The Limits of Tech 1: Vintage Tech
In an era dominated by high-tech convenience and automation, there is a growing desire towards vintage technology. From fountain pens and vinyl records to Polaroid cameras and manual transmission cars, these older technologies offer a unique appeal that contemporary innovations often lack. This eagerness comes from the intentionality, effort, and a deeper connection they foster between the user and the art, the hobby, the passion that the user is either consuming or producing.
The Appeal of Vintage Tech
Film Photography
I’m going to start with the tech that illustrate my argument the most. Have you ever saw your old photos since you purchased a digital camera? I bet you didn’t, because no one does, except when you have a social media challenge like “Me today vs 10 years ago” and you look for some photo using a date filtering in your could provider’s gallery.
When film photography was a thing, and it was for my parents until 2006, we always have the ritual of taking 36 pictures, the limit given by a film, then we send to develop, and when you develop 36 photos you earned a kodak photo album, that creates a compilation for that trip, and when you had a guest on your home was quite natural if a travel destination came up during the conversation to get the photo album to show them.
Digital photography is a very streamlined process, you take tons of shots, see what is the best, post it and you’re done, is as ephemeral as living through the moment without a drop of attention.
Vinyl, CDs and Tapes
These techs are an example that goes right on to the consumer side of vintage tech, and not something that you create with. The biggest thing that we lost with streaming, social media, and digital media in general is intentionality, which is consuming a piece of content, only one with begin, middle and end because you want it and not because an algorithm decided, not on an infinite playlist mode, and the power of that lies on the friction, on the decision process and owning your decision, and “owning your decision” is a theme that will come back a lot in these series.
Beyond that there is the aspect of endless ownership, the disc is mine and I’ll replay as much as I want, and no license agreement will be on my way. The streaming era, and subscription model already pushed the market to saturation, and it takes only a few bad experiences of not being able to rewatch that movie that I liked so much to start looking to the subscription model as a curse to get rid of as soon as possible, although marketing tries to shape the consumers desire to be to most mainstream possible to avoid the issues of deleting a niche media, eventually more and more people will pass through this phase of dissatisfaction with such business model.
Boats, Cars and Pens
Any meaningful hobby and sport relies on difficulty, effort, in the joy of leaning, that’s why any old tech is considered prettier, more appealing, but most people are still put away because they were trained to fear struggle, but over the next decades people will start noticing the psychological benefits of struggle, and the process of just being focused on a single thing, and mastering a specific art, our lives and hobbies are not supposed to be a factory’s production line, but we are treating as such, because we were fed the propaganda that joy is consuming one thing, and then as soon as it finishes move to the next one, and if possible consume two or three things at once because it will be better for the economy.
This is just the first one, this series is an invitation to rethink tech, and our relationship with it. I work with tech and I love it, but over time I start to question more and more when we will see that the more is not the better like we used to think in the techno-optimistic era of the 90s and early 2000s.
Here are sources below that you can easily find on google images, over time more and more people are realizing this and physical media is the most accesible way to start it. Over the next texts I’ll discuss it more deeply and the implications on the UI/UX of digital tech.
