wrapped

by Michaela Brady

1. Context

“we resist the changing / Of the seasons with history and memory, / Make a Bible of what was said”. – Bro. Yao, “My Father Speaks of His Father”

At the end of 2024, you probably received endless push notifications to watch Spotify Wrapped, Duolingo’s “Year in Review”, “Your Year with YouGov”, BeReal’s “ReCap” and, most harrowing of all, “Tesco Clubcard Unpacked”. If you know what each of these apps or companies do, you can guess what each one featured.

Most notably, in 2024, Spotify decided to bring AI, our current enforced obsession, center-stage. The app has used AI for several years both in the Wrapped summaries and in our Discover Weekly playlists, but it wasn’t so clearly advertised as an “AI service” until this year. Suffice it to say, users did not appreciate any of the perks on offer.

Beneath the cringe, an existential horror simmered: this is what they are doing with our data. This is what we look like. This is who the platforms think we are. None of these assumptions are accurate, and yet they’re painted with funky graphics and well-timed musical cues to douse us in different waves of nostalgia as the past year flashes before our eyes. All the memories made with this platform, a companion, thrust upon us with the vigor of a Girl Scout trying to sell her last box of Thin Mints.

Consider whether you’ve noticed this. At the end of the year, what you’re left with, contrary to what these campaigns promise, is not an accurate reflection of yourself. Because listening to music, learning, the time you spend doing anything you care about, are so closely tied to memory that you expect these summaries to reflect that. They operate under the presumption that they are depicting you, a datafied you, as both a series of achievements and as a composite profile of You in Year X. But they don’t. And it’s not foolish to feel disappointed by that.

Is this the logical conclusion of nostalgia baiting, or something far more sinister?

2. Memory

Nostalgia eases you into the past; it’s slow, comforting, fond. A core part of our souls, as we perceive them, is our memories. We have photo albums, scrapbooks, diaries, boxes overflowing with cards and letters from decades ago, voicemails we refuse to delete, concert tickets and receipts so worn that the text is almost gone—but we know what they say, we know why they’re there, and why they aren’t going anywhere. And we have playlists, mixtapes and CDs that still revolve around their mechanical sun, because music is one of the most neurologically and psychologically resonant things we have created.

As Daniel J. Levitin writes in This is Your Brian on Music, the relationship between music and memory “involves a precision choreography of neurochemical release and uptake between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems.” In other words, “when we love a piece of music, it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times in our lives. Your brain on music is all about…connections.”

An excellent time to reflect on these connections, and dip into nostalgia, is the end of the year. While many resent the tacit obligation to make New Year’s resolutions, we all do make them to an extent. Maybe not on New Year’s Day, but as the clouds clear and the daffodils promise something like springtime, we might set some short- or long-term goals based on how the past year went. We remember who we were, how we changed or what happened to us, and decide where to go from there.

I want to stress that, in the examples I’ve mentioned so far, we decide what to preserve, what to remember, and how we want to be remembered. We decide when to indulge in nostalgia, when to refresh our memories and reminisce. We decide when and with whom we share these memories. We have a brilliant amount of agency. And if we don’t remember that, we just might lose it.

As a means of control, nostalgia is also highly effective. Nostalgia bait is both a marketing tool and an aesthetic. To immerse you in a story, or entice you to keep watching, a piece of visual media will employ artefacts from your generation’s childhood—a period remembered warmly, summoned and hearkened back to, defined by hope and blissful ignorance. By proxy, this incites positive feelings towards the piece of media as an immersive experience, a means of escape and comfort. There’s no shame in taking nostalgia bait, watching Boomerang or The 90s Were All That. For those 30 minutes, you are transported to the moment you first laughed at a joke or were moved by a character’s arc. You reflect on what has happened since, and enter a strange sort of reverie. You might use it as a storytelling device, a way to pass on humor and memory to your own children, or you might just enjoy the small triumph that these cultural artefacts have survived. Someone has cared enough to preserve them, to re-sell them.

Of course, that’s not the full story. While rewatch podcasts, critics, and a seemingly endless chain of re-runs and franchises saturate our media landscape, this experience is not confined to our specific era of late capitalism. Faced with a surplus of media, objects and rhetoric that are both products of the past, yet delivered to you through more sophisticated technological means, your agency is whittled away. You walk through life in two minds: yourself in the present, and yourself in the past, forever in a loop, grasping for a sense of where you stand in time.

