Not-stalgia?

The experiential context of technology

I’m a big Robert Eggers fan. No filmmaker I’m aware of does the depth of historical and literary research that he does and then produces something so not ponderous or stilted or pompous or in any way weighed down by all the “authenticity” he brings to it. If you didn’t know it was authentic, it wouldn’t really matter. It serves the film, rather than the other way around.

In The Northman, the last scene takes place on a Viking ship beginning an ocean passage. One of the main characters exercises supernatural powers and has visions as the vessel pulls away from land. This is not presented as something gee-whiz or special-effects-y, because the whole point is that, to these people, these things were just as “real” as the wood and the rope and the canvas and the water.

For decades now, modern Scandinavians have built and sailed careful reproductions of these craft, based on mostly-intact archaeological finds. I’m not talking about a quick circle of the harbor; they’ve done ocean passages in them up there where it’s really cold and you don’t want to go in the water. These people have acquired a deep understanding of how to build and sail these thousand-year-old ships.

And yet, as I observed in a much earlier essay here, what the ship “is” to them, and what the ship “was” to its original builders and users are two very different things—even if, physically-speaking, they are identical. The experience modern Scandinavians have aboard—even if they are as faithful as possible to what they know about how their predecessors lived aboard, down to the last detail—cannot be what it was to the Vikings. There are no sorceresses aboard summoning a fair wind, or having visions of the future of her lineage.

It's often said that, when people of a certain age group reach their 40s and 50s, they simultaneously find themselves with the means and the desire to acquire the cars they dreamed about in their teens. When that happens, those cars go up in value. It’s like waves on a graph—demographic line and car-value line. It’s interesting to me that, for me, there remains a disconnect between the two—between what I dreamed of at 17 and what I dream of now. It’s not a complete disconnect; I was enamored of Jaguars then and I am now. But I have no desire to drive around in a 1985 Jaguar. Sure, I’d love to experience that—well, part of me would. Part of me has a reservation. I think the reservation is a sort of “don’t meet your heroes” type of thing. My ability to distinguish between enjoying the memory of what that felt like—and enjoying the reward of being able to own and drive a car like that now—has to do with my ability—acquired rather embarrassingly late in life—to appreciate fantasy solely for its own sake. When I was younger, I considered fantasies to be ideations and projections of what I wanted to come true in real life. Fantasies were the inspiration to pursue the realization of something in the “real” world. If I didn’t make my fantasies come true, I was a loser—I would lose at life. The most pathetic character to me was Walter Mitty.

Sexual fantasies are probably best-equipped to disabuse us of this fallacy; we learn to accept sexual fantasies as just that, and we are aware that, for many of them, we really have no desire to actualize them. They are sufficient as fantasies. We can extrapolate from there. I remember what it was like to stand and admire a brand-new green XJS on the dealer lot with a window sticker and ivory leather and a real wood dash and center console. I remember what it was like to fantasize about driving a car like that. But I don’t need to drive a 1985 XJS. If I did, I would think something along the lines of, “Huh. Cars have come a long way in 40 years, haven’t they?” My experience of it in 2025 at age 57 would not be what I fantasized it would be when I was 17. And I want to preserve that memory as it was.

It’s not that the car would suck—it certainly wouldn’t. But my concept of it at 17 was that it was the latest and greatest—the best you could have. For some people, it may well be. But for me, a 2006 XK8 is just on another level. It’s more like what I thought a 1985 XJS was—in 1985. In a sense, I can’t take the XJS out of 1985 and expect it to give me something I couldn’t have at 17. That’s what the 2006 is for. The XJS is a memory. What it meant then, what it evoked then—those are memories. I don’t have a nostalgia urging me to buy and drive a 1985 XJS. I want the 2006. The Jaguar “mystique” is still there; that’s the connecting thread. But the actual car has to remain in its own time to retain its meaning to me. I don’t want to go to Disney World, because I experienced Disney World when I was four, and that is how I want to remember it. When it was literally magic.

Obviously, I still find the relationship of technology and nostalgia interesting. This time, I’m thinking of the context of technology, to which I always return—in terms of time, yes, but also in terms of the subjective experience. The technology itself is two different things to two different people in two different times—or perhaps at the same time—though it is, by any “objective” measure, exactly the same. This really can get into some real philosophy—what we call ontology—the examination of being—of what really is.

What is a 1985 Jaguar XJS? To a certain extent, it only makes sense to ask that question if I add “to me” or “to Hannah” at the end of it—and if I do that, I get two very different answers indeed.

If anything I’ve come up with so far in this now-long series of essays can blow “form follows function” out of the water, this is it. We realize just how abstract, just how subjective, just how “irrational” technological choice can be. We already know it can be overwhelmingly aesthetic. This goes beyond even that, I think.

I love Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Universe and Wonders of the Solar System series from around 2010, 2011. There’s a sequence in which he watches the sun rise on the winter solstice through the special slit in the walls of the temple at Karnak in Egypt—the one with the giant columns. Imagine an alien coming to Earth and trying to figure out what that was and why it was built. They’d have to know that the Sun was a god to these people—that the sunrise through that slit meant the return of the god of life for another year. And they would have to know that, as Cox says, the temple was not built “on the scale of men. It was built on the scale of gods.”

This gives you a glimpse of the challenge paleoarchaeologists face. Think about how long people have been debating what Stonehenge was “for.”

Sure, the scale is much smaller, but the problem here really is the same problem of the fact that a 1985 XJS to me would be only very partially explicable to Hannah (who’s 31). I would have to fish around for some analogies that worked in order for us to relate to each other there at all. I might could do it, but it would take some effort. And we know each other, and would be in each other’s presence, at the same time, speaking the same language, living in the same society where the things going on around us were the same. Unlike the Scandinavian experimental archaeologists and the Vikings. Unlike the ancient Egyptians and the alien. Or, for that matter, Egyptians alive today.

I can own a wooden “cathedral-style” radio from 1939, in perfect working and cosmetic condition. What that radio would be to me, and what that radio would be to someone in their 90s, are two entirely different things. Even though the radio “is” exactly the same, as experienced by our senses. This isn’t merely important when we’re trying to understand a technology. It’s indispensable. If I wanted to understand what that radio “was” to my elder, it would take someone like Robert Eggers to get me as close as I could get.