Stop the press. The haywire internet algorithms’ varioius malfuncitons aligned in such a way as to make a useful suggestion.
This digital miracle occurred over the weekend, when YouTube recommended a video wherein a Zoomer uses 1980s technology for a week.
For over fifteen minutes, I watched enrapt as YouTuber Liam Thompson spent a week self-exiled to the 1980s.
Did young Liam enjoy his 80s vacation? Or did he starve to death without DoorDash? Either way, what insights into man’s relationship with technology did he glean on his trip back in time?
Related: Gen Y and the Pre-Internet Age
The answers lie in this video:
My highlights:
Analog Video
It wouldn’t do to record a video about using only 1980s technology in digital HD, now would it? To avoid that inconsistency, Liam documented his week in the 80s on 8mm videotape.
You can spot the instant when he switched from the contemporary camera to the Sony camcorder. The picture becomes far grainier and less stable.
Maybe it’s just me, but my gut reaction to the 8mm video footage was Man, this looks normal.
Related: Watching the 90s Watch the 90s
Go back and check the video to see what I mean. Do you have the same response?
The Walkman
Thanks to Disney, this standard-issue 1980s device is probably the most familiar to younger generations.
Having just stopped using a Walkman within the past decade, it definitely struck the most resonance with me.
Liam, too, had all kinds of fun with his Walkman. You can hear the mirth in his voice and see his eyes light up while he’s listening to tapes on his daily run.
And it makes sense. Of all the Current Year tech, personal music players have changed the least in basic functionality. I’m not the first to point out that a Walkman is basically an iPod. The main difference is just a matter of storage.
In fact, the same can be said for a lot of 2020s tech.
More on that observation later.
Paper Maps
Here’s one contest modern tech wins hands down.
Navigating with paper maps was never not a pain in the ass.
And it could be dangerous, as well, if you were driving alone.
GPS is so vastly superior, it’s the sole reason I finally got my first smartphone. It’s a good thing Liam didn’t end up carjacked in a bad part of town or lost in the wilderness.
Paper Books
Liam mentions that he’s an avid reader, and it’s his custom to do his reading on a Kindle.
So one would expect the switch to paper books to be quite an adjustment.
He seemed to take to dead tree editions just fine, though.
Longtime readers of this blog know that eBooks are the other recent innovation, along with Google Maps, which I have embraced.
Still, you can’t overstate the importance of having physical media that tech oligarchs can’t censor with the click of a mouse. So advantage: paper books.
Pizza Hut
I couldn’t in good conscience end this post without awarding Liam maximum points for dining at the official pizzeria of the 1980s.
Related: Generation Y’s Real CafĂ© 80s
Conclusion: The More Things Change …
Liam’s look back at the bygone days of Reagan brings to light several key insights about where we’ve been and where we are now.
For one, the chronicle of a zoomer immersing himself in the tech level of the 1980s brings us some noteworthy, and often counterintuitive, revelations:
- We pretty much have all the same stuff now, it’s just a lot smaller
- It’s also more consolidated–Liam’s brick phone, Mac, Walkman, etc. pretty much took the place of his smartphone
- Current Year devices are also faster, which raises another key point …
The main difference between current technology and tech that did the same stuff in the 1980s is that 80s tech took longer to interact with. But paradoxically, that lower ease of use placed hard limits on consumption.
Liam remarked how odd it felt not to be able to just reach for his phone to instantly obtain any information or entertainment he wanted.
Instead of that one Swiss Army knife device, he had to reach for his Walkman for music, a TV and VCR for movies, and print books or maps for info.
That division of labor, along with space limitations for storing media, explains why binge-watching didn’t exist in the 80s.
And even though social media did exist in the form of BBS, only weird nerd shut-ins were extremely online back then.
So what smartphones have done is turn everybody into this meme:
As author David Stewart noted elsewhere, a major good that society lost due to the tech boom was the time to be alone with our thoughts.
Your memory’s tendency to focus on high and lows while cutting out the mid accounts for most members of Gen Y’s rosy picture of the 80s. We forget the long stretches of time during which nothing at all happened.
If I try hard enough, I can dig between rose-colored flashbacks to pizza parties, arcade excursions, and movie theater trips to unearth hour upon hour of idle time.
To be honest, a good 30 percent of the hangouts, sleepovers, and mall trips I’d try to arrange fell through.
More often than I’d like to remember, I’d come home from school or get up on a Saturday and call up my friends, only to find they were busy or get no answer. That meant spending the weekend watching TV for the 3 or so good hours of shows they broadcast, doing chores, and slaving over pointless homework.
And in between, there was nothing.
