Nostalgia Trap

The online culture of memes, shitposting, and irony found on Twitter and other places is deeply entwined with the rise of millennial socialism and the larger landscape of 21st century politics. On this episode we explore the twisted path of the extremely online, as guest @CapitlsmDislikr shows us a world of grad school dead ends, crushing student loan debt, thankless adjunct teaching, satanic institutional bureaucracies and, of course, relentless irony posting on Twitter. Looking back on a ghastly past and even ghastlier future, our conversation sees millennials inhabiting a kind of endless present, with capitalism trapping an entire generation in a state of suspended animation.

Justin and David were mere children in the 1990s, the hellish decade that spawned much of the political and cultural landscape we currently inhabit. In this episode we talk about pop-culture: from Friends to Seinfeld, Good Will Hunting to The Big Lebowski, Kurt Cobain to Tupac, we attempt to draw a historical line from the 60s to the 90s to the Trump era. What do some of our favorite (and not so favorite) cultural figures and products look like in the rearview?

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE: https://www.patreon.com/posts/24632188

Timothy J. Lombardo is a historian who teaches at the University of South Alabama, and whose recent book Blue Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia and Populist Politics covers critical territory for those seeking to understand the Trump era. Using Rizzo's political career as a jumping off point for a wider discussion of race, class, and identity, Lombardo's work complicates some deeply-held myths about the "white working class." In this conversation, he talks about the politics and culture that surrounded him growing up in 1980s and 1990s Philadelphia, and how he developed an interest in describing the contours of conservative politics in the post-industrial Northeast.

Justin Rogers-Cooper is here to explain how the robber barons of the 19th century stack up against the current crop of capitalist megalomaniacs in Silicon Valley and beyond. In the process, we talk about Marx's labor theory of value, the shift from control of resources to control of debt, the colonization of the human soul as the final frontier of profitability, and the specific function of monopoly within the larger liberal project.

Before the Nostalgia Trap, David hosted a show called Topical Fever, which took on specific subjects from the worlds of politics, history and media. Sounds familiar, right? To mark the 20th anniversary since the premiere of The Sopranos, we're sharing this Topical Fever episode from the vaults, featuring a conversation with professor of English Jeremey Cagle on the show's relationship to another epic piece of American art: Herman Melville's Moby Dick.