Marketers, there’s a right way and a wrong way to use nostalgia

MySpace is plotting a comeback. Searches for iPods are rising. Young people are buying point-and-shoot digital cameras, and flip phones are appearing again in people’s hands. It would be easy to dismiss all of this as another turn of the nostalgia cycle but that, in many ways, misses the point. People don’t necessarily want to return to 2006. They just don’t want to be in 2026. Nostalgia was coined in 1688 by a Swiss physician, Johannes Hofer, to describe the severe homesickness he saw in soldiers posted abroad. The word is Greek for “the pain of wanting to return home.” What people long for has shifted from a place to a time, but the underlying impulse is similar: We miss something we feel we’ve lost. An iPod held music you chose and owned, without tracking your listening habits or deciding what you should hear next. MySpace pages were genuinely personal; people learned basic HTML just to make theirs look different, often the first code they ever wrote. Your friends were effectively your recommendation algorithm, no endless feeds, no engagement to hack. It was sloppy but free of slop. There was a sense of autonomy and ownership that is harder to find in today’s optimized, surveil…