The Gentrification of Yesterday: How Wealthy Nostalgia Tourists Are Pricing the Poor Out of the…

The Gentrification of Yesterday: How Wealthy Nostalgia Tourists Are Pricing the Poor Out of the Past

In which we discover that “Old Tech 2026” is just colonialism with a sepia filter

There’s a certain type of person, you know them, you’ve seen them, you may have dated one in a moment of weakness, who looks at a crumbling rowhouse in a working-class neighborhood and sees potential. Not potential for the people who live there, mind you. Potential for them. Potential for exposed brick and reclaimed wood and a kitchen island where the previous owner’s grandmother used to can vegetables to survive the winter.

They don’t see a home. They see content.

Now these same people have discovered something even better than distressed real estate: distressed technology. The flip phones. The DVD players. The disposable cameras and MP3 players and all the other detritus of the early 2000s that your parents threw in a box in the garage because they couldn’t afford to be sentimental about objects that actually worked.

Welcome to Old Tech 2026, the latest movement promising psychological salvation through consumer downgrade. A UK-based TikToker named Ava (handle: @vioiliet_) has convinced roughly 200,000 people, or at least convinced them to express interest, which is not the same thing but makes for better headlines, to abandon their smartphones and streaming services on January 1, 2026, in favor of the technological equivalent of a juice cleanse.

The pitch is seductive in that way wellness culture always is: you’re overwhelmed, you’re overstimulated, you’re drowning in algorithmic sludge and doomscrolling and the ceaseless churn of content. The solution? Go back. Return to a simpler time. Embrace the noble flip phone, the tactile DVD, the disposable camera that forces you to be present because you only get twenty-seven shots and no idea if any of them are usable.

It sounds like rebellion. It sounds like opting out. It sounds like the first sensible thing anyone’s suggested since “maybe we shouldn’t let children use Instagram.”

It is none of these things.

What it actually is, what it has always been, every time this particular fever dream cycles through the culture, is gentrification. The same impulse that sends trust-fund kids into Bed-Stuy with dreams of “character” and “community” is now sending them into Best Buy’s clearance section with dreams of “authenticity” and “intentionality.” They’re not rejecting consumer culture. They’re colonizing a new market segment. And just like every other gentrification story, the people who actually lived there first are about to get priced out.

The Sisyphean Cycle, or: We’ve Done This Before

Amy Orben, a Cambridge researcher who has clearly spent too much time reading nineteenth-century moral panic literature for her own mental health, calls this the “Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics.” New medium arrives. Adoption outpaces social norms. People freak out. Correction occurs. Everyone calms down. New medium arrives. Repeat until heat death of universe.

The formula is so consistent it should be patented. Every generation discovers that their particular communications technology is different, that this time the kids really are being ruined, that previous panics were overblown but this one reflects genuine civilizational decay. And every generation is exactly as wrong as the one before.

When print arrived, authorities immediately understood that mass-produced text meant mass-produced ideas, and mass-produced ideas meant the masses might start having ideas, which simply would not do. Pope Innocent VIII’s Inter-multiplices of 1487 established Church oversight of printing before most Europeans had ever seen a printed book. The fear wasn’t literacy itself, it was what literate people might read, and worse, what they might think about it afterward.

Novels produced the same panic in a more domestic key. The specter of “reading fever” haunted eighteenth-century Europe, with physicians and moralists warning that fiction would corrupt the young, weaken the will, and produce a generation of daydreaming emotional cripples unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. When Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther allegedly inspired a wave of imitative suicides, it confirmed everything the panic-merchants had been saying: stories were dangerous, especially to impressionable minds, and the only responsible course was restriction.

Sound familiar? Swap “novels” for “social media” and “reading fever” for “phone addiction” and you’ve got a modern op-ed that practically writes itself. The Atlantic has been running variations on this piece for fifteen years.

But here’s the thing the Sisyphean model captures that most tech criticism doesn’t: these panics never actually reverse the technology. Nobody stopped printing. Nobody stopped reading novels. The panic exhausts itself, norms develop, the medium gets domesticated, and society moves on, until the next medium arrives and the whole circus starts again.

What Orben’s model doesn’t fully capture, because it isn’t her focus, is what happens commercially during the correction phase. Because the correction isn’t just psychological adjustment or norm development. It’s also, and increasingly primarily, a market opportunity.

Every backlash is a brand.

The Original Gentrifiers: What the Luddites Actually Wanted (And Why It Wasn’t Your Flip Phone)

If you’ve heard of the Luddites at all, you’ve heard the wrong story. The popular version goes like this: simple-minded workers, frightened by machinery they couldn’t understand, smashed looms in a futile rearguard action against progress. They were on the wrong side of history. They were anti-technology. They were, and this is the part that makes modern tech critics nervous, stupid.

This version is useful if you’re a tech executive who wants to dismiss criticism without engaging it. “Don’t be a Luddite” is the polite way of saying “don’t be a moron,” and it works precisely because everyone has absorbed the cartoon version of the story.

The actual history is more interesting, more complicated, and considerably more relevant to understanding why “Old Tech 2026” isn’t rebellion, it’s cosplay.

The Luddite uprising of 1811–1816 was not a protest against machinery. It was a protest against how machinery was being used: to de-skill labor, break customary wage standards, and concentrate power in the hands of factory owners at the expense of workers who had previously controlled their own trades. The frame-knitters and croppers and weavers who made up the Luddite movement weren’t afraid of technology. Many of them operated sophisticated equipment themselves. What they opposed was a specific deployment of technology designed to make their skills worthless and their leverage nonexistent.

This wasn’t abstract philosophy. It was economic warfare, and both sides understood the stakes. The British government eventually made machine-breaking a capital offense and deployed more troops against the Luddites than Wellington had taken to the Iberian Peninsula. You don’t hang people for being confused about progress. You hang them for threatening profits.

The Luddites lost, of course. They were outgunned, outmaneuvered, and eventually crushed. But their defