as though to devour them like a fly (partially digesting its food before swallowing it), orients them steeply towards itself such that all activity in their spheres must at the very least refer to it, or simply consigns what it can’t absorb (or has no need of) to crumbling in unattended desuetude.
But I suppose all we’re describing are the normal operations of capitalism: subsumption, centralization, and the severing and rerouting of relations.
When vaporwave (and particularly its mallsoft subgenre) employs the mall as a symbol for the irrevocable good old days of the millennial generation, the clever artists are the ones who tacitly acknowledge that the object of their reminiscence is an economic and cultural fixture of a less advanced phase of neoliberalism. Their misty, implicit critique of corporatocracy attains a truly poignant level of irony through their self-consciousness of having no lived experience or concrete conceptual touchstones standing outside the frames of consumer capitalism and digitalization. As it so often goes with nostalgia, it wasn’t the age that was innocent, but the people whose uncynical youth happened to coincide with it. And the millennial creators and fans of vaporwave have at least some inkling of their role in closing out that age through their amenability toward resituating ever more of their habits and desires in and around cyberspace.
What we really miss are the years before the negative externalities of “move fast and break things” piled up too high to go on ignoring.
As a requiem of digital culture for the sense of place, the apparent solidity, and the intimations of stable progress it seems to recall from the turn of the century, mallsoft is like a Puerto Rican commemorating the Taíno in the language of the Spaniards.
VI. AFTERTHOUGHT
Vaporwave imagines the path of development not taken. But there is a question to be asked: was Web 2.0 inevitable?
What I mean is: was its form determined by the will and power of Silicon Valley’s Californian Ideologues, or did the rudimentary technologies of the Altair 8800, the DynaTAC 8000X, The World, and Usenet only follow their internal logic (with the assistance of tech firms) towards becoming what they only could become?
I am aware that city pop predates the .mp3 format and the consumer internet, but it probably wouldn’t be enjoying such a surge of popularity among twenty-first-century Western listeners if vaporwave artists didn’t sample it and if YouTube compilers didn’t pair it with the same varieties of nostalgic imagery that typically accompany vaporwave, mallsoft, night drive, etc. releases and mixes.
I’ve written before about witnessing the start of the jockeying and the formation of hierarchies in the early-to-mid 2000s webcomics scene. It was as inevitable as the gravitational collapse of a dust cloud.
The “surfing” metaphor was more apt when the internet experience consisted of cruising from website to website to website to website and routinely discovering unfamiliar virtual places instead of clicking back and forth between Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and a news site of choice.
In this respect 1980s anime is a lot like American pop culture of the 1990s. Even when it’s dark, gritty, and ambivalent, an élan born of prosperity, international clout, and optimism shines through like the sun behind a flimsy window blind.
Flying cars and hoverboards—lodged into my generation’s imagination and given an expected date of arrival by Back to the Future Part II—promised increased mobility, speed, and freedom of movement along new axes. Facebook and Alexa, on the other hand, are both surveillance devices. The pseudo-freedom Facebook offers has nothing to do with traversing spaces, but rather with obliterating them. Alexa’s purpose is to condition the user so as to become a better Amazon customer; it doesn’t want you going anywhere.
(1) John Gray in The New Leviathans:
In America, wealth buys power, while in China power creates and destroys wealth. In China, market forces serve the objectives of government, while Western states have ceded power to corporations that obey imperatives of profit. Both systems are variants of state capitalism, but the relations between capital and the state are reversed.
(2) To repeat: a lot of earlier vaporwave wryly acknowledges this, while the later stuff and most of its spin-off genres are much rosier in their retrospective outlook on the late twentieth century.
Postscript: evidently Toys R’ Us intends to return to the world of brick-and-mortar stores. Probably only parent company WHP Global believes there’s any chance of it going well.
Well, there used to also be an Electronics Boutique and an EBX, but those were owned by Gamestop and virtually identical. Before digital distribution, it might have made sense.
CBS News, April 23, 2023: “Wall Street says 50,000 retail stores will close in 5 years.”
Simon acquired the Rockaway Mall in 1998. Pretty soon afterwards it started changing for the worse.
"that I came to the sober realization that anime has at last penetrated so deeply into the American mainstream as to become kind of trashy"
I came to this realization after moving back to Austin from California and realizing that all the low rent trashy cars have the Naruto stickers, and sometimes even hentai stickers.
Weirdly, amidst many corpses, California and Texas have some of the only remaining healthy malls I know about. I can think of examples of healthy indoor malls in LA, San Jose, Austin and Houston. San Jose's Great Mall in particular is still crowded as all hell, or was in 2019 when I last went.
All of the healthy malls I know sell mostly premium mediocre, the kind of upscale stuff upper middle class people have now in place of the sharper image. Every one of them has a Uniqlo, a Lego store, an Aeropostale, a Victoria's Secret, and a Van's. Almost all of them are owned by Simon.
I was promised the death of the mall! It was in the news and everything. I'm honestly kind of bothered that it's thriving *anywhere*.
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Incidentally my parents were from Morristown and Kinnelon, and half my extended family live there. I think I've been to Rockaway mall. I wish I'd done a better job journaling things like that.
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I firmly believe that the social network and the pocket touch screen and the infinite news crawl were inevitable. Truly, like the endless waves of migrating tribes exerting pressure on the late Roman empire, there was latent pressure, enormous latent pressure, which already existed as soon as pre-industrial life became the minority experience. For a hundred years, disconnected people with no idea how to spend their time cast about for something, anything that fit their mammal social brain and their lizard attention brain. These were captured by the most captivating advances. Any further optimizations are just that: optimizations, which will just do a better job capturing. TikTok replaces Youtube, ad nauseum.
I *was* Silicon Valley, by location and experience, for about ten years. I sat in a cubicle three hundred feet away from the Google leadership, eating glorious free food, and tried in vain to write machine learned models to stop the decline of news source quality, before anyone ever uttered the words "fake news", and I did it with far too little oversight, and I failed, and I went home. Silicon Valley, to the extent that it is people at all, is best regarded as Marcus Aurelius, and Maximinus Thrax, and Diocletian, and Theodosius, and Stilicho. Each gets his choice how to deal with the barbarian invasions, with significant lasting consequences, but none gets to choose the pressure itself.
Since you mentioned taínos, malls in Puerto Rico are for the most part alive and well.