In the _The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows_ (2012), John Koenig coined “anemoia” to name “nostalgia for a time or place one has never known.” Teaching at Skeuomorph Press (https://skeuomorph.ischool.illinois.edu/), I encounter anemoia frequently, as students enthuse over movable type, printing presses, typewriters, and vintage computers, all obsolete long before they were born. These responses have become only more forceful during the past few years, as students increasingly situate their work with our “dead media” as responses—whether humorous, serious, or sanctimonious—to the emergence of computational—and especially AI—systems in their educational and professional lives. Our most frequent patrons this academic year are members of the Illinois Luddite Society, who print broadsides declaring “RESIST SHITTY TECH!” using bold wood type and stark black ink. There is irony, of course, in using this particular technology to make such declarations: letterpress is only artisanal by contrast to digital technologies, but was in its heyday primarily a technology of industrialization. This paper attempts neither to lionize nor mock these complex and conflicting media impulses, but to unpack what Alan Liu calls “the _déjá vu_ haunting of new by old media.” How do nostalgia, anemoia, and one of their products, skeuomorphism, shape our own moment of media transition, from these student responses to corporate branding, such as OpenAI naming their coding platform Codex? The notion of a skeuomorph as flatly nostalgic or anemoiaic assumes a directionality of media change: either away from a glorious past we should hold onto, or backward from a future we should aspire toward. By contrast, this paper proposes a theory of skeuomorphism as embedded cultural critique, whether deliberate or inadvertent. The skeuomorph speaks to which cultural values, aesthetic preferences, or expressive possibilities users see as vital to retain through new media shift.

In my paper, I will introduce the contemporary periodical genre of the mindstyle magazine as a postdigital metatext of digital media. Coined as a counterpart to ‘lifestyle,’ mindstyle publications such as Flow, Breathe, Happinez, and Oh (since the 2010s) primarily target women readers, reconfiguring the conventions of the women’s magazine by rejecting its aspirational consumerism and body-centric narratives. Instead, they tap into the affect and emotions of the ‘happiness industry’ (Sara Ahmed 2010) and the ‘digital backlash’ (Kristoffer Albris et al. 2024), focusing on well-being, interiority, and creativity: Text, images, and design often hinge on the opposition of online and offline experiences, urging readers to engage with, e.g., book reading and nature as offering more ‘valuable’ and restorative experiences.

Casting themselves as an analogue escape, the magazines’ design too must be understood against the foil of digital media: uncoated stock and papery extras like postcards, posters, and ephemera foreground tactility. Ornaments, design, and images evoke a predigital, peacefully analogue world, with illustration styles leaning towards hand-drawn and child-like imperfection, suggesting the aura of the handmade and authentic object as well as an unspecified ‘past’ period.

Flow magazine’s annual spin-off publication, The Flow Book for Paper Lovers, takes this a step further, consisting solely of paper objects that can be detached and used for craft projects. Images and ornaments are cute, cosily domestic, and feminine, depicting scenes and motives conspicuously devoid of screens. Mindstyle magazines, I argue, reveal contemporary fantasies and fears about digital culture, and the binary between digital media and analogue unfolding a magazinal version of what A.R.E. Taylor (2006) has termed the ‘analogue idyll.’

In the design of their games, many mascot horror developers have mentioned the role nostalgia played in the creation of their game worlds. The trappings of childhood, in particular, appealed to the developers as a shared experience their prospective players could relate to, which the game can then render uncanny. With the majority of mascot horror developers born within the Millennial and Gen Z generations of the global north, however, this “shared experience” is a specific one—that of the highly consumerised, pre-Internet childhood of the late 20th century.

Previous research on mascot horror—and the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise, in particular—has positioned these games as a part of the digital gothic genre, due to their emphasis on media obsolescence and the instability of memory this leads to in the digital age. But little attention has been paid to the ways mascot horror performs what Svetlana Boym describes as reflective nostalgia; a form of nostalgia that questions the supposed truths of the past.

