iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Anyway I wrote a whole thing about nostalgia and this was an interesting little tidbit I learned during that. If you’d like to read the whole thing it’s on substack and the blog if you don’t like substack.

"dont come back, dont give in to nostalgia, forget us all" from cinema paradiso

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It’s made me a little insane. Selling merch to launder “the government has decided you can do without” into “look how wonderfully resilient you are!” Keep calm! Carry on! The library’s fucked. The hospital’s fucked. Mustn’t grumble! Chin up old bean. Think of the waaaaarrrrr

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Owen Hatherley talks about the poster in The Ministry of Nostalgia (2016) as an example of selling “austerity nostalgia”, a prosthetic nostalgia for the return of “the Blitz spirit” and the virtues of ‘making do’, and ‘muddling along’, to soften the ground for savage cuts to government services.

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“Keep Calm and Carry On” was left on the cutting room floor in favour of two posters with considerably more urgency and a lot more “Reginald! The Gerries are here!” energy than telling everyone to just suck it up and get on with things:

Freedom is in peril, defend it with all your might! and YOUR courage, YOUR cheefulness, YOUR resolution WILL BRING US VICTORY

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Learned recently that this famous poster we all associate with wartime Britain was never actually circulated during WW2 at all?? It was one of three posters designed by the Ministry of Information in 1939 amid fears of a German ground invasion—and it was the only one that didn’t make the cut.

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Oh this is so cool! I have a folder of videogame nostalgia papers too that I was hoping to use on something! I could send them to you?

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

“5000 words?! I’m not reading all that. i gotchu babe:

fought. We can't afford to forget the unkept promises made to us that were supposed to lead to an exciting future. Unmet needs sit in our longings; there is space for nostalgia in the utopian imaginary.
My main takeaway is that we should interrogate our nostalgia, not surrender it.
Ideally, we can hold our nose and bear to sit with it long enough to find whatever unfinished yesterdays might still be useful to the utopian project. Nostalgic longings don't even have to begin in our own lived memory, they can be planted—or even inherited-so there's a more defensive reason to pay attention to them, too. A praxis reason: if we don't pay attention to what people miss, somebody is going to tell them why they miss it.
And you're not going to like it.
-Leena

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I wanted to figure out why nostalgia gets such a bad wrap on the left, months later (💀) this is where I landed: “Unmet needs sit in our longings; there is space for nostalgia in the utopian imaginary.” Substack: hetconned.substack.com/p/nostalgia Blog: hetconned.com/2026/09/09/n...

hetconned.substack.com

Nostalgia

On why we don’t quite trust it.

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Angela Mitropoulos @mitropoulos.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Academic freedom & freedom of speech are different. The former stipulates conditions, like verification, per the field. The latter, that the state cannot dictate the content of speech. Differences aside, neither compel me, universities or media to platform flatearthers, phrenology or fascism.

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Lucy Hamilton @lucyham.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

This is the kind of event that provokes Murdoch’s commentariat & Atlas Network partner people to have several junktanks geared to break the 🇦🇺 law like the Federalist Society broke 🇺🇸. These fossil fuel-linked players want federalism ➡️ free states from federal mandate, for the donors. #Auspol

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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

As of July 1, Vietnam's updated Cybersecurity Law took effect, Khadija Alam reports for Tech Policy Press. What counts as a violation now extends beyond memes and "fake news" to boycott calls, "causing division," and more.

techpolicy.press

Vietnam Tightens Online Speech Controls as Cyber Law Takes Effect

As of July 1, what counts as violation goes beyond a meme spreading “fake news,” writes Khadija Alam.

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Posting cadence has slowed a bit as I'm working on a yoooooge piece on nostalgia that's taken up all my thinky-time, but I hope to get a new nutty-butty fantasy up soon. There are wider concepts I need to get across to do it justice and this is turning into a whole-ass phd faster than I thought 🫨

a hetconning mind map of related concepts, like archives, memory, irony, myth, tradition, utopia, grief, hauntology et al. If you need more alt text let me know, happy to put it in digital form so it's easier to read.

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I set up a wordpress site for the hetconned project for the people who don't want to use substack. Graphic design is obviously not my passion, so be nice about it or I'll cry. It has all the same posts as the substack, and I'll post across both going forward. ✌️ hetconned.blog

hetconned.blog

hetconned

Hetconning (n.) — the deliberate retroactive straight-washing of history. Hetconned, the project, maps how the contemporary far-right market different post-truth fantasies to recruit and radicalise…

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Leena 🌵 @leena.reuben.games · 13/07/2026

Can’t wait to see whose kids will be majoring in phrenology and physiognomy next year

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Leena 🌵 @leena.reuben.games · 10/06/2026

Worth pointing to this as some background to what’s happening in the UK, @annieknk.bsky.social’s reporting from back in January feels very relevant to what we’re seeing on the streets right now: podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/q...

January • E
London Has Fallen (E356)
QAA Podcast >
1h 50m
If you've spent any time on Travel YouTube lately, you've probably seen it: grim walk-and-talks through London that portray neighborhoods like post-apocalyptic no-go zones. This week, Annie Kelly digs into the booming "London Has Fallen" genre of online video travelogue. Unscrupulous influencers trawl London's most diverse neighborhoods hunting for "proof" of civilizational collapse, and reliably finding it in the form of clickbait, racism-by-implication, and algorithm-friendly panic.

