shoutouts to a friend for reccomending a link to a video essay on the game "Broken Reality"
In the video essay, the presenter seems to struggle to grapple with "whether or not vaporwave is ironic, genuinely affectionate, or critical in its relationship to the detritus of capitalism and corporate culture and aesthetics."

And i think legitimately insisting that it has to be one or the other, is missing the point. It _can't_ be only one. To insist that it is, Is to numb the _pain_ to which it speaks. To allow you to either academically abstract your feelings by putting them towards a proper anticapitalist rhetoric, to busy the mind digging through dogwhistles. To delare it ironic is to detach yourself from your feelings through vaccinated nihilism and rebuking the aesthetics for being chintzy and out of step. and to be purely affectionate is to throw yourself into nostalgia wholesale, but why retreat into a recontextualization then when the progenitor cultural artifacts still exist?

And the harder you look for irony, the more genuine the feelings it seems to evoke in it's enthusiasts, and the harder you look for sincerity, the more ironic it feels. because, it's just office muzak, It's just slowed down adult contemporary, and when you declare that it _must_ be irony, and start walking away, the consistency, of the aesthetic implies something genuine.
because that is the power of the superposition:

That which is perfectly satirical, is so close to the original as to be indistinguishable from a sincere example,
That which is perfectly sincere, will overlook or overstate, so many things as to become a satire of itself.

Or according The Book Of Five Rings:
That which is perfectly void is form, that which is perfectly form, is void.

Fundamentally, it cannot divorce itself from the love it feels. because that's nihilism, but neither can we look at our present reality, and say with confidence, that the forces that engineered this vision of a future, were good. But those memories are still there, We still FEEL things.
Because the truth is no matter how smart we become, we experience the world, in all of its glory, both opportunity and oppression, through our emotions.

When you remember a broken promise, you can't feel bummed about it, if you don't remember what you were yearning for; and you can't remember what you were yearning for, without feeling its absence. You can't compartmentalize just half of it.
You cannot separate the irony from the sincerity, because they reflect one another.
You cannot separate the visual aesthetic from the music, because they evoke one another.
You can't separate the celebration from the anticapitalist critique, because it's not the artifacts' fault they couldn't be the future, but neither were the promises they signified, kept.

And for me anyway.
Vaporwave is the music of broken promises.