You can take your pick of the decade, but mostly the reels show a cinematically vivid Australia of the \u201c1990s\u201d. One of the most popular is captioned \u201cPOV: The Australia we all remember\u201d. In one scene we\u2019re watching kids playing cricket in the suburbs using a\u00a0wheelie bin as wickets. On a hot summer morning, Dad\u2019s sweating in a singlet as he pushes the mower around the front lawn. It\u2019s probably Friday dinner when the family\u2019s sitting around the kitchen table and happily scavenging a communal splat of fish and chips. Somewhere else in the grid, the boys are pulling monos, helmetless, on their BMXs. The girls are reading the \u201cDolly Doctor\u201d sealed section. In most of the reels, one of the kids breaks the fourth wall to voice their incredulity at the bad turn life has taken by 2026. The 10-year-old clutching a footy is astonished: \u201cA house with a backyard costs $2\u00a0million!?\u201d<\/p>\n
The kids are you, of course. Or a generalised version of you if you happen to be a 30- to 60-something who\u2019s long grown into voting adulthood. They\u2019re coaxing you towards a memory of your carefree childhood somewhere between the 1970s and the noughties. It was carefree, right? No matter our differences, we all got along. We could all afford to live.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s notable, if not necessarily remarkable, about these reels, which began to appear on the social media accounts of their Australian creator, Sam Thompson, towards the end of 2025, is that they\u2019ve been synthesised using generative AI. While they lean hard on an aesthetic of photographic verisimilitude \u2013 with colour palettes, fashion and consumer signifiers typical of their selected decade \u2013 they\u2019re much like any other video in the same genre. Behind the \u201csee how real it looks\u201d gloss and dazzle, they\u2019re riddled with obvious and laughable glitches. There\u2019s a Hills Hoist in the front yard, gobbledegook symbols instead of the Sherrin name on the football. And that\u2019s not what a Sunnyboy iceblock looked like.<\/p>\n
Still, despite their unreality \u2013 or probably because of it \u2013 the reels have gained traction among an audience for whom the warmth of a nostalgic memory teeters and sometimes tips over into what Rodney Tiffen, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Sydney, has called the \u201crestorationist\u201d impulse, a frustrated and wilful mood of political time travel.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s barely any coincidence that in the lead-up to his diving-board leap into the swill of populist grievance, former Nine Network Today host Karl Stefanovic brought Thompson in to create a bespoke, on-brand reel, depicting his own version of Australia in the 1970s and \u201980s. \u201cI love this country,\u201d Stefanovic writes in the accompanying text. \u201cThat\u2019s why I won\u2019t stop talking about what\u2019s destroying it. We have to remember what it was like.\u201d The post has had more than 105,000 likes.<\/p>\n
While it\u2019s fairly easy to challenge the factual accuracy of these dreamy, always-summer depictions of \u201clost\u201d Australian life and to wrangle with the ideological leanings associated within them, it\u2019s harder to undo the sentiment that drives their popularity.<\/p>\n
Even though nostalgia tends to draw bad press, it\u2019s understood from a psychological perspective to be a functional, stabilising emotion. Nostalgia researchers Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides explain it as part of a homeostatic feedback loop: \u201cnegative states trigger nostalgia, which, in turn, restores balance by counteracting these negative states\u201d.<\/p>\n
The object of nostalgic feelings, though, is not limited to personal memory. It also includes the \u201cpractical past\u201d, a concept the historian Hayden White described as \u201call those memories, illusions, bits of vagrant information, attitudes and values which the individual or the group summons up as best they can to justify, dignify, excuse, alibi or make a case for actions to be taken in the prosecution of a life project\u201d.<\/p>\n
While it\u2019s fairly easy to challenge the factual accuracy of these dreamy, always-summer depictions of \u201clost\u201d Australian life and to wrangle with the ideological leanings associated within them, it\u2019s harder to undo the sentiment that drives their popularity.<\/p>\n
The practical past is not just what we know, or think we know, about the interlocked cogs of history, memory and experience; it\u2019s also how we instrumentalise the feelings we have about that past, including nostalgia, as a basis for individual and collective \u2013 that is, political \u2013 planning into the future.<\/p>\n
