The Machines Are Making Us Sick

Clark Griswold in the National Lampoons Vacation movies is living the 80s dream and he hates every minute of it.

When an elder millennial or a Gen X-er in the 2020s daydreams about how wonderful it must have been to raise a family in the 1980s, they might picture the Griswolds in all their Reagan-era glory, maybe with slightly fewer death-defying hijinks and things of that nature. Life for Clark Griswold, we think, was so much more understandable, so much more comprehensible, so much better in every way. 

Yet all Clark can do in these movies is to pine for yesteryear, for his childhood, for the glory days of the 1950s, when things were simple, when life was more understandable, more comprehensible, better in every way. Watching footage from Christmases long ago, the man weeps for the Old Days while trying to live out what he considers an idyllic American Christmas. He has tried – and mostly succeeded – in recreating the sort of holiday gatherings and celebrations he thinks he remembers from his childhood, and it all rings hollow. Clark chases ghosts: That's the plot of every Vacation movie.

None of it is as good as he remembers. In fact, it’s horrible – this pursuit of a feeling that exists somewhere in the recesses of the mind of a man who desperately wants to overwrite the present with the past. Again and again, Clark takes a crowbar to his family’s life to relive an imagined past that must be better than the present, the 1980s. Again and again, he succeeds, and it sucks. 

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'Forget 2025 And Come Here'

I suppose it was inevitable that artificial intelligence would accelerate the burning nostalgia that has delivered all-out fascism to the United States and other parts of the world in an age of democratic collapse via social media algorithm. I’ve come across AI-generated videos lately in which AI-generated creatures posing as 80s caricatures urge their viewers to “come back” to the 80s and that the 80s “miss you,” whatever it means for a decade to miss someone. These make-believe faces of Reagan-era youth, replete with all the minor mistakes of clumsy AI models trying to generate human beings, lure social media users back to a time most of them never experienced.

These monstrosities are all but inviting Americans in the 2020s to dive into their phones or laptops or tablets and escape the horrors of today for the uninterrupted joy of a better time, a time defined by the beginnings of the democratic collapse we’re living through today. 

Nostalgia for the unremembered 80s – even zoomers are hungry for a decade in which they did not live – ramped up during the darkest days of the COVID pandemic and has hardly let up in the years that have followed. We’ve largely given up on this world – this era – and collectively decided to reach back into the past for something nicer, something less exhausting and demanding and bleak. It has to be there. We remember it being there.

Let's be very real about these AI 80s nostalgia videos: They are truly sick shit. Ghosts of 80s culture created by AI telling people to stop living in the moment and "come back" to 1985 sounds like something invented by a tech-savvy suicide cult.

"Forget 2025 and come here," one of the AI creatures says, referencing The Goonies, a trigger for 80s nostalgia even though the film sucks ass. "We want you here."

"I know 2025 is bad," says one of the AI 80s twins, reminiscent of the blood-drenched twin girls in The Shining. "As soon as I finish here, I'll come get you."

"Come to 1985, I mis you," another AI creature says from the back of a pickup truck, having pizza and sodas with tight-jeaned friends. "I heard that 2025 is very complicated. I'm sorry about that." You heard right, you evil collection of words and images stolen from the internet.

"The 80s weren't just about neon lights and mix tapes," a big-haired 80s fake says as Tears for Fears plays in the background. "It was about being here, actually being with people. No screens in your face, no noise from the future, just the moment. The 80s miss you. We all do. Maybe it's time to come back."

Like I said, it's the laser-guided messaging of a death cult bent on brainwashing new members. What the fuck does this even mean? It does check out, since nostalgia at its core is the worshipping of death, of a past long dead, of something that no longer exists, of people and places that are long gone. We fear the future (anxiety) and we grasp for the past (depression) and we ignore the present because it's too much to bear. For a people made depressed and anxious by the devices in their pockets, this makes terrible sense.

There's a political component, of course: Watch these AI slop videos and the videos made by right-wing influencers last fall touting Project 2025 as a return to America's past glory and you will see precisely zero people of color. You will see no gay couples, no interracial couples, no one outside of a strict cisgender heterosexual, extremely white framework. This, as you know, is intentional. People you hate and fear, according to these nostalgia psyops, did not exist way back when. And if they did exist, they were out of your face, afraid to be who they are in public spaces, they way it ought to be. Eighties nostalgia is intensely fascistic, just as the 1950s nostalgia that pervaded 80s culture – think Back To The Future – was pulsing with fascism. In a time of increasing multiculturalism, 80s movies and TV shows and music – think Billy Joel's 80s stuff and Queen's Crazy Little Thing Called Love – preyed on Baby Boomers' longing for their pre-Civil Rights childhood, when things were good and uncomplicated and repressed in ways that resulted in psychosis for an entire generation of Americans.

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Someone on Bluesky asked me a while back what exactly was wrong with nostalgia. This person was defensive about a post of mine urging folks to evaluate their nostalgic urges and their rejection of the present – however awful and overwhelming – for a past that never happened (the 80s were bad, people forget). I tried (and failed) to present my anti-nostalgia case: Nostalgia was first known as a sickness, a mental disorder that primarily affected soldiers sent to faraway conflicts and people escaping those conflicts for foreign sanctuaries. Doctors during the American Civil War diagnosed thousands of troops from both sides of the conflict with nostalgia, a yearning for home as they slaughtered their countrymen. These soldiers had stopped sleeping and eating and could barely stand up straight because they missed their homes and their families and the time before they were recruited to defend slavery or defeat it.

That we have a stinking, putrid relic of the 80s in the White House, practically dripping out of his clothes, his face slack with the kind of aging that happens when you’re consumed with hate and grievance, should not be a surprise. Donald Trump is the embodiment of 80s excess and the inhumanity that became a guiding light in the decade's culture and politics. It's why so many 80s songs and movies and TV shows either celebrated or critiqued unfettered capitalism and the greed that flowed from it: It had come to define everything, to be a virtue. People emerged from the Civil Rights era directly into a never-ending Ayn Randian nightmare of self obsession and fulfillment as the only reason to be. The 80s birthed Trump. He slithered out of the 80s' womb, fully formed, soulless and dead-eyed and denied the love that could have made him fully human. He haunts us today, a reminder of a reactionary decade.

I find these AI 80s nostalgia videos particularly upsetting because there was a time not too long ago when these videos would have hooked me, plunged me into the a self-perpetuating kind of depression that tells you the solution to your sadness is somewhere back there, in the dead-and-gone past. I feel for those who come across these deeply manipulative, vile AI slop videos and feel lost and sad and lonely. Maybe this person will cue up a favorite 80s movie or album in hopes of recapturing the happiness they think they experienced back then. Maybe someone born in the 90s or 2000s will do the same in hopes of finding joy in someone else's past. None of this will work, naturally. It will only exacerbate your sadness. It will only expand the unmoving storm cloud that hangs in your mind. Trust me, I've been there, I've done that.

Contentment, happiness, peace, joy, whatever it is you seek, can only be found in the present unfortunately. It's why people need to see these AI nostalgia videos for what they are: A way to make you sick, a way to stop you from finding what you're seeking.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.