Currently, nostalgia is an omnipresent phenomenon. This goes for popular culture, where retro aesthetics has turned into a dominant mode of design, as much as for political decision making processes which – like parts of the race for the U.S. American presidency or the BREXIT – are driven by ‘longings for a time that never was.’ Yet how does nostalgia work? Why does it sell? And what do we actually talk about when we talk about nostalgia? In her talk, Sabine Sielke explores the complex cultural work nostalgia manages to accomplish in times of (supposed) acceleration and multiply motivated cultural anxieties. Nostalgia, she argues, is not so much a psychological disposition or a characteristic of certain objects, but a phenomenon of modernism and modernization inextricably entwined with the rise of technologies of reproduction. Nostalgia ‘arrests’ and spatializes temporality, shapes affects, and is inextricably entwined with processes of commodification and consumption. Delineating how U.S. American culture is inspired by a nostalgia for the new – a serial longing to begin again, to start over, to innovate –, Sabine Sielke shows that nostalgia is not so much about the past than about the future, a mode of “remembering forward” with the potential for both compliance and resistance.