It’s been observed that nobody really wants to live in 2024. A lot of people, especially members of Generation Y, long to go back to the simpler days of the 1980s. But in reality, the main difference between daily life in the 80s compared to now was the absence of flastscreen devices.
Imagine waking up tomorrow and finding all the flat, glowing screens you rely on—your smartphone, tablet, HDTV, and laptop—gone. What would life be like? Surprisingly, it might feel more familiar than you’d expect. Without flatscreens, much of daily life today would resemble the world of the 1980s more than any other era. Let’s take a look at how omitting these devices would leave most of us in an environment more like that decade than many would like to believe.
If you think about it, the majority of present-day consumer tech does the same stuff as 1980s technology, just miniaturized and all in one device. Take your smartphone, for instance. You may feel dependent on it, but without it you could still have a landline. While people in Current Year would feel temporarily disoriented by the absence of instant messaging, you could still keep in touch just like people back in the 80s did. If you have enough disposable income, you could still have a brick-type cell phone that could at least make calls on the go.
As far as socializing is concerned, Facebook and Twitter do basically the same thing as BBSes back in the day; just with ads, user IP theft, and a slicker interface.
The biggest difference that removing smartphones would make would be a return to planning ahead and coordinating with precision. Back in the 80s, if you told a friend you’d meet him at a certain place and time, you stuck to it. There was no texting last-minute updates or excuses. In a post-flatscreen world, this type of intentionality would make a comeback, likely slowing down the pace of life but increasing its reliability.
Related: Zoomer Uses 1980s Technology for a Week
Entertainment would present even less of a change. Video store memberships are basically streaming services with one extra step. Ditto CDs, tapes, and even vinyl records in relation to Spotify. Then as now, people still went to theaters to see new movies, just more often. Studios incessantly tweaking and even censoring classics already have people rebuilding phsyical media collections.
Speaking of which, no flatscreens means no Kindles. But as mentioned above, there’s already a notable movement back to physical books. And comic book fans never stopped buying print copies for the most part. Only magazines haven’t enjoyed a resurgence, but a lot of them are still around if you know where to look.
The lost Zoomer–or even Millennial–who can’t find his own backyard without Google Maps has become a meme. Yet roadmaps still exist on paper, so granting a slight inconvenience when it comes to storage, you could, with some token effort, get around town in the same way as a 1980s pizza guy.
Working from home: Surely, there’s a contemporary trend that’s a marked departure from the 1980s workplace. But employers are already rolling back work-from-home accommodations as we leave the Corona-chan lockdowns in the rearview mirror. Besides, it would theoretically be possible for a lot of people to accomplish basic tasks on 1980s-era PCs and teleconference via phone and fax (the Zoomer cited in the linked post abvove managed just that feat).
Sure, some modern industries might grind to a halt. But many others would adjust by dusting off equipment and practices that still remain functional. Video calls would be out, but those turned out to be a msitake anyway.
As much as we think that new technology defines our lives, the truth is that much of it simply builds on older frameworks. The flatscreen era is, at its core, an extension of the technologies developed in the 1980s. The personal computer, the Walkman, cable TV—these were all inventions that shaped life back then. And in many ways, they still do today.
Strip away the flat screens, and you suddenly get transported 40 years back. But instead of a giant leap, it’s a jump to an era that would seem strangely recognizable. The main differences would be superficial, with people relying more on physical objects, in-person interactions, and slower, more deliberate ways of doing things.
The reality is, we are much closer to day-to-day life of the 1980s than we might realize. And our 21st centurylives hinge on surprisingly few pieces of technology (mostly software). Remove those sleek flatscreens and apps, and you’d still recognize many parts of your daily routine. Would there be inconveniences? Yes. But you would also get continuous reminders that the foundational aspects of how we live haven’t changed as drastically as most people assume.
Welcome to the future past.
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Despite all our talk of progress, things have not changed that much over the last half century. Maybe it’s because we knew we had something and strive to work around it instead of with it, for whatever reason. By the time of Cultural Ground Zero it felt like we’d already made our minds to ignore what brought us there and pretend we could Progress by listening to our betters and abandoning the past.
Didn’t quite work out that way.
Even in times of great “technological efficiency” if feels like we are doing as much work, if not more, just to keep things running. I think with the limitations of previous technology, systems had to be simple. Now, because we have all this technological power, our systems are sloppy and fragile.
Swapping to an old flip phone has reminded me that there’s nothing special about new technology (like smart phones). Smart technology doesn’t improve the base function of a phone, to call and text, but instead just adds a bunch of things I don’t need, but I’m being told I can live without.
Another example of why the line doesn’t always go up.
There is one thing a smartphone improves on over a dumbphone, and that is the ability to use encrypted communications. To forgo encryption in our current time and place is madness and folly. Not a sexy or obvious one, but it is essential.
Of course, this does not mean or require dropping the equivalent of car down payments on some overpriced high end model once every few years either. As long as the device you have receives security updates, it’ll be fine.
My Dad has all of his 1960’s bubble era music on a tiny SD card that his car plays. He’s so impressed by that fact. And it is impressive, in fairness to him.
However, when he was younger, he had a collection of records, 8 tracks, tapes and CDs, the last 3 of which would fit in his car without needing a rock band in his backseat.
Modernity was only slightly more inconvenient back then. It was not radically different, as you correctly point out. A dot matrix printer is still a printer, etc, etc.
People like thinking about their youth because they were young and Ma/Pa was doing the adulting for them, if they had an even vaguely stable family. Adulting is tiring and time consuming, although I still prefer it to childhood.
I think you are mostly correct, Brian, with one adjustment for widespread public access to the Internet. While pinning our effective tech level to the late 1980s does point out the technologies we take for granted today were at least developing by then, most of the world didn’t know about many of them. Prodigy, for example, was available as an online service in the late 80s, but wouldn’t become an ISP until the mid 90s. AOL became an ISP a bit later, around the same time period. Still, even technologies like HTTP which were not mature by 1990 were at least nascent, so I can see your point. Even things like virtualization, which make “the Cloud” as we know it possible, and which wouldn’t start to mature until the mid ’00s, were at least theorized much sooner. All in all, I would pin our effective tech level closer to 1995 than to 1989.