The Ghost in the Machine: Weaponized Nostalgia and Bubble Bobble

Like many, I have been deeply worried by the seemingly unstoppable return of fascism across the globe. It can become somewhat overwhelming and so my primary coping mechanism has been to treat it like a specimen under a microscope, specifically by studying its techniques of persuasion.

Among the most insidious techniques used is what philosopher Jason Stanley terms the "mythic past," or what I like to call weaponized nostalgia. We’ve all seen the AI-generated "sloppaganda"  media flooding our feeds - images of a sun-drenched, crime-free London that supposedly existed before the "wrong" type of people (read: "foreign folks") arrived. The decline porn’s power lies in exploiting the sheltered innocence of childhood; of course you felt safer as a ten-year-old as your world was the size of a postage stamp and you weren't the one paying the bills! You weren't living in a safer era; you were just living in a smaller one. However, the sense of hauntology, of what could have been, seeps through and is a siren song for the disaffected and disenfranchised looking for someone to blame for why it all went so "wrong".

Many far-right actors and grifters promise a return to that sanctuary, provided you trust them and place them into positions of power and influence. Once they’ve successfully convinced you to loathe the present, the suggestion that creating a wave machine in Dover to push back boats and opening "processing centres" in Rwanda might start to sound disturbingly like common sense. We become more susceptible to this as we age, largely because it’s a convenient distraction from the realization that our own lives maybe haven’t quite unfolded in all the cinematic glory we envisioned in our youth.

So, why am I so unconcerned about falling for my own nostalgic indulgences? Simple: I own a collection of vintage computers and consoles and they serve as my personal fact-checkers.

Take Bubble Bobble, for example. In my memory, the version for the Amstrad CPC 464 was a pinnacle of digital achievement - a masterpiece of monochromatic fluid motion (I only had the green monitor on which to play the game). However, when I played the pixel-perfect port on the Numskull Quarter Arcade cabinet I bought as my Covid comfort purchase the reality bit.

This machine was my lockdown purchase and I do not regret anything, except maybe the lack of a haircut!

Sure, the Amstrad version was a valiant effort, but compared to the original 1986 arcade Bubble Bobble game, it was obviously a lesser work. In my head, nostalgia had upscaled my memories to 4K, but the aging Amstrad hardware was only pushing 8 bits and creaking under the effort. It seems a long way from the English Channel to the 8-bit caves of a 1980s platformer, but the mechanics of the delusion are identical; nostalgia didn't just upscale the image; it filled in colors that were never actually there. So, by keeping these relics around, I’m constantly reminded that the "good old days" were often just a lower-resolution version of the present.