Moreover, the idiosyncratic version of the practical past each of us carries with us is not a static object. It evolves, not least because of the influence of the vast array of cultural artefacts we encounter that purport to tell us something about the past.<\/p>\n
Among those artefacts are what memory researcher Alison Landsberg describes as \u201cprosthetic memory\u201d, the complex of individual and communal memories of events that we have not personally lived through but have assimilated through cultural artefacts. For Landsberg, the dividends of prosthetic memories are an increase in compassion and empathy for others, whether individuals or groups, to whom we have no other \u201cnatural\u201d attachment.<\/p>\n
Outside the media-scape of the populist-restorationist outrage merchants, it\u2019s possible to turn up some relatively thoughtful, or at least not-so-cynically intentioned, AI-memory artefacts that prosthetically articulate into the practical past. The Barcelona-based Synthetic Memories project, for example, uses generative AI tools to render deliberately unrefined visual representations of individual participants\u2019 descriptions of personal memories. The project is framed by its serious consideration of the ethical implications of how these renderings are both made and used, including their adoption in therapeutic settings for dementia patients. Sydney\u2019s Jewish Museum has adopted the kind of AI-assisted technology already in use in similar educational museum settings in other parts of the world to enable visitors to engage in an authentic-appearing \u201cdialogue\u201d with a repository of video-recorded and AI-integrated responses given by members of the diminishing cohort of Holocaust survivors about their experiences. This use of the technology overlaps with the more autonomous and less factually rigorous \u201cdeathbots\u201d, synthetic representations of deceased people produced largely for the bereaved by the memorial industry.<\/p>\n
Yet, for all their well-intentioned gestures towards ethics, factual accuracy and emotional integrity, these examples of how AI might be shaping relationships with the past are largely localised rain showers in a vast algorithmically driven AI climate. In that atmosphere, savvy and cynical human actors are relying on these profoundly non-human tools to confect utterly ahistorical illusions, commodifying and politicising memory artefacts to manipulate attitudes and feelings towards the past.<\/p>\n
The Thompson\u2013Stefanovic reels, as they reach deep into the prosthetic memory space, don\u2019t aim to encourage empathy for anyone except a generalised \u2013 as only AI knows how to generalise \u2013 version of \u201cyou\u201d as a child-turned-hard-done-by-adult. They are emotional deepfakes, seeking to attach you to a feeling about a past that, like the past depicted in any historical fiction, no one has ever actually lived through and to which no one can ever return. They are engaged in a politics that is keenly aware of political scientist Ivan Krastev\u2019s bleak diagnosis that in democratic discourse the category of the future, so vital to White\u2019s \u201cprosecution of a life project\u201d, has been consumed by eschatological thinking. One side has it that the future has been lost to climate disaster, while the other believes it has been ruined by \u201cmass immigration\u201d. \u201cThe right,\u201d Krastev writes with Leonard Benardo, \u201cis nostalgic for the past. The left is nostalgic for the vanished future.\u201d<\/p>\n
In both cases, the homeostatic psychological template of nostalgia, when applied to the political psyche, does not restore balance. Rather, it incites frustration and rancour.<\/p>\n
Of course, as much as the incursions of AI into the politics of nostalgia are uncharted territory, the manipulation of this emotion for political ends is as old as the hills. Perhaps its inflection in the present moment is a useful reminder that the past, just as much as the future, only ever really exists in the present. We\u2019d do well to end our emotional enthralment to illusions and realise that none of us ever really was that kid in the reel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You can take your pick of the decade, but mostly the reels show a cinematically vivid Australia of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":822350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-822349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/822350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}