no new ideas
no new ideas
is it even possible for the choco taco to die?
Between us, I wonder whether Klondike sacrificed the Choco Taco at the altar of virality. The handheld ice cream treat has historically flown under the radar, less the snack of a generation than a one a.m. 7-Eleven indulgence. This isn’t to say that the Chaco Taco wasn’t special – of its many online eulogies, my favorite might be Gustavo Arellano’s in the L.A. Times – or to minimize the disorientation of losing something you’d assumed would be around forever. But it’s hard not to believe that the Choco Taco is fodder for the nostalgia machine, poised for a “popular demand” comeback after a wave of social media marketing, courtesy of us.
Millennials have been called “the most nostalgic generation” since at least 2015, and reboots of Barbie, Polly Pocket, and the soft grunge industrial complex only stoke our apparently insatiable desire for regression. An essay published last month in Refinery29, titled “I’m 23 & Nostalgic For The Fictional Millennial Experience,” yearns for the pub crawls, hookup culture, and affordable apartments of yore, at least according to shows like Everything I Know About Love and its blueprint, Girls. The essayist may be misinformed about Brooklyn rent in 2012, but she hits on something interesting when she notes that aughts protagonists display a “lack of self-consciousness” – an existential ease nurtured, she posits, by a world without pervasive social media. She writes, “there’s a pressure now to be a remarkable person in a way that doesn’t seem as apparent in these millennial series.”
I disagree that the aughts were free from insecurity – we were raised by helicopter parents, pro-ana tumblr, and the people who put Britney away – and I’m not sure that the pressure to be a remarkable person is generational. A Slate article covering this week’s Kardashian/Instagram beef categorized the Kardashians and Jenners, whose birthdates fall between 1979 and1997, simply as “Generation Instagram.” John Berger introduced the male gaze in 1972. That being said, the pressure to be exceptional on a viral scale is a fresh horror. Part of this is because we live in a panopticon mall. Part of this is because traditional markers of success – a career, a house, kids – feel comically unattainable to the vast majority of millennials and gen Z. Only the exceptional get to experience a boomer’s idea of normal. The mid-aughts millennial didn’t have any better a shot at “normal” success, but they (we?) possessed a blissful ignorance of what the future would hold. Why wouldn’t we want to crawl back into Polly Pocket’s clamshell?
I also wonder, though, if “nostalgia” has become a convenient umbrella term for a more nebulous phenomenon. We were raised alongside the internet, if not by it. Our online lives are inextricably entwined with our identities, and now we’re the first generation to watch parts of the internet die. Blingee, Internet Explorer, Yahoo Answers – we bury our dead in glass coffins and pile on a quintillion bytes of data. You’ll never find that meme again, but your tweets from 2009 may come back to haunt you. We have unprecedented access to the past, and no grasp on the future. The internet is and isn’t forever. Or it is, but it isn’t. How is that not supposed to fuck with our heads?
There was another childhood snack in the news this week – a class action lawsuit claims Skittles are “unfit for human consumption.” Apparently Mars reneged on a 2016 vow to phase out titanium dioxide, a colorant and “caking agent” that’s also found in sunscreen and is banned in the E.U. My first thought is that everything makes more sense when you consider that everyone you know has titanium dioxide poisoning. My second thought is that old Skittles fact – the fact that beneath their colored coating, all the Skittles are the same flavor. Our brains take the sensory cues available to us – color, scent – and fill in the rest. It’s a useful trick for consuming the banal.
Studies suggest that humans most often experience nostalgia during times of transition. Suspended in a permanent state of change, we’re psychologically predisposed to reverie, and I don’t think that’s always a bad thing. The issue with virality and nostalgia, though, is that inevitably, everything turns into everything else. Algorithms aren’t meant to suss out greatness. They’re designed to amplify mediocrity, to reinforce ideas rather than challenge them. We get a slush of content, a high price tag on our own memories, the same indie sleaze aficionados who fucked teenagers in L.A. in 2005 fucking teenagers in New York in 2022. Taste the rainbow.