There is hope, albeit bittersweet; we’ve transcended the need for nostalgia as a buyable feeling because fewer and fewer people are taking the bait; and, as companies increase their reliance on AI, apparently that’s only going to continue. In response, self-proclaimed “marketing ninjas” and “PR junkies” are grasping for answers: how do we sell this product to the public when they see through our game?

3. Quantify

Nostalgia has been employed to maintain the public’s trust in institutions, to create a sense of a heyday that can be reclaimed, and to distract. Change, and the future that exists beyond it, is daunting. But the past, however distorted it’s become, is eternal. Technology sits at either extreme; it is a field of rapid innovation and deployment, of constant demand and showboating, yet it is also a tool to plunge us into the past and overwhelm us every time we manage to surface.

For example, the propaganda poster and its nostalgia-baiting graphic design elements elicit certain emotions, and more importantly influence decisions. Alongside radio, they were important technological advances during the World Wars and have continued to influence public opinion about various issues. Yet, all of these elements, however artistic they may appear, are supported by data.

There is a division between what a consumer sees—visual, abstract, emotive—and what a business sees—concrete, quantitative, cumulative. And whether it was those LinkedInfluencers that littered their trend analysis posts with emojis, or the sales team desperate for a new gimmick that decided to bring the quantitative to the consumer is not important. Any piece of nostalgia-baiting media is an appeal to a certain group or demographic, defined by population data. Each supposedly creative decision is meant to target the viewer, to conjure up a certain feeling, and influence an action.

That’s ultimately what Year in Review summaries are. In the digital age, they are but one of many examples of a datafied summary of us, our memories, our perceived desires, predicted or re-sold to us by supposedly “sophisticated” technology, wrapped up in time for Christmas.

‘Datafication’ is not my term. In his book, We are Data, John Cheney-Lippold defines it as “the transformation of part, if not most, of our lives into computable data”. Such transformation is not inherently evil; it’s an act of translation. However, Cheney-Lippold is quick to highlight the drawbacks:

“measurable types forbid strict allegiances to what we call identity, the complex formation of histories, power relationships, and subjective experiences that make us who we are….They are the arbitrary closures that allow someone or something to say, at this moment, in this space, that you are going to be seen, evaluated, and treated like a ‘woman’ who is ‘sad’ and ‘young.’ And because measurable types have no timeless essence, they are wed to data: only that which can be datafied is included.”

And, as he points out, “it’s measurable types’ universality of allowable wrongness that permits them the ability to move, to reform the world into new, measured ‘truths.’” In turn, we find ourselves confronted by a new dominant narrator—someone we have never met who we can never truly interact with—who reshapes our memories to gather and sell them back to us, either for profit or to maintain a political resistance to progress.

Returning to the topic, we have to ask what value data adds to our memories, and the limits of end-of-year summaries like Spotify Wrapped. For example, financial data can be extremely useful to describe your spending habits and motivate you in the coming year to afford whatever it is you want to do. Or the data in your smartwatch, which tracks how many steps you take each day and presents these stats to you in a lurid, neat graph; from there, you can set fitness goals. These data motivate and explain. At the end of a given period of time, it’s useful to aggregate daily data points into a collection, an overview, which can then be parsed and disaggregated depending on how granular you want your self-reflection to be.

Statistics jargon aside, there’s something so satisfying about seeing a line go up, or down, or stay roughly the same. You connect to those moments of change and even reminisce about what was happening on the day you somehow spent no money, walked 20,000 steps, or listened to 10 hours of music. But this is an individual experience, tailored specifically for you, to cue your memories. It cannot be applied to someone else. In essence, you apply your memories to your own microcosmic market segment. It feels eerie.

Marketable nostalgia wasn’t always so individual. In the Web 2.0 era, YouTube launched a year-in-review summary called YouTube Rewind. At first, it was a “Best of Year X” with a top-10 countdown and, at least in 2010, a little bit of data on views, hours watched, etc. Rebecca Black, of “Friday” infamy at the time, hosted the 2011 YouTube Rewind. Rewinds soon became montages, in which YouTube tried to pack in every viral moment from the past year into a complete story, a giant music video. The 2012 video’s description asks the audience, “can you spot all the references?” That was the game, and it was an excellent way to visualize trends, fueled by user data. Unfortunately, by 2018, the Rewind videos became masturbatory; they flailed in an attempt to appear as feckless as the early 2010s while maintaining corporate responsibility to their advertisers. Despite its self-destructive cringe, what Rewind did well was consistently balance both engagement data—view count, likes, comments—and the less quantifiable but nonetheless present cultural moments. The videos were the subject; what defined the year was not a singular user but the unexpected, cultural fascination with a piece of media.

