The Good Old Days? - Thoughts on Nostalgia

We live in a golden age of technology as far as I’m concerned. Never before have had so many people had access to truly powerful technology and devices. Even mid-range smartphones nowadays pack the type of computing power that was not too long ago reserved for laptop or even desktop computers, while also packing cameras that equal or even surpass some DSLRs or mirrorless cameras. I mean, I’m writing this on a tablet with a CPU that used to be reserved for MacBooks and yet is more compact and lightweight than said MacBooks, even with its heavy keyboard case. And yet, there seems to be a growing trend away from this amazing technology, and towards either retro or pure analogue. I don’t really remember when I first noticed the trend, it must have been around 2016 or 2017, when I first started to take YouTube seriously as an entertainment service, rather than it just being a random collection of weird clips. At the time, a couple of creators I’d been following suddenly started adding some sort of VHS effect on their music videos. The videos in question were quite tongue-in-cheek, so I didn’t give it much thought, but at the same time, a former colleague of mine started posting scans of Polaroid photos on Facebook, with deliberately low quality. Steam had at this point of course been flooded with “retro” and pixel-art games for years, some of them good, others not so much. Fast forward to today, eight years and one pandemic later, and this retro trend has fully exploded. People who weren’t even a gleam in their parents’ liaisons’ eye in the 1980s or 1990s are suddenly trying to recreate not just the fashion of that era, but also the tech.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, but I just don’t get the attraction. I mentioned in another blog post that I was in school when mobile phones first became mainstream. I am very lucky to have lived through the age that those following the ongoing retro trend are trying to replicate. But I’ll be level with you, all that glitters is not gold. So, for context, I grew up in an IT-centric household, even back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My dad was a programmer, and even in 1990, I was writing my homework on the family computer and getting my first taste of computer games. That was the time when what is now called pixel art was one of the high points of graphics power in these early machines. Later, when I was at boarding school in Austria, I got my first laptop, this must have been in 1999 or 2000, something completely unheard of at the time, and while it was a revolution for me, things were not necessarily easy. 

A boarding school room in Austria around the turn of the millennium is probably the last place anyone would have expected to see a laptop, but still, I had one. And as much as I love reminiscing, I would NOT want it back!

Battery life on my first laptop was abysmal, two to three hours if I was lucky, the machine as bulky, loud and sensitive to even the slightest shock. And let’s not talk about the screen. The situation was similar on the phone front. My first mobile phone, the Siemens C10, was positively anaemic, even by the standards of the time. Forget about touch screens, built-in cameras, media players, internet access or even a colour display. It barely even had a backlight. I mean, the very fact that it was a phone by Siemens should tell you enough about how different those times were. And while I’d upgraded via a rather circuitous route to a more advanced phone for my last few years in Austria, and in school, lugging around a laptop, a phone, a portable CD player and, in my last year, a PDA in the shape of a Palm M105, was quite the chore. Not to mention that every single one of these devices was pretty limited in what it could do. So why do so many people seem to be hankering back to those days? From my perspective, there are two different answers. 

For the younger generation, those born in the 1990s or 2000s, a large part of the interest is simple curiosity, reinforced by shows in recent years such as Stranger Things. This generation obviously never lived through that period, which is a primary basis for their interest. A few of my colleagues are in their mid-20s, and from my experience, this curiosity is indeed pretty real, and I myself have the same level of interest into the mid-1970s and the period up to around 1985, when my own memories begin to kick in.

For the older generation, I can basically copy the reasoning directly from my notes for this blog post: I think it’s a combination of childhood nostalgia and simple escapism, the first part of which I can actually understand. The latter part however, not so much. The 1980s were more than just weird haircuts, monochrome green computers and washed-out photos. Bullying was very much a way of life and either ignored or encouraged by those in power, it was a horrific time for the LGBT community and the entire world teetered on the brink of nuclear war, in fact it was regularly far closer to it than we are these days, and with a lot more warheads ready to go on both sides. Social pressures were just as great in those days as they are now, even without social media or the internet.

I still remember feeling so cool for having this. The Zire 71 from Palm was the first real “All-in-One” device I ever owned. MP3 player, full PDA functionality, office apps and most importantly…

…a camera slider, which I used here to document one of my late dad’s Frankenstein computer projects sometime around 2004, this little thing had it all. All except internet access.

Now, I don’t want to be holier than thou here. I have quite a soft spot for the tech of the early to mid 2000s myself and have thought about getting myself an old Palm PDA just to the sheer thrill of it. I was an avid Palm user back in the day, and still have fond memories of my first real “smart” device, a Palm Zire 71. It was an absolute marvel for me in its time: Apart from all the usual accoutrements of a Palm OS device, the Zire at the time sported an onboard music player, built in headphone jack, an SD card slot to extend your storage and a slide out camera, something almost unheard of in the early 2000s. It had no WiFi or Bluetooth connectivity, but that didn’t matter. This device, together with a foldout keyboard that connected to the Zire via its IR port was more than good enough for me to last me through several years as the secretary and press spokesman for the choir I was a part of. Here’s the thing though: Nostalgia is an unreliable narrator! And while that Palm PDA might have been the most advanced piece of tech in my social circle at the time, it is by todays standards also painfully limited, something that I’m just finding out with regards to a retro review of my old Asus EeePad Slider that I’m currently working on.

The ASU’s EeePad Slider SL101 felt like a similar slice of the future as the Zire 71. 

I understand that the present can be scary, confusing, infuriating or overwhelming, especially in this age of pandemics, renewed wars and ever escalating anthropogenic climate change. However, we are also in possession of tools that are several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything that was there even twenty years ago, let alone in the 1980s. We have the collective intellectual output of our species available at our fingertips! Whilst this has caused massive upheaval and problems, there is also unfathomable potential in these tools, in the technology that we have available. Yearning for, and regressing into, earlier technical ages will not put the genie back into the bottle. The box of Pandora was opened a long time ago, and we’ll only be able to deal with its content by facing it head-on and making the best of it. Turning away from it, either by turning to vintage tech or by eschewing technology altogether, only eliminates whatever agency we have, but doesn’t accomplish anything.