EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: Young People Are Falling in Love With Old Technology.
The Luddite Club, a nonprofit group that supports taking smartphone breaks, has 26 chapters, nearly all of them at high schools or colleges. Jackson is a board member.
Musicians with younger listeners, including Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Alex Warren and Chappell Roan, sell on their websites multiple forms of nostalgic physical media—CDs, vinyl records and tape cassettes. Some, like Carpenter and Troye Sivan, even sell CD “singles,” a format largely forgotten since the early 2000s.
Carpenter, Icelandic singer Laufey and Roan, all Gen Z-ers, have recently topped Amazon’s CD charts. Older artists appear on the charts too, but listeners of John Fogerty, for example, probably aren’t digital natives buying discs for the fun of it.
Even TikTok is full of videos for Bluetooth CD players, flip phones and digital cameras.
“People, especially in Gen Z, are just tired of not owning anything,” said Hunter White, a 25-year-old data engineer and self-described member of “the music nerds of the internet.” White said he collects CDs to escape the domination of streaming services, which he believes underpay artists and have inconsistent offerings. He sources discs from garage and estate sales, thrift shops, record stores and vendor events, and listens at home on a player Sony introduced in 2002.
It’s relative, I guess. The older 21st century hipsters of lore became obsessed with LPs in the 2000s. But all of the gadgets described above, when they began appearing in the mid-1980s through the 1990s were seen as something akin to Star Trek props by my Greatest Generation-era parents, who grew up with 78 RPM records, AM radio, Kodak cameras, and after WWII, three commercial TV networks and Polaroid instant cameras.
Last year Virginia Postrel wrote:
Since the 1980s, technological progress has enjoyed a few flickers of glamour, notably around the singular figure of Steve Jobs, who brought computing power into the everyday lives – and eventually the pockets – of ordinary people. Jobs fused countercultural allegiances with modernist design instincts, technological boldness, and capitalist success. Most important, he gave people products that they loved.
The outpouring of public grief at his death in 2011 demonstrated his power as a symbol. As Meghan O’Rourke wrote in The New Yorker, ‘We’re mourning the visionary whose story we admire: the teen-age explorer, the spiritual seeker, the barefoot jeans-wearer, the man who said, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”’ Jobs embodied a new ideal of progress, at once uncompromising and humanistic, a vision of advancing technology that artists could embrace. (That the hippie capitalist could be a tyrannical boss and neglectful father were details obscured by his glamour.)
Jobs also helped to deliver on one of the touchstone technologies of twentieth-century progress glamour, a technology almost as evocative as flying cars. The twenty-first century kept the promise of videophones, and they turned out to be far better than we imagined. Instead of the dedicated consoles of The Jetsons, Star Trek, and the 1964 World’s Fair, we got multifunctional pocket-sized supercomputers that include videophone service at no additional cost. ‘I like the twenty-first century’, I tell my husband on FaceTime. But, like refrigerators, videophones aren’t glamorous when everybody has one. They’re just life. We complain about their flaws and take their benefits for granted.
Today’s nostalgic techno-optimists want more: more exciting new technologies, more abundance, and more public enthusiasm about both. Mingling the desires of the old modernists for newness, rational planning, and speed with those of the old nerds for adventure and discovery, they long for action. Their motto is Faster, please, a phrase popularized by Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds and the title of James Pethokoukis’s Substack newsletter.
20 years ago, James Lileks wrote:
Sometimes I think you have to be middle aged to realize how cool things are. You grow up with MP3s and iPods, as my daughter will, and it’s the way things are. If you remember the KUNK-KUNK of an 8-track tape, having a featherweight gumpack that holds a billion bits of music is really quite remarkable. (Metheny was followed by something from the “Run Lola Run” soundtrack, which was followed by “I Apologize,” by some nutless 30s warbler, followed by “Dawn” by Grieg.) And then there’s the cellphones and the tiny cameras and the widescreen TVs and home computers that sing to each other silently across the world; wonders, all. This really is the future I wanted. Although I expected longer battery life.
For those who wish to really be on the bleeding edge of hipsterdom, the Lonestar State has you covered: Move Over, Vinyl Trend: North Texas Produces 8-Track Tapes for Major Labels.