It was the same while standing in line to buy a new CD, watching the clock count down the last 20 minutes till the end of the school day, or sitting in the car on the long drive to grandma’s house.
In the 80s, the ability to keep yourself company was vital to maintaining sanity.
And as our current social disorders show, I think it still is.
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I heard a saying once from a motivational speaker don’t take your work home with you and don’t take home to work with you. I.e – everything has its place.
I think the division of labor with older technology kept us sane and less prone to ADD. With a smart phone, it does EVERYTHING. No matter what you’re doing with a smart phone, chances are you’re being bombarded with a thousand other distractions. Talking with someone on the phone? Here’s 100+ messages about your IG post that just went viral. Wait there’s more, while you’re checking that out TikTok just called, your bestie just made a new post for the day. Round and round, it’s mental abuse what we are doing to ourselves. We are programming our brains into ADD because we habitually can’t focus on one thing for a fraction of a second.
Even since I swapped back to using a flip phone, I’ve felt more at peace. Even if I’m bored at work with nothing to do, I have little to no reason to pull out my phone and I’m forced to look into other things to keep me occupied. I feel like the non smart phone alternatives to entertainment feel cleaner.
At most, I use my old smart phone as a gaming device bc there’s still a game I play on there that I’m invested in, but that engagement stays at home where it belongs.
The only thing people are losing by using older tech is time, but let’s be real here, that time they are gaining isn’t being put to better use in most cases.
“Even since I swapped back to using a flip phone, I’ve felt more at peace.”
This is great! I have used my smartphone to replace a lot of things. It’s mostly used for good. However, it has (almost) zero social media on it. It’s email and some habit/diet apps. The worst problem is YouTube, the only social media app, but even that I’m using to sing/pray the hinge offices.
I think it’s mostly the social media app effect that makes it the worst problems, although I admit I was never into gaming.
Here’s something that’s easy to overlook: He’s using all this technology that has been “obsolete” for decades… and it all still works (well, with the exception of the smoking TV.) Now obviously stuff has broken down forever, but this is consistent with my searches through thrift shops and getting decades old technology that obviously hasn’t been maintained well but which works just fine. You can start to see the cracks by seeing what you can’t get easily used. Some newer technology, like blu-ray players, works fine for a long time and you can find easily in pawn shops and the like. MP3 players are almost entirely absent, because they break down. Same thing with smart phones. I guess Apple in particular is responsible for a lot of this.
Beyond stuff outright breaking, when you get to software, streaming and “cloud storage” you run into the problem where the thing you bought required connecting to an online server which has since been shut down, meaning that you can’t use it ever again. In contrast a SNES will still play games just fine if you put in the proper cartridge. A book is even more resilient; as long as the paper and ink themselves are fine nothing is going to prevent you from reading that book. I have books that have been passed down in the family since 1900, and only need a bit of repair to the binding.
It was quick, but also note him going through the Mac manual and noting that it is actually comprehensive and useful. Old software manuals really were works of art, and they had to be when the user might never get help from outside of the manual. Now we are in the age of “lol, someone might be able to help you on our discord channel, idk.”
If something has lasted for 30 years, chances are it’ll last for another 30 years.
Now where’d I put that NES controller?
I have never adopted smartphones. Still have a flip.
I have been given THREE smartphones by well-meaning people who don’t understand that choice, and… for a while I use them as camera, guitar tuner, couple geeky apps like astronomy, and they are cool… and then they die, for no apparent reason. Screen bricks up so the only bit you can see is part of the clock at the top. Or it won’t turn on anymore at all. Dead. Unusable. I’ve not had one last more than six months. No idea why anybody’d pay $300-$400 for one. How often do you typically replace them?
Meanwhile, I find one of the easiest ways to entertain my kids and introduce stealth learning into their lives is to buy them old tech. They have a tape recorder, a record player, an electric typewriter, a whole series of quite nice but outdated digitcal cameras… and they’re now very familiar with a variety of classical composers (records are a dollar at the St VdP) (they really like Bach and Tchaikovsky), they’re teaching themselves to touch-type, they’ve recorded a whole bunch of random interviews with each other, made little books and newspapers and menus, worked out a few sound and visual effects, trick photography, they make little movies where they work out a storyline, make costumes, write a script, and then film scenes. They troubleshoot their own tech when it isn’t working right. And they’ve learned *so much* just because the devices were there for them to use. It helps that they all cost next to nothing. They can take all the risks they want. If it breaks it breaks, oh well.
Young relatives who live in a ‘smartphone house’ come to visit now and then, and the contrast is stark. They have a device in their hand that could do most of those things: the trick photography, the movie filming and editing, access to every composer who ever lived, self-publishing… all that in their pocket.
