Wrapped and the End of the Future

Nostalgia, data and the retrospective century

“The future isn’t what it used to be”—it’s the kind of epigram that sounds too pleased with itself, part witticism, part rueful shrug. But it’s also true, isn’t it? There’s a definite air of retrospection in the culture right now, a sense that the future is hard to glimpse. We’re fumbling around in the dark towards—what exactly? Politics feels stalled and yet there’s a roiling in the background. Our media diets are recursive spirals. Time itself seems to be collapsing into a bizarre simultaneity where everything exists at once, but anything worth hoping for is out of reach.

Each December, we’re overrun by cutesy content packages from brands we love, services we’ve made reluctant use of, and businesses we’d rather not think about at all. Spotify Wrapped, the genre’s prototype, launched ten years ago and, since then, it’s become an almost totalising cultural phenomenon, spawning countless imitators. Many of us—myself included—experience a dopamine spike, a nostalgic hit, on its arrival. We flood one another’s social media feeds with the results. The various digests run the gamut: from fun and shareable, making us feel like Spotify cares about us—they’ve clearly been watching, after all—to the salutary (Strava), and the truly mortifying (Monzo, Amazon, Uber Eats).

Indeed, as Spotify’s marketing lead mused last year, Wrapped represents a “cultural moment” which reliably induces “FOMO”; a festive gimmick that’s really a “gift to users” and which, as luck would have it, also functions as marketing, helping to augment brand equity, loyalty and experience. That kind of thing. By reflecting our own behaviour back to us—streamlining a year’s worth of joy and despondency, grief and awe, the ragged edges winnowed down—they can whisper in our ears: “This is you.”

Alternatively: the relentless mining and extraction of our data, the unmistakable evidence of corporate surveillance, all of this intrusion, is wrapped in euphemism and misdirection before being telegraphed into our ready palms as we shriek with delight and text our friends about it. In The New Yorker, Brady Brickner-Wood argues that Wrapped is “a cheap magic trick that momentarily distracts you from the gun being held to the back of your head,” promising to “help shape and clarify” our personal tastes.

Spotify, like its correlates, behaves like a monopoly crossed with a panopticon. Personalisation, primary colours and syrupy blandishments soften the blow, and help to recruit subscribers in the battle for market share and vertiginous profit margins—but what is all of this doing to us?

As I was writing this, an ad appeared on my Instagram feed from “STATSAPP WRAPPED”, offering me a tantalising preview of what I listened to in 2025—a garish graphic mimicking Spotify’s own branding, complete with a fraudulent top 5 (‘Dancing Shadows’ by the improbably named Jasper Moonbeam). We live in a hell where even a passing interest or stray thought is never forgotten; vague bouts of curiosity, basic online research—everything must be monetised. Don’t show any interest online; there will be consequences.

Wrapped is our obsession with the past ritualised and codified. Not only a summary of our tastes, but a measure of the gulf between commercial incentives and the very idea of the future. Novelty, risk, disruption—all of these have been steadily devalued. It’s a vibey liturgy confirming the triumph of aesthetics over progress, branding over self-expression. It is, quite obviously, very, very conservative—risk-averse, palliative.

This logic is inescapable because contemporary marketing has fundamentally changed. Advertising used to be aspirational—showing you a future self, a lifestyle to reach for. Twentieth-century, Mad Men-era ad execs conjured images of what tomorrow might look like, even in its cynicism. A possible future was acknowledged, at least, even if it was unattainable.

In the last decade or so, it’s retreated into the past, a terrain that’s rich with the raw materials of modern market systems: demographics, consumption habits and taste profiles. Personalisation depends on data, and data, by definition, belongs to the past. Market research and audience segmentation have always existed, but now the tracking is granular and automatic. Every targeted ad, every recommendation, is built from your browsing history, your purchasing patterns, your behaviour from a week ago or a year ago. (When I’m exposed to an ad that’s irrelevant it feels like a glitch). There’s no real future in it—just slight variations on what you’ve already consumed, calibrated to satisfy a version of yourself that may no longer exist.

