Technostalgia Technostalgia

Early 2000’s tech is trending today. Our Instagram feeds are full of digitals. Over-theear headphones are everywhere. I saw someone on campus playing on their Nintendo DS last month.

These headphones are the best example of how nostalgia is trending today. Amid an Apple and Beats’ popularity contest, these headphones claimed the ears and Pinterest boards of Gen Z. They exude vintage, old-school vibes. They make users appear disconnected, even resistant, to modern technology.

Except, this is not necessarily true. Most of them connect to phones as cordlessly and easily as AirPods.

Nostalgic trends can be heard as well as seen, music being a key player here. Vinyl records, CDs, and cassette tapes have all seen a resurgence in recent years. Their allure transcends aesthetics — music’s quality is lost in digital format. There is an undeniably warmer and higher quality sound to a vinyl record in comparison to the tin speakers of a laptop or JBL Flip.

An exception is if you’re listening to the record on one of those Urban Outfitters Crosley briefcases. Speaking as a Crosley product owner, there is no reason to prefer the sound of records spun on something that also offers Bluetooth. Let’s call it what it is: a performative excuse to appreciate the zeitgeist of a time none of us were alive to remember.

Honestly, that’s kind of awesome. Why should we miss out on the joys of record-shopping just because we have Spotify and Apple Music?

Of course, some of Gen Z remembers a time before phones could play any and every song imaginable.

A time of iPod nanos and illegally downloaded music; a time of portable CD-players and radios.

My very first CD was the High School Musical 2 soundtrack (the consequence of giving a six-year-old a Walkman). While my baby pink Sony CD-player may be long gone, my ever-expanding vinyl and CD collections are here to stay, because they’re cool, and I love them.

So, what is it exactly that makes early tech so cool and memorable? It’s not for quality, ease, or convenience. We are not buying 2000’s point-and-shoot digital cameras because they are easy to use and have objectively better quality than a smartphone. We are buying them because they take pictures that are unique, fun, and nostalgic. We are buying them because no matter how many camera lenses the iPhone adds, they will never be able to create something that looks different.

Nostalgic tech trends reveal a desire to be different: to make a statement. To experience something that we choose to hold on to, rather than merely use because it’s the sensical, trendy option.

In addition to the physical devices we’re bringing back, there are also the stylistic choices our generation picks in the tech-world. Airbrushed cursive 90’s floral prints color Wildflower phone cases, Y2K grids and futuristic fonts cover Canva layouts. Half of the computers and HydroFlasks on campus look like a Bratz doll pasted the stickers on them. The Lisa Frank-ificiation of current design poses the possibility that if we’re still into everything we were into at ten years old, doesn’t that just mean we’ve always had, like, really good taste?

I say, yes. The most defining and lasting trends of the 2000’s are fun and fairly feminine. They remind us of simpler times, and remove us from the dominion of the Internet.

That’s perhaps what I admire most about the early aughts revival —the implication that we are mourning simplicity. Technology is supposed to simplify things, and in many ways it has. But to those of us with the hazy, happy memories before tech’s sudden and exponential growth, technology marks the end as much as it does the beginning.

We glamorize simpler tech and styles of our youth because we recognize how complicated our lives have become, and how much technology is to blame for that. We have become overexposed and desensitized to tragedy, alienated from more meaningful communication, and addicted to instant gratification.

We are just as unhappy about our reliance on technology as the generations that criticize us for it, as the generations that created it for us.

We were given the toy of all toys and then punished for playing with it. How is someone supposed to resist when everything at their fingertips? It’s like

Pandora’s box; the forbidden fruit. They reimagined Eve’s Apple into an iPhone and let us take a bite. Now all we know is the taste of technology.

No wonder our tech is sold to us in trending waves, as central to our existence and as profitable as our clothes, shoes, and bodies. No wonder we long for simplicity – for tools with less than five functions, for the colors, songs, comfort of our youth before the world became so gray.

The tech-sphere has become hellishly complex. The updates and upgrades are ceaseless and needless. The algorithms have an uncanny ability to advertise my most recent conversation topics to me. Every day I read something about advancing artificial intelligence or machinery threatening the livelihoods of working people. Every day violence springs from some dark internet corner.

As one of the brightest voices of our generation once sang, “The things that seem so simple, suddenly so far out of reach.” Just a hunch, but Hannah Montana probably wasn’t talking about the phone you keep glued to you at all times. Simplicity is in and nostalgia is selling, except no matter how hard we try, we can’t quite reach it.