Reviewstack: The Wayback Machine, by Daniel Falatko

Spirit they're gone, spirit they've vanished.

If you have any interest in a satirical paranoid thriller centering on an investigation into the collapse and erasure of online hipster culture from the ‘00s—arguably the last gasp of America’s ”true freedom” before everything got paved over with our current corporate, generic, prohibitively expensive, subscription-based, AI-generated hellscape—you should read The Wayback Machine by Daniel Falatko. It’s great.

I’m constantly impressed with Falatko’s ability to create emotional yet anthropologically insightful portraits of communities through times of transition. All of his work has a powerful sense of place, and The Wayback Machine is his magnum opus.

I’m going to use the rest of this review to weigh in on something specific about the book. It won’t be long or spoiler-heavy, but if you want to avoid all spoilers (I agree with you, the surprise is much more fun!), I’ll leave you with a brief list of the book’s vibes:

• Vats of burning acid satire poured like hot tar over the hipsters you once were and/or loved to hate!

• The limping, sweating, white-knuckled nostalgia of Falling Down!

• The paranoid intrigue of an early-‘70s urban thriller!

• Multigenerational debates over whose fault it is that everything sucks now!

• Sincerity. For a book about a millennial defending his generation on a zoomer podcast, there’s a lot of heart to be found here. Both sides of the argument have their protective shells, and Falatko does a beautiful job cracking them to reveal the stunned and sad human beings beneath.

• The TRUTH about why everything sucks now! Yes! The answers you seek are to be found within!

If that sounds good to you…

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Okay, here we are at the spoiler line. I’m just saying some stuff here to keep errant eyes from catching unwanted glances. Like when you’re reading a comic book, and you turn the page and accidentally see something amazing on the right page before you continue reading on the left page (swap those if you’re a manga reader). I hate when that happens. I don’t even like watching movie trailers most of the time for the same reason.

This is your last chance; if you want to avoid going into this book with any kind of pre-suggested lens, stop now and just buy the book. You can always come back later.

And if in the meantime my Substack has disappeared, be sure to check the Wayback Machine…

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There’s a lot of talk going around about unsympathetic characters.

Too much? Sure, maybe too much.

So let’s talk about a character who I believe to be sympathetic, despite some other “expert opinions.”¹

I’m going to go ahead and say it: Nathan is not only sympathetic, but he is admirable.

He’s the one person (albeit fictional) in this moment who’s not trying to erase or deny the misdeeds of his past. Any given day, we could ”channel surf” through an endless barrage of halfhearted apologies delivered to a spot just inches below the camera (because the apologizer can’t stop staring at their own face to monitor their level of projected remorse). I don’t need to remind you that the current “leader of the free world” is doing everything in his power to deny and erase atrocities committed in his own past, either decades old or from five minutes ago.

Yes, Nathan’s done some terrible things. He didn’t instigate the worst of them, but he certainly participated. No, I don’t approve of them. But neither does he. He admits to having an immense amount of power at a young age when his snarky music reviews gained traction and shot him up the cultural commentator ladder. He got so caught up in the glittering bursts of scenester royalty fireworks that he couldn’t look objectively at his actions.

When I heard “drug trafficking” it took a moment to register.… But just like when you wake from a dream, the shock of revelation wears off and it all starts to make sense. “Oh wait, I guess I am a drug trafficker.” I’d never really thought about it in those terms. I was just a way cool dude who worked in the music industry. That was just something that went along with it, ingrained in the fabric, or so I was always led to believe. But then there you are under the fluorescents being reduced to a two-word definition: Drug Trafficker. And the world you once knew, the world you were just inhabiting an hour previously, is just gone.

The Wayback Machine is a book about that ever-shifting quality of one’s world—be it a neighborhood, an industry, or even a personality or relationship (in the case of Nathan’s infatuation with musician M.I.A.).

Unlike the “way cool dude” he used to be, he’s now well aware of the time slip. Sure, he’s angry about it, as each of us become when it turns to focus its hot, unblinking laser eyes into our own until we wither. But for all the complaining he does about how his body, city, and culture have changed, he doesn’t begrudge the fact of change itself; he’s surprisingly zen about it.

There was something that had been gnawing at him in his first week back in New York City. It wasn’t the city’s fault; it was the transitory nature of its populace.… You could rage against the rebranded and relocated Essex Market that obliterated your fave diner…, but there was already a whole new influx, an entire generation, that would recall the new Essex Market fondly, part of the scenery of the greatest years of their existence. And they, in turn, would eventually raise their deteriorating fists against whatever moved in to replace the Essex Market. They too will walk upon the same streets they’d strode hundreds, thousands, of times and not recognize them. A never-ending chain of victims. New York City: The Ghost Maker.

It’s not a comforting thought to know that you’re in a constant state of losing everything you’ve ever known, but he accepts it as fact.

What he doesn’t accept is an entire swath of culture, people, and events wiped from history, because he knows how dangerous it is to forget. In a world where Holocaust denial and (not coincidentally) Naziism are on the rise, The $200 Mason Jar Podcast might as well be a couple of eye-rolling zoomers swapping esoteric factoids about the Third Reich they snagged from recovered Encarta CD-ROMS—not for historical perspective, but for entertainment value and the fetishization of bygone eras.

Enter Nathan the history professor, come to elevate their show from I Love the Aughts silliness to a serious crash course in the death of (what he and many others believed was) a cultural revolution.

Nathan’s struggle reminds me of Back to the Future, when Marty’s parents aren’t together at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, so Marty starts to literally fade into nonexistence. By testifying to that missing history, Nathan ensures that the events of the aughts remain causally involved as the “parents” of his present moment, 2024. He knows he can’t fix the present, but he can at least help explain how we got here.

Nathan’s a champion of history and accountability. He’s got a checkered past, but a strong moral center. He doesn’t seek to wipe any misdeeds from the record, including his own—he acknowledges their relevance as part of his personal landscape, and that of his city and culture at large. He knows that if we can remember the past, we won’t be condemned to repeat it.

All culture is a fraud. Nathan, however, is not.

Follow Daniel Falatko (wayback machine) here on Substack!

1. Looking at you, Vinny Reads! You think Nathan’s unsympathetic? You think you’re so tough? That Paw Patrol poster doesn’t impress me one bit!