Beyond the annual celebration of brand–consumer synergy—the regret and the pleasure of it—where we’re invited to see ourselves in what we consume and how often, how we measure up to our friends, whether we’ve listened enough to earn a bloodless thank-you message from our favourite artist, there’s the matter of streaming more broadly.

Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours sits nestled alongside tracks by AI bands whose sound evokes the 1970s but were created last week. Y2K pop bombast appears on the same playlists as songs released yesterday, their origins unclear. We have access to more art, music, fashion, film, and literature than ever before but it feels like scarcity. Everything appears in the same perpetual present, gutted of sequence or consequence. A Möbius strip that’s harder and harder to escape from, that we can’t get off and can’t remember boarding. As Mark Fisher writes in Ghosts of My Life, “anachronism has led to stasis: time has stopped.” Or even a touch gloomier: “not only has the future not arrived, it no longer seems possible.”

If the internet has an ideology, it’s not democratic—it’s anarchic, postmodern. Its organising aesthetic is pastiche: a reticulated patchwork of styles, eras, and references shorn of chronology or hierarchy. The early period of Web 2.0 was characterised by crude user-generated content, rudimentary social networks, chatrooms and forums, nerds on Reddit and mood boards on Tumblr—the internet was scruffy and DIY. Consider the teenage mixtape: laboured over, the track order precise, stickers applied, song titles written out by hand. (A friend of mine once burned me a CD containing only “Queen Bitch” by David Bowie twelve times in a row.)

Wrapped trades on a similar aesthetic—the personalised playlist, the year-end digest, the sense that someone’s curated something just for you. But it’s been focus-grouped, fine-tuned and optimised. It’s a commercial product rather than self-expression. Both can provide that same hit of intimacy or recognition though. Our minds are porous and easily diverted, and so, after a while, we stop distinguishing between the two. What’s handmade and what’s merely generated blur together—the same endorphins get activated either way.

The whole aesthetic has been privatised. Streaming platforms operate on the same magpie logic but now it’s in service of something darker and meaner and unseen.

This suspension of time isn’t just a quirk of how we consume music. It’s become the structure of online life itself. In a recent essay for Harper’s, Daniel Kolitz describes a subculture of young men attempting to reach what they call the “goonstate”—a kind of ego dissolution reached through endless consumption of pornography, spliced together, with no end or beginning. What matters isn’t the pornography specifically, but what Kolitz observes about their relationship to time: these are people who’ve blacked out their windows to avoid knowing what time of day it is, who exist in a perennial present where the only thing that matters is flow, continuation, the seamless fusing of one thing to the next. “What are these gooners actually doing?” Kolitz asks. “Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms… Does any of this sound familiar?”

The gooners are monomaniacal fantasists but the way they live is more escalation than aberration. As much as we’d like to distance ourselves from the squalor, the wall-to-wall omnistreams they create are just the logical endpoint of the platform media consumption we’re all familiar with. What matters is opting out of the passage of time—blacking out the windows, losing track of hours or days. Consistency rather than novelty is the goal, and a kind of fugue state becomes the prize. What Kolitz does so well is describe a subculture that’s pathological and sordid, easy to gawp at and pity or condemn, before closing the aperture and narrowing the contrast, so that, soon enough, we see ourselves on the same continuum.

A film or novel is an escape from time too, sure, but these tend to be discrete and segmented. When you finish a book or even a television series, there’s time to reflect on it. But the feed never ends. Nor is this a problem with specific, individuated examples of media—a video essay on YouTube, a Spotify playlist for the gym, a dumb skit on Instagram, none of these alone is responsible for truncating our lives, they’re just bits of accessible, cheap, even functional entertainment. But the combination of the internet’s infinite sprawl, the privileging of pastiche as the aesthetic rubric of the new millennium and the beady focus of marketing departments on our data trails lands us in a cultural environment that’s profoundly sceptical about the future.

