The Man Who Sold Yesterday: How Randy Pittman Became the World’s Accidental Nostalgia King
Randy Pittman, a name that sounds like it belongs on the back of a bowling shirt in a forgotten Wisconsin league, has improbably become the Zelig of our late-capitalist fever dream. From a basement server farm in suburban Omaha to the marble lobbies of the Gulf’s petro-princes, the 37-year-old former SEO consultant has spent the last eighteen months teaching the world how to weaponize nostalgia for profit—while pretending he’s simply “reconnecting cultures.” Translation: he’s selling your childhood back to you, slightly pixelated, for $9.99 a month.
Pittman’s algorithm—christened “RetroMorph” in a fit of marketing bravado—scans 40 years of global pop detritus, remixes it into bite-sized TikTok-ready loops, then auto-licenses the result to whichever streaming platform bids highest. Last quarter alone it generated 2.3 billion impressions, enough eyeball time to make the population of Lagos collectively blink for three straight weeks. Analysts at Credit Suisse, who still wear ties despite no longer needing to, call it “the fastest-growing soft-power export since Korean sunscreen.” That’s banker-speak for “We have no idea how this works, but the numbers glow like Chernobyl.”
The international fallout has been predictably absurd. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, worried that its own heritage brands are being out-nostalgized by a Midwesterner with a fiber-optic umbilical cord, convened a blue-ribbon panel of elderly manga artists and teenage VTubers to draft “synthetic authenticity guidelines.” Meanwhile, the French—ever the moody poets of industrial policy—slapped a 3% “cultural reparations” tax on any platform hosting RetroMorph clips that reference pre-1999 chansons. Revenue so far: €43.27 and one irate tweet from Johnny Hallyday’s estate.
In Lagos itself, local creators have reverse-engineered the algorithm, feeding it Nollywood car-chase scenes and 1980s highlife riffs. The resulting clips—equal parts Fela Kuti and Fast & Furious—have become the unofficial soundtrack for the city’s motorcycle-taxi uprising. Drivers stream them from battered Bluetooth speakers, partly to drown out the price of petrol, partly to remind the ruling class that culture, like traffic, only moves when you stop pretending to control it. Pittman, ever the opportunist, has responded by launching “RetroMorph Lagos Edition,” complete with a disclaimer that royalties will be “shared equitably,” which in tech parlance means “after we skim the cream and call it infrastructure costs.”
The Chinese market, of course, presented a unique challenge. The algorithm kept hallucinating Tank Man and repressed memories of 1989, so Pittman simply partitioned the code base, creating “RetroRed,” a parallel universe where everything loops back to state-approved 1950s factory choreography. Usage stats remain classified, but leaked slides from a Shenzhen pitch deck promise “seamless harmonization of past glory with future obedience.” One slide features a cartoon panda dabbing in front of a blast furnace; the audience, presumably, was meant to find this inspiring rather than dystopian.
All of this would be merely another chapter in the annals of techno-absurdism if not for the collateral damage. Independent archivists from Buenos Aires to Bangalore report that RetroMorph’s voracious scraping has overwritten irreplaceable analog masters—think lost Ethiopian jazz reels, early Indonesian punk demos—replacing them with AI-upscaled facsimiles that sound like elevator music filtered through a nostalgia-shaped hangover. Pittman’s defense, delivered via Zoom from what appeared to be a tastefully distressed WeWork, was characteristically frictionless: “Preservation is a collective hallucination. We’re just providing the stronger dose.”
And yet, somewhere in the noise, a pattern emerges. From Omaha boardrooms to Cairo coffeehouses, humanity has agreed to a single, unstated contract: we will trade the messy specificity of our memories for the frictionless dopamine of the loop. Randy Pittman, accidental ambassador of this pact, simply built the conveyor belt. The rest of us queued up, credit cards in hand, eager to be gently lowered into the past—edited, monetized, and delivered in 15-second increments. History repeats itself, the cynics say, first as tragedy, then as farce, then as a subscription service. Pittman just added auto-renew.
