“Nostalgia maxxing:” why can’t we forget the past

I saw this going viral, “The Lost Civic Life of Movie Rental Stores,” about the decline of “third spaces,” which describes informal places where strangers congregate. This can include post offices, coffeehouses, grocery stores, or, as it pertains to this article, movie rental stores. Movie rental stores thrived during the eighties and nineties, until becoming abruptly obsolete by the mid-2000s. VHS players first became available in Japan in the late ’70s, and became much more commonplace for Americans by the early to mid-1980s. This created a large market for movie rentals. Although the World Wide Web gained popularity in the late ’90s, it wouldn’t be another decade until cheap bandwidth and streaming technology made it possible to bypass rentals altogether. The rise of Netflix also played a major role, first with mail-order discs in the early 2000s, until pivoting to a streaming-based subscription model in 2013. Admittedly, there was the treasure-hunt aspect of finding a movie you’d…