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

“I should probably get across the literature on nostalgia before going further” nek minnit:

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

“Straw knighting” 👏👏👏 open.substack.com/pub/counterc...

Oh yeah? The online rando says. You think every author has to read? Well, maybe you haven't considered an author who gets caught in a freak basement explosion that lodges a rusty pipe from the boiler into their skull, which after being surgically removed leaves them unable to comprehend written words, and also they have a preexisting ear sensitivity that means they can't listen to audiobooks with headphones-and before you ask, they live in a crowded home of screaming war orphans so they can't play audiobooks on speakers-and even if they could still read, they literally do not even have a single free second of the day between work, cooking, cleaning, and posting on social media. Are you saying they can't still be a writer? Huh? You're saying a disabled war orphan caregiver with literally no free time because of late capitalism can't be a novelist? You elitist gatekeeping
@&%*#^$*!
(As a side note, I've never seen a great term to define this common rhetorical move. It is a bit like straw manning, except you're inventing an imagined exception instead of an imagined argument. And a bit like white knighting, though not on behalf of anyone real. I hereby propose "straw knighting" as the term.)

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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 23/05/2026

[sticks finger in toaster] "how did i get burned, i thought it loved me"

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

the biggest hurdle to me pursuing further postgrad studies is that i’d look like this standing in front of people going “don’t you want THIS as part of your faculty?!”

Daniel radcliff in slippers with guns being very normal

Amarnath Amarasingam @amaramarasingam.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

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It's publication day! Mine and @stephaniecarvin.bsky.social's book is now available anywhere books are sold: www.mqup.ca/Books/F/For-...

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Bill @bill-of-lefts.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

I still think these two paragraphs from Ganz are the most important contemporary political writing

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Will be interesting to compare the impact of deepfakes on Australian and American elections, given Australia has compulsory voting. Such a comparator could contain the data that really puts it in stark relief.

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Digital Warrior - Combat Disinfo @digitalwarrior.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

1/ We keep asking the wrong question about deepfakes. The real question isn't whether voters get fooled into changing their minds. It's whether they get confused enough to stay home. The math is brutal. And in 2026, it's already working at precinct level. #DV1 #ProudBlue #Voices4Victory #USDemocracy

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

I appreciate the military angle here, gives it a certain je ne sais quoi. I also appreciate seeing people use the term fantasy here, as I go about my little project mapping them even though nobody asked: hetconned.substack.com/p/traditiona...

hetconned.substack.com

“Traditional Family Values” and the Labour They Conceal

(Home)making America Great Again

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Was in the fortunate position of interviewing some researchers recently and one of my questions was “If we put all your research on a big corkboard, what would be the common threads between it all?” & i’ve been doing amateur Freudian analysis on my own output ever since it doesn’t look good folks!

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Imagine if we saved our little sprites?!

leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Absolutely, and Ben Tarnoff’s book (mentioned) goes into exactly how those machinations all work, helpfully separating it into “pipes” and “platforms”. I wonder all the time about how different things would be if the pipes themselves were nationalized.

leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Always happy to have a constructive conversation about my writing and thinking but I will be a bit of a noodge and insist that such critiques engage with what I actually said and not something you made up ✌️

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Milestone reached: a post of mine is doing the rounds with people who have fundamentally misunderstood what I was saying and are calling me a fucker about it

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

I never denied the existence of a better internet, I merely pointed out that the people who remember it the most fondly are more likely to be the people it was built for, with them in mind: “What many people remember as unlimited freedom reflects their position within that arrangement”

*affective economies! How is autocorrect getting worse we went to the moon again! don’t replace my word with the wrong word!

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Looking forward to some thinking this weekend about the effective economies and fantasy markets involved here. Like what fantasy is being sold there, what emotions is it soothing. Why are they so desperate

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How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult

There’s something I can’t quite put my finger on about the contemporary right’s desperation to bottle and wield charisma, they’re obsessed with comedy and *being seen as* funny. Time for that Elephant Graveyard video again, I think: youtu.be/ewvRS3NwIlQ?...

youtu.be

YouTube video by The Elephant Graveyard

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Leena 🌵 @leena.reuben.games · 17/04/2026

Finished Muskism this week on this recommendation and have much to digest about the fantasies men like Musk are choosing to believe in order to not send themselves insane. Fun to think of the brain damaging capacity of immense wealth and how that interacts with the things I’ve been writing about.

Book cover:
MUSKISM
A Guide for the Perplexed

Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff

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Don’t miss this. Absolutely essential stuff.

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leena @hetconned.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Well there goes my weekend!

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Feminist Researcher in Residence 2026 - Victorian Women's Trust

This is the first year the VWT is doing its Feminist Researcher in Residence (FRiR) program, you can keep updated on the program and future research topics by signing up here: www.vwt.org.au/feminist-res...

vwt.org.au

We are seeking a curious, impact-focused researcher to examine the gendered risks and opportunities of Artificial Intelligence.

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More information on the Dugdale Trust funding this work: www.acnc.gov.au/charity/char...

acnc.gov.au

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The full EOI brief and more about the program is here: www.vwt.org.au/wp-content/u...

vwt.org.au

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