Book Review: The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech by Grafton Tanner

Abstract

Jamie Ranger reviews The Circle of the Snake by Grafton Tanner. The Circle of the Snake grapples with the political consequences of the cultural turn to nostalgia, specifically the dynamic tension between the radical nostalgia required to contest the incessant homogeneity of cultural reproduction and the neoliberal narrative of a nascent digital utopia endemic to our contemporary systems of mediated communication.

Keywords

• algorithms
• social media
• nostalgia
• capitalist realism
• control society