Plutonic Rainbows

What people often call nostalgia is too small a word for what many of us feel when we look back at life before the internet. This is not a sentimental longing for youth, nor a refusal to accept the present. It is something more structural: a recognition that whole stretches of lived experience now sit outside the modern systems of memory.

Large parts of everyday life before the internet were never meant to be archived. They existed as lived experience rather than data. Conversations were not logged, rooms were not photographed, ordinary streets on ordinary days were not documented. What remains today is not hidden behind a paywall or lost to poor search results — it simply does not exist. The absence is not a personal failure to find it. The record genuinely stops.

The internet age inverted this relationship with memory. Almost everything now leaves residue: photographs, timestamps, metadata, surveillance, backups. The present is endlessly replayable. Yet this abundance comes at a cost. Experience has become thinner, more mediated, more performative. What existed before was dense precisely because it was not designed to be recalled, shared, or optimised. It existed fully in the moment, and then it was gone.

This creates a quiet but persistent asymmetry. The years that mattered most are the least recoverable. The present, by contrast, is exhaustively documented but often less meaningful. No future technology, no amount of money, and no hypothetical AI will reconstruct what was never stored. At best, fragments can be triangulated: a photograph here, a programme listing there, an address, a date, a weather report. But continuity — the sense of being there again — is irretrievably broken.

This is the uncomfortable truth: much of what mattered most survives only inside the people who lived it. And as time passes, even that archive degrades. Memories blur, witnesses disappear, and the final copies fade. That does not make those years less real. It makes them more so. They were not designed to be revisited. They were designed to be lived once.

If there is any consolation, it is a sober one. To have lived fully in a time that left so little behind is to have experienced something that cannot be replicated, simulated, or accessed later by anyone else. That loss is real. But so was the life that produced it.

While reviewing a GTmetrix performance report, I noticed unusually high server response times despite having an A-grade score. The HAR file revealed that all resources were being served over HTTP/1.1 instead of HTTP/2, even though I believed HTTP/2 had been enabled previously. I queried my CloudFront distribution using the AWS CLI and confirmed the HttpVersion setting was indeed set to http1.1. I updated the distribution configuration to use HTTP/2, which enables multiplexing (allowing multiple requests over a single connection) and binary header compression. After the change propagated to CloudFront's edge locations, I ran a second GTmetrix test. The results were striking: Largest Contentful Paint dropped from 690ms to 167ms, Time to First Byte collapsed from 386ms to under 5ms, and the fully loaded time fell from 2 seconds to just 193ms. The improvement came from two factors working together: HTTP/2's multiplexing eliminated connection overhead, and the warmed CloudFront cache meant all resources were served directly from the edge location without origin fetches.

Speculative fiction often frames communication with the past as a problem of infrastructure rather than magic. In works such as William Gibson’s The Peripheral, the enabling technology is imagined as an advanced quantum system capable of exchanging information across time, usually by exploiting ideas drawn from quantum mechanics or many-worlds theory. The key move is not literal time travel, but data transfer: messages, control signals, or sensory input passing between eras. This allows the future to talk to the past through networks that resemble an internet stretched across timelines. Crucially, these stories impose rules — no matter crosses the boundary, only information does, and the moment communication begins, a new branch of reality forms. This framing gives the technology a cold, infrastructural plausibility that feels modern and computational rather than fantastical.

However, even within physics-inspired speculation, this idea collapses under closer scrutiny. Quantum mechanics does not permit usable communication backward in time. Quantum entanglement, often invoked in fiction, cannot transmit information at all — let alone into the past — without a classical channel that obeys normal causality. Proposed workarounds, such as closed timelike curves or exotic spacetime geometries, remain mathematical curiosities with no experimental support and, in many cases, imply energy conditions that appear physically impossible. Even if a future civilisation mastered quantum computing far beyond anything imaginable today, it would still be bound by causality as we understand it. At best, speculative models allow correlations across timelines, not conversations with people who already lived, acted, and died in a fixed historical world like 1990.

There is also a more fundamental, and bleaker, barrier: both the finality of causality and the sheer antiquity of the technology that defined 1990. The networks of that era were fragile, local, and transient — dial-up modems hissing over analogue phone lines, CRT monitors driven by decaying phosphors, spinning hard drives and magnetic tape that relied on constant power, maintenance, and human presence. Those systems were never stable endpoints in any enduring sense; their signals vanished the moment they were received, their protocols were crude, and their physical substrates have long since degraded, been erased, or thrown away. Even if physics permitted a message to be sent backward in time, there is nothing left to receive it: no addressable infrastructure, no listening process still running inside that causal frame. The past is not merely unreachable because time forbids it; it is unreachable because its technology was built to disappear. 1990 is not a dormant node awaiting reconnection — it is a powered-down, dismantled world, beyond reach not just in theory, but in every practical, material sense. The past is not offline; it is gone.