And they use it to watch youtube and talk to Character.ai all. day. long. Zero learning, zero creative output, and they can’t be bothered to talk to the actual people in the same room because it doesn’t give them a big enough dopamine hit. It’s like their souls have been excised.
“Old software manuals really were works of art”
Indeed – video game manuals, too. I spent many hours on the school bus staring at the artwork. Faxanadu was probably my favorite.
Planned obsolescence is one of the worst things we’ve ever come up with. It’s truly saddening that market forces actively incentivise companies to NOT make the best product possible, but instead to make cheap crap that needs constant replacement. This is also one of the points that has most convinced me that Free Market Idolatry is stupid – contrary to the Libertarians’ faith in it, the Free Market regularly encourages evil and/or socially destructive behaviour.
“The main difference between current technology and tech that did the same stuff in the 1980s is that 80s tech took longer to interact with. But paradoxically, that lower ease of use placed hard limits on consumption.”
That includes the Internet too. In the1980’s, the Boomers and Silents were working full time jobs. The WWII retirees were not likely to jump online at all. That left the people who could get online mostly the young and after work hours for the young adult and middle age population. They were going to be techy savvy, too. Limits in time and by skill set.
However, with the rise of Facebook, smart phones, and Internet comments, it’s easier for anyone to make a comment. Further, the Silents are all of retirement age, and the Boomers are mostly retired. I’m generally convinced that the rise in online toxicity and love of mind numbing theories with the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one* is in part thanks to two massive generations with too much time on their hands. I’m sorry to say that Gen X is getting close to adding to the chaos.
*Kudos to anyone who can name this quintessential Boomer song that my own Dad played on the guitar when I was a child.
“Kudos to anyone who can name this quintessential Boomer song that my own Dad played on the guitar when I was a child.”
Clarification: My Dad heard it on the radio and then played it on the guitar himself at home. My Dad absolutely was not the writer/performer. 🙂
Too bad, because “Wiffle Guthrie” would be an awesome stagename!
The Internet didn’t go public until the mid 90s, so I don’t think anyone COULD have created modern Net culture in the 80s even if they’d wanted to. Prior to the public internet, you pretty much had to be a university student or military researcher if you wanted access to it. At least, that’s the version I was taught.
Those stretches of downtime where why some of us had books in our backpacks, or took books to read on car trips.
I’m still a dead tree book guy. We own a few hundred volumes, probably. When a professor provides the ISBN-13 for the ebook of a required text, I go looking for the paperback edition’s ISBN instead. I don’t want to “own” a book I’ll lose when the power goes out. When the big freeze and power outage hit Houston a few winters ago, my wife and I opened the blinds and curled up with books. (And the dog, who loved getting up on the bed because we needed her extra body heat.)
The Internet didn’t go public until the mid 90s, so I don’t think anyone COULD have created modern Net culture in the 80s even if they’d wanted to. Prior to the public internet, you pretty much had to be a university student or military researcher if you wanted access to it. At least, that’s the version I was taught.
Oops, duplicate comment!
“Liam remarked how odd it felt not to be able to just reach for his phone to instantly obtain any information or entertainment he wanted.”
I recently read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, about the experiences of a young man convalescing (ostensibly) from tuberculosis at a remote Swiss spa.
And one of things that struck me was how completely beholden he was to the limited information told to him by his doctors. Were his symptoms actually consistent with the diagnosis they gave him? Were the medicines appropriate? Doses? What alternative therapies were possible? Etc.
The most he would be able to do to verify and investigate their work would be to order some medical texts and go through them; a time-intensive process — how would one even research which titles to purchase? — and one that would still leave one wondering about the adequacy of the resources etc.
Too much information that is readily accessible can have its downsides, but it also is empowering when you think about the situation for someone like the character in Mann’s novel.
On the other hand, if the young man had all that information, what would he do with it? How would he sort the wheat from the chaff, as it were? There is a vast difference between owning a library and possessing the knowledge and experience to apply what is stored in it. I’m not a doctor, so I can’t speak to the main character’s predicament directly. However, as an IT instructor working on a degree in theology, I have my own collections of fairly technical books. They’re a passive resource without the context I supply based on my previous education and experience. Without what I know, I can’t even assess the assertions the various authors make, or determine the usefulness of any given book. There are rules of thumb, of course. Older books on computer science are less likely to be useful, unless I’m dealing with a system which changes slowly. In fact, much of my CS technical library is obsolete. Some of it is outdated by the time it’s printed.
One of the canards of the modern age is “knowledge is power.” That is incorrect. Knowledge is a best a tool, at worst an invitation to the pride by which the Adversary (and humanity) fell away from God. Rather, “knowledge makes us proud, but love edifies.”