Fisher writes that “cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.” Brands reach into our pasts to exploit an extremely valuable commodity: nostalgia, recognition, our sense of ourselves, resulting in a kind of confected intimacy between brand and consumer. We’re encouraged to think about them constantly, not just when weighing up what kind of toaster to buy.

But this collapse of cultural time isn’t merely an aesthetic problem—it has material consequences for how we think about the future itself. Political imagination and cultural imagination aren’t separate capacities. They draw on the same faculty: the ability to picture something genuinely different from what exists now.

When everything we consume is a remix or a meta-commentary, when playlists serve up decades in shuffle mode, something shifts and we lose our bearing, our sense of place. In his essay “The Reader in Exile,” Jonathan Franzen writes about “the muscle tone of our imaginations in a fully digital age” and that muscle is slackening. The future has stopped being something we can picture clearly. We’ve spent so long swimming in recombination that invention starts to feel implausible, if not impossible. Our cultural archive is endlessly collapsed and reassembled and we mistake momentum and velocity for direction and progress—kicking our legs frantically and wondering why we’re no closer to the shore. What comes next? Does that question even make sense?

Several things are true at once: monoculture is dead, the end of history was a fantasy, and we are, by turns, too wired and too mollified to work out what comes next—culturally, yes, but politically too. Huge vistas of opportunity and renewal should be visible to us, if only we looked up from time to time. But all this potential is immediately neutralised and then absorbed. Even the most seductive solutions to 21st-century malaise—universal basic income, the alleviation of illness and drudgery, emancipation at our fingertips—don’t function as signposts; they’re folded back into the content stream, becoming grist for discourse, momentary distraction, all caught in the dragnet of online media.

Fisher argues that the 21st century is characterised by “anachronism and inertia” and goes on to write that “this stasis has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of ‘newness’, of perpetual movement. The ‘jumbling up of time’, the montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is now so prevalent that it’s no longer even noticed.”

Somewhere beneath the giddy sugar rush and the festive graphics, there’s the faint suspicion that something has gone terribly wrong. Spotify Wrapped is the cheerful facade for something much more retrograde. Linear time has been consigned to irrelevancy. To engage us, corporations look to our pasts and sell them back to us—a predictable, reliable return on investment. The past keeps returning, lacquered and shining, unarguable and implacable because it’s clearly us—we made it after all.

The logical endpoint of this shift is the handover of our cultural archive to AI. It won’t be long before we’re furnished with playlists of songs we’ve never heard before but which, according to some mad equation, some taste profile that isn’t even our own, reliably produce those same warm pangs of nostalgia. Simon Reynolds, in a recent interview with Spike Art Magazine, distinguishes between nostalgia and the retro aesthetic: nostalgia is a feeling towards a particular period, often one’s youth, while retro is a style—it’s the affect without the sense of loss, the gloss without the complications and contradictions of real nostalgia. As he put it, Generative AI is “the ultimate extension of retro logic”—a piecemeal recombination of sounds and visuals without any perspective or twist. “When humans do retro, usually there’s some new emotional content within it,” and without that point of view, that dissonance between vintage references and a modern take on the style, it becomes “empty pastiche.” Just as advertising and much of consumer culture now focuses on the trails and traces that identify us online, AI is an engine of patchwork and mock variegation, an identifier of patterns and rhythms and cues that already exist.

That marketing harnesses and hijacks powerful emotions like nostalgia to sell us products and lifestyles is a point barely worth making anymore. But the retro-fetish sensibility we can see all around us goes deeper than that—it’s broken containment; it’s not a fad or a style but a perspective, a cultural vernacular, that we’re struggling to shrug off.

And if we can’t imagine cultural futures, we won’t be able to imagine political ones either. The stakes aren’t just aesthetic—they’re about whether we can conceive of, let alone build, worlds genuinely different from this one. The production line is degrading the product; the delivery mechanisms dilute and trivialise what’s left. Fisher writes about “a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion” and a “feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush.” The past is spent, the future never arrived, and the present is outflanked.