This presentation will interrogate the ways in which mascot horror calls into doubt the warmth of feeling for analogue childhood by revealing the cold reality of fast capitalism and consumerism, which have led to the contemporary, commodified self. This exploration will be performed via a close reading of the monsters, settings, and narratives of the Five Nights at Freddy’s and Poppy Playtime transmedia franchises. Ultimately, this will expose how mascot horror instrumentalises the cultural anxieties of late capitalist society to achieve its own commercial success.

A photograph is a ‘temporal hallucination’, Roland Barthes tells us in Camera Lucida (1980) of the product of photography, a medium which fixates in time a moment that can never be found again. Photographs are at the heart of Agrippa (a book of the dead), a 1992 hybrid – part-analogue, part-digital – artist’s book meant to self-destruct in the act of reading, thus fixating in time the moment where a reader unfolds Agrippa’s story. The joint work of cult science-fiction author William Gibson, visual artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr, Agrippa presents itself in the codex form, enclosing images by Ashbaugh made to fade over time, and as one leaf through the pages. They are visual responses to an early electronic poem by Gibson, based on his discovery of a family photo-album, and enclosed in a diskette programmed to be only read once. In Mechanisms (2008), Matthew Kirschenbaum defined Gibson’s poem, ‘Agrippa’, as ‘closest to a literal embodying of the peculiar nature of electronic objects [..]: their remarkable staying power and their fugitive abandon.’ This talk will address how Agrippa, the multimedia work of literature, is based on a mechanism of nostalgia, whose ‘remarkable staying power’ sprung from a photo-album, replicated into a codex-form book and found itself ultimately enclosed – according to technological obsolescence and library policies and procedures – in a 1990s relic: a diskette. ‘Hacked’ at Agrippa’s launch event, the diskette’s content was subsequently retyped and posted on the Internet, preserving access to Gibson’s poem – via digital surrogates – but also separating the text from Ashbaugh’s images, to date. To return to Barthes, if the continued online presence of the poem might convey the ‘temporal hallucination’ of an early electronic publication, I argue that the dual nature of the book – part-analogue, part-digital – has remained nostalgic to be found since 1992.

It is a known tension of queer digital ecosystems that visibility produces a difficult binary. Each advance in seamless communication and its multimodal tools allows queer individuals to express themselves in new, imaginative ways. In doing so, new sexualities and gendered ways of being emerge that expand and destabilize once rigidly held binaries. Yet each of these advances comes with an inevitable backlash in which content moderation conflates queerness with adult content, erasing it from platforms by decoupling disclosure from its contextual and communal formations. The result of this cyclical tension of in/visibility is a perception that queerness did not exist in the immediate past or in any formation of digital space. While queer internet scholars like Avery Dame-Griff and Kat Brewster have worked tirelessly to correct such perceptions, the sentiment produces a sociohistorical nostalgia for artifacts of analog circulation. Ironically, much of the access to these artifacts comes through digital repositories of queer history such as the Digital Transgender Archive and the GLBT Historical Society. However, as contemporary historical evidence, these records can be informationally biased. Tools like OCR can inadvertently obfuscate the technologies of circulation that helped put queerness online. Put differently, we know how queerness moved from newsletters to early bulletin board systems, but we know much less about how queer folks used information and communication technologies to enact that onboarding. It is through examining these interactions that this presentation will explore the relationships between informational nostalgia and obsolete media and, in doing so, contend that queerness has a generative relationship with obsolescence. Borrowing from queer theoretical lenses such as Halberstam’s notion of queer failure and Munoz’s theories of queer archival ephemera, this presentation re-examines a handful of proto-Internet queer media artifacts, ranging from transgender newsletters produced during the rise of the Internet to subscription-based VHS tapes released at the decline of magnetic media. In highlighting these artifacts, the presentation asks what they reveal about the informational desires of their contemporary users and how those desires might serve as a lifeline of nostalgia for queer people today, hoping to build queer information networks anew.

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