You don't miss your childhood. You miss not being angry.

It's always a bad idea to watch a video that prominently features right-wing commentator and Russia shill Tim Pool – even in the context of someone offering cutting commentary on that video – but that's exactly what I found myself doing earlier this week, thanks to the below Bluesky post.

When I clicked on the video, I truly expected the AI-generated video that followed to be something vaguely poignant or streaked through with a hyper-specific nostalgia for the 1990s or early 2000s. Perhaps, I thought, it would be a recreation of, like, walking out of a movie theater after Titanic or something along the lines of this absolutely horrifying bit of "remember the '80s???" pastiche. After all, AI videos so often take the form of vague and unsettling recreations of things that never were, so why not extend that to the year 2002, as we see in the video embedded below, which you are required to watch. It's the law.

Instead, what I found was mostly deeply, deeply sad. Pool talks at length about an AI-generated TikTok he saw – one that he fully knows to be a completely false simulacrum of a thing that was probably never real – and the gist of it is that the video takes place in a room with large windows through which the viewer can see falling snow. There's a mug of hot cocoa and cartoons on a nearby TV. Pool says the video – which, again, he knows is of a thing that does not exist and never has existed – gave him "a feeling of home." At the end of his commentary, Pool pivots to full-on Islamophobia, because he cannot simply want to have a nice winter's day without plunging into racism.

There are a lot of ways that we could read this sort of fauxstalgia. Fascist and other totalitarian movements often use nostalgia as a way to create a permission structure for their horrors. If they are simply trying to get back to a beautiful, purer past, then anything is excused as the cost of getting there. And since nostalgia is almost always tied to memories of childhood and adolescence, when one didn't have to care about much beyond the things immediately in front of them. Obviously, all childhoods are more fraught than the popular conception of them and only become more fraught the less they resemble the childhood of straight, cis white boys. But our brains also tend to elide many of the things that make childhood so difficult as we grow, simply because they cannot retain every piece of information. You might have had the most traumatic childhood imaginable, and your brain would still be grasping at straws to remember the handful of things that were tolerable about it, the small number of ways you felt safe from moment to moment.

Yet I think there's another level here. Pool knows he is consuming a falsity. He still can't stop himself from giving into it, even though it's about to be winter. Pool could quite easily wait for a snowy day – or travel to somewhere where it snows more frequently – buy some hot cocoa and watch some cartoons. That sounds like a perfectly enjoyable way to spend a snow day to me, and it also wouldn't end with a blatant pitch for white supremacy. Presumably, it wouldn't involve him broadcasting at all. He'd just be alone with his thoughts and some cartoons.

To be sure, there's a very childlike center to this imagined winter's day. Only having to worry about the cocoa in your hands and the cartoons on TV doesn't sound like an adventure in adulthood. At the same time, our most childlike desires don't really leave us as we age, and a day spent in these sorts of pleasures is worth indulging in occasionally. So I find it easy enough not to judge Pool for his longing for the innocent fun he so clearly wishes he could return to – at least until he takes that turn into outright racism.

So what's really going on here?

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Notice what's missing in Pool's received fantasy of that winter's day or most of the nostalgia videos I linked to above: intermediary devices. A day spent drinking cocoa and watching cartoons is also implicitly a day not spent on one's phone or laptop. It is peaceful not because it's specifically a childlike reverie but because that childlike reverie removes one of the foremost stressors of modern life. Children get angry, surely, but in many cases, that anger dissipates quickly, even when dealing with one's worst playground enemy. Childhood emotions are purer, which means they burn more cleanly.

The longing to return to childhood is a longing to be freed from adult responsibility at its core, but at this moment in time, "adult responsibility" too often takes the form of being mad at the right people on the computer. Don't get me wrong: I think it's worth being mad at the people who are making the world a worse place. Still, the trap too much technology places us in is an endless anger loop, unable to send that anger anywhere. Especially if you are someone like Pool whose entire career is spent pointing that nebulous anger at slightly less nebulous targets — like entire groups of people — it must offer the same sort of relief to imagine a day spent not having to marinate in inchoate hatred as I get when I think about how little I'm going to do once the projects I'm currently working on are finished.

In nearly every interview I gave about Woodworking, someone asked me about the process of writing a teenager and how I tried to get modern teenagers "right." My standard answer to the question was that what much adult anxiety about understanding teenagers properly is actually anxiety about understanding technology, since teens are early adapters who jump on platforms and devices long before most of the rest of us. To be sure, a high-school student right now lives so much more of their lives online than a high-school student even 10 years ago, but the lives they're leading there are largely animated by the same passions adolescents have always been animated by. When you are 15 and you fall in love or argue with your parents or fail a big test or have a messy friend break-up, it feels like the first time anything like that has happened to anyone. But teens have been having those experiences as long as we've had teens.

What I think often happens with nostalgia is this process in reverse. In the Walmart video embedded above, the creepy automaton children talk about Walmart as though it exists in a far more distant past than 2002. "Our YouTube was the giant TV aisle" sounds like it should carry the strange melancholy of nostalgia – but then you remember that YouTube began in 2005. Meal delivery services, also dissed by the video, began in earnest in 2004.

No, what this nostalgia longs for isn't the past but, rather, the absence of certain kinds of technology. If you watch previous eras' nostalgia porn, you'll find a longing for the absence of television or mass media more generally or transportation faster than horseback or even urban centers at all. The idea, always, is that there is some point in the past where you didn't have to feel like this, and "this" is a free-floating target. Right now, longing for the absence of technology boils down to the absence of an anger that can never be resolved. In other times, that longing took different forms.

We long, then, for less knowledge, less understanding. Which means, yes, that we want to be children again, but also that we know simply making some hot cocoa and watching cartoons won't solve the problem. Nostalgia becomes so easily linked to fascist movements because the things you see out there that make you angriest become an easy proxy for your bad feelings, and our current merchants of misery will use that emotion to advance a project of hatred and death. But you can also just choose not to let your anger fester, to process and feel it and let it go. To understand this, however, is also to rob nostalgia of much of its power. And what fun is that? Far better, for some, to get caught in an endless loop of recreating the past not as it was but as it should have felt, then growing ever more frustrated that the present refuses to cooperate.

Three Things to Read

Do you like reading things? These are things that, frankly, could be read, were you so inclined!

• As AI slop becomes an aesthetic we all have to grapple with, I'm more and more fascinated by places where the lines blur. For instance, consider this story of a video from Will Smith's recent tour, which takes real photos, then uses AI to turn them into videos, thus creating the impression that none of the footage is real, even though it started in a real place. Tech writer Andy Baio tracked down one couple frequently accused of being AI-generated to talk to them about the experience of actually being real people. It's all a weird harbinger of where shit's headed.
• I adored this Lydia Polgreen piece on what the killing of Charlie Kirk revealed about the right's take on transness and gender more broadly.
• Did you read Lily's piece last Friday about Silksong? If not, do that. And once you're done, check out this lovely piece by Nicole Clark about using the punishingly hard game to help her rehabilitate her hands.

A Good Song

The free edition of Episodes, which (usually) covers classic TV and film, is published every other Wednesday, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes, which covers more recent stuff, is published every Friday. Paid subscribers also have access to the weekly Monday Rundown. Our editor-in-chief is Emily St. James, and our managing editor is Lily Osler. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).