Every generation has its own flavor of nostalgia. At the height of the MTV boom, many Millennials longed for the music of the sixties and seventies. Many Gen X young adults in the eighties and nineties were drawn to hair and clothing styles from the fifties.
Gen Z is now experiencing something similar but with an important difference. Today, young adults obsess over fashion, media, and music that are not so old and date back to when they were just born or about to be born.
Just like Gen X and Millennials, they long for simpler times, with a profound difference: they don’t have to go back as much as previous generations to find them. The advances in technology, the advent of high-speed mobile internet, social networks, and everything that has happened in the last 20 years is enough to warrant enough of a gap from the early 00s to qualify that era (which feels like yesterday to any aging millennia) as a golden age of simplicity and lowered complexity, marked by genuine and shared entertainment experiences.
Gen Z is bringing back outdated Y2K technologies, and it’s not “nowstalgia”
From old digital cameras to music players, young adults seemed to be drawn to tech products that had been ousted by smartphones, in a global trend relaunching tech gadgets not perpetually connected to the Internet.
Photo: Unsplash
While the Club is clearly an extreme fueled by good old teen angst, it’s also the tip of the iceberg. Teens and young adults refuse the idea of an always-connected life more and more often. The phenomenon has been hard to quantify, but the ongoing success of nostalgia-driven phone designs and a resurgence of social-media-free dumb phones has certainly to do with more than millennials trying to briefly detoxify from their addictive tech habits.
Portable cassette players are sold for hefty prices on Etsy and eBay. And while they certainly won’t rewind the tape on streaming, they are carving their niche of younger aficionados.
The mju II is so popular because it brilliantly mixes the aesthetics of analog photography with the simplicity of digital cameras. Something hard to find in older cameras which, albeit qualitatively better, come with a way longer learning curve for the uninitiated to the complexities of film photography.
When it comes to listening, it’s a different story, and the aesthetics of the black silhouettes with white-corded iPod earbuds from the mid-00s might play a fashion role.
The device is a quite basic electronic typewriter that can hold more than 200 pages of text and comes with modern word-processing features such as copy-paste and even a dictionary for spell checking.
Young (and not so young) writers have been snatching them off of eBay like crazy, as they enable a form of undistracted writing that no computer program can emulate.
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- Andrea Nepori
- 13 March 2023
“Because there is so much information Gen Z can choose to consume, they lack the shared experiences previous generations had when everyone saw the same commercials, watched the same TV shows, or listened to the same music,” Dr. Joanne Frederick says in a comment to Her Campus magazine that perfectly encapsulates the phenomenon. “Gen Zers turn to early 00s shows, like Friends, Sex and the City, and That 70s Show, to experience life in a way that they never have, before ubiquitous social media and texting.”
The trend has expanded beyond media and entertainment to technology choices. The refusal of technological complexity and the need for shared meaning have drawn Gen Xers back to early 00s cameras, music devices, and even mobile phones. All gadgets designed to perform the functions we now use a smartphone for. Some companies are even trying to capitalize on the trend with mixed results. In this gallery, we collected six not-so-old yet already obsolete devices that young adults are re-discovering and bringing back a part of the Gen X nostalgia trend.
Opening image: The obligatory London dump, from the instagram account @francescaleslie_
Point-and-shoot compact cameras are by all means commercially dead, killed by the advent of smartphones. Now Gen Zers are drawn back to them exactly for the reasons of their demise: they are one-purpose devices that let you focus on the experience. The lack of quality is not an issue, A) because it’s part of the aesthetics (and also because Gen Zers don’t feel the urge to print) and B) because the ability to capture the experience is what really matters. In his book “The Social Photo”, social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson suggests that “as a medium, social photography becomes an important means to experience something not representable as an image but instead as a social process: an appreciation of impermanence for its own sake.”
Brands that are particularly popular among Gen Zers now are the Canon PowerShot and the Nikon Coolpix from the mid-00s to 2010.
A picture taken by Gen Zers with an older digital camera perfectly emulates the unsatisfactory results we Millennials would have despised back in the day.
A recent and widely popular report from the New York Times told the story of the Luddite Club, a group of Brooklyn teenagers who promote self-liberation from the chains of social media and complexly connected technology.
While the Club is clearly an extreme fueled by good old teen angst, it’s also the tip of the iceberg. Teens and young adults refuse the idea of an always-connected life more and more often. The phenomenon has been hard to quantify, but the ongoing success of nostalgia-driven phone designs and a resurgence of social-media-free dumb phones has certainly to do with more than millennials trying to briefly detoxify from their addictive tech habits.
Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014 and, more recently, Stranger Things might have played a role in rediscovering the walkman and the music cassette. The trend has been ongoing for a while. Even superstar tech reviewer Marques Brownlee reviewed an original Sony Walkman back in 2019.
Portable cassette players are sold for hefty prices on Etsy and eBay. And while they certainly won’t rewind the tape on streaming, they are carving their niche of younger aficionados.
Analog photography has been a growing trend for a while, and it certainly isn’t limited to Gen Zers. Yet, there’s a recent trend within the trend that recently contributed to the skyrocketing prices of compact cameras from the late era of analog cameras such as the Olympus mju II. While a mighty little analog camera with a great lens, the mju II is certainly not worth the €200-and-above prices it’s going for within the niche of analog enthusiasts.
The mju II is so popular because it brilliantly mixes the aesthetics of analog photography with the simplicity of digital cameras. Something hard to find in older cameras which, albeit qualitatively better, come with a way longer learning curve for the uninitiated to the complexities of film photography.
Despite searching for refuge in the memory of simpler times, Gen Zers are still drawn to share their retro choices on social media, especially TikTok. On the platform, the hashtag #Y2K is widely popular. So is also the habit, or stylistic choice if you prefer, to record video while holding the microphone of their wired earbuds closer to the mouth. Whether Apple earphones or another brand, TikTokers seem to love cheap wired headphones. In this case, the nostalgia component is mixed with a purely technical choice: microphones on wired headphones, especially more recent ones, are qualitatively better than any microphone mounted on expensive Bluetooth earbuds. There’s no contest, as the wired connection allows transmitting a non-degraded signal whose quality can’t be matched by Bluetooth compressing algorithms.
When it comes to listening, it’s a different story, and the aesthetics of the black silhouettes with white-corded iPod earbuds from the mid-00s might play a fashion role.
Created in the early 00s as a tool to teach children how to type, the Alphasmart Neo 2 portable word processor is also going through an unexpected revival.
The device is a quite basic electronic typewriter that can hold more than 200 pages of text and comes with modern word-processing features such as copy-paste and even a dictionary for spell checking.
Young (and not so young) writers have been snatching them off of eBay like crazy, as they enable a form of undistracted writing that no computer program can emulate.
Although the phenomenon affects a smaller niche than photography, Gen Z seems to have rediscovered the handheld camcorders of the early 2000s as well. Various YouTubers - sometimes with big followings - are using models such as the Sony Handycam (or similar) to document their lives through video. Again, this is a return to the past that has nothing to do with quality (with video the results in comparison with a smartphone are far worse than photos), and everything to do with the need to find and convey meaning in a way that's unadultered by filters and artificial intelligence.