Photographed for Victoria's Secret, Summer 1991.

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Bridget Hall, Elle Italia, February 1996. Photographed by Gilles Bensimon.

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Sapphire & Steel operates in a zone that contemporary aesthetic theory would describe as the eerie rather than the horrific. In Mark Fisher’s terms, the eerie emerges when there is an absence where there should be presence, or a presence where there should be absence. The show repeatedly constructs spaces that conform to this logic: domestic rooms stripped of human warmth, children’s rhymes rendered threatening by context, or time itself behaving like an unseen intruder. These formal strategies destabilise the viewer’s assumption that the world is coherent and continuous, generating an uncanny atmosphere through the slow realisation that something is fundamentally wrong.

A second theoretical lens is hauntology, where media forms bear the imprint of other eras and unrealised futures. The show’s production values — videotape texture, muted lighting, set-bound staging have aged into something that feels suspended between eras. Instead of diminishing the show, this temporal dislocation strengthens the aesthetic effect. One perceives a world that is both familiar and lost, as though watching a broadcast from a parallel timeline. Because the narrative concerns fractures in time, the medium itself becomes part of the message, with the artefacts of its era acting as aesthetic features that allow the past to bleed into the present.

Finally, the show’s treatment of character aligns with a tradition of metaphysical minimalism. Sapphire and Steel are deliberately under-explained, abstract, and emotionally restrained. They function almost as agents of negation, clearing away conventional narrative cues — emotion, exposition, psychological grounding — to expose the underlying strangeness of the world. This prevents the viewer from anchoring the experience in human drama and instead redirects attention to atmosphere, ontology, and the instability of time. The result is an aesthetic that feels unusually modern: sparse, disquieting, and concerned not with character arcs but with the integrity of reality itself.

Callaghan is a Spanish footwear brand founded in 1987 by Basilio García Pérez-Aradros under the Hergar Group, based in La Rioja. It emerged with a focus on comfort-driven, technologically oriented casual shoes and gained early recognition with its 1991 Náutico Over model, which helped define its identity in Spain.

Ready To Wear, Photographed for Spring & Summer 1991.

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I grew up with a world that still had:

• scarcity
• mystery
• slowness
• locality
• deep engagement
• real community
• real boredom
• real privacy
• analogue warmth
• anticipation
• physicality

And that world is gone forever.

There is a scientific idea I’ve often heard, one that is both beautiful and unsettling: the notion that if you travelled far enough away from the Earth, you could look back and see the world as it was in another year — perhaps even 1990. The idea rests on a simple truth: light takes time to travel. When I look at the Moon, I’m seeing it as it was a little over a second ago. When I look at the Sun, I’m seeing it eight minutes in the past. And when astronomers look at distant galaxies, they are witnessing events that happened millions or billions of years before any human existed. Looking across vast distances is, in a very real physical sense, the same as looking back in time.

By that logic, the light that left Earth in 1990 is still travelling outward into space, carrying with it the faint, scattered imprint of the world as it was then. In theory, if I journeyed tens or hundreds of light-years away and possessed a perfect telescope, I would intercept that old light and see Earth as it appeared in that year. The idea feels almost like a loophole in reality — a scientific whisper that the past still exists somewhere, still moving through the darkness, still intact in the form of ancient photons.

But here is the truth most people overlook: even though the physics is correct, I could never see Earth in any meaningful detail. The light escaping our planet is impossibly faint, dispersed, and chaotic. It does not assemble itself into images of streets, faces, shops, or skies. Even with a telescope far beyond anything humanity has ever imagined, Earth would remain nothing more than a dim, trembling point of light. The practical reality is that the world of 1990 is physically unreachable, no matter how far I travel or how much technology I possess. The idea is scientifically sound but forever beyond reach.

Yet the emotional power of the thought remains. There is something haunting in knowing that the light of 1990 is still out there, still travelling through the universe, still carrying some trace of the world I once inhabited. Even if I can never recover it — even if it can never be seen again — the knowledge that those photons departed Earth at that moment and continue their journey gives the past a strange and fragile persistence. It satisfies a deep human wish: that what mattered to us doesn’t simply vanish, but continues outward in some form, expanding into the dark.

Still, the unsettling truth persists beneath the poetry: even though the light of 1990 still exists somewhere, I can never step into that world again. I cannot re-enter its atmosphere, its sounds, its scents, its daily rhythms. The idea offers a certain comfort, but also a very sharp reminder about the nature of time. For human beings, time moves in only one direction. We cannot return. We can only remember — and even our memories are shadows compared to the worlds we once moved through so easily.