Where Rewind differed from today’s app-specific Year in Review summaries was its focus on the collective experience. Now, your Year is Review is not about the common parlance, but rather based on your individual data, usage, dwell time, idle habits, and the moments you forget you’re being watched.

Maybe there’s no use in concerning myself with this. I still own the memories I’ve connected to those songs on my 2024 Wrapped. I can reminisce about my personal experiences and the collective euphoria from something like Brat Summer, for example; these summaries just cue up the memories for me. Are they really so harmful?

4. Existentially Wrapped

Sure, this is a fine exercise in using data to tell a story of your year. However, to what extent do you want to know how many market research surveys you answered at a wage of less than £3 per hour, in the hopes that one day you would have accrued enough points to receive a little £50 boost in your bank account? What pride do you derive from knowing you spent over £100 on bread at Tesco this past year? Surely bread shouldn’t have cost that much in the first place. There’s a broader, political question of why any of this is presented so positively.

This is no longer about delighting a customer with the opportunity to reminisce, to preside over their achievements and set goals for the new year. It’s about the companies behind every experience, every log-in, every track played and image sent, justifying their existence and their encroaching dominance over our lives through an aggressive campaign to assert that you still need these products and services, and you need to use them every day.

Any dissenting voice is framed as a buzzkill; your cynicism, your boycotts, your increased awareness of your rights as a data subject and as a human being are just ruining all the fun.

But there is a deeper psychosocial element to it all. At the end of these summaries, as well as on every page, there’s an opportunity to share the results on social media. It’s a limp-wristed attempt to unite this individual with the collective once again, only to die on arrival. Sure, the display cards have been formatted perfectly for an Instagram story or text message, and once you’ve shared yours, other people may be inspired to do the same. But it’s not about agency or nostalgia. It’s a competition. You boast to your friends about how you made the top 2% of Duolingo French learners in the past year based solely on the XP you gained in the app, then proceed to stumble through the most rudimentary French phrases. What did you actually learn? What meaning does this statistic bring to your life? Is it just an opportunity to feel like you’ve achieved something because, at the very least, you signed on to an app every day?

These summaries instill a heightened, prey-like awareness of our behavior online. They are not the only service to do this, but they’re adding to the noise. Whenever I turn on Spotify, I’m now conscious of what I’m listening to, how many times I’ve hit “repeat”, how many minutes I’ve dedicated to a podcast or album; I catch myself plotting, even curating my listening habits to yield the ideal narrative at the end of 2025. It’s not about me anymore; it’s about convincing the platform to give me a good report card.

In his video essay on Charli XCX’s Brat, Alexander Avila proposes that capitalism “in the contemporary world would rather you not exist. It would rather you be a vessel for feelings and desires, a group of atoms that consumes and pursues but that never is. That never will be or have been…You do not have a place in history; there’s no selfhood to defend. The market runs on feelings felt by no one.”

Left with this overwhelming disenchantment, any rational person with a basic desire to see tomorrow would thrash against these vain attempts to appeal to our nostalgia, to understand what makes us cry or grin solely for the sake of marketability and control. The corporate, the datafied, cannot understand an experience as human as memory. And it cannot understand something as powerful as our agency. To assert agency, to protect our information, and to confuse these measurement systems with an identity they cannot meaningfully capture, is somehow radical. It shouldn’t be.

We must remember. Remember persistently. Archive, reminisce with anyone that’s shared a moment with you, review your photos and your personal playlists. Create a secure, enduring demonstration that you exist and do not need a tool to prove it. It’s not wrong to repeat your favorite song as many times as you want on your desired streaming platform. It’s not wrong to commit to a goal and use the tools at your disposal to achieve it. But do not for a second believe any tool developed under capitalism can summarize your minute, magnificent time on Earth without seeking a piece of you in return.

Photo of Michaela Brady

BIO: Michaela's writing explores belonging, mis/communication, grief and mental health. Originally from NYC, she received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, then moved to the UK to pursue a master's degree at Oxford University. Her work is featured or forthcoming in The Talon Review, BarBar, Clepsydra, ephemeras, GROUND Journal, Feast Zine, Hatred is a Bitter Fruit and Two Shrews Press, among others. Recently, she won GRAVY magazine's winter poetry competition, was a featured poet in the Oxford Di-Verse Poetry Festival, and a finalist in both the 2024 London Independent Story Prize and Oprelle's 2024 "Coming Home" contest. She lives in Oxford, where she works as a civil servant and cabaret performer. You can read more about her and her thoughts on writing here: https://www.michaela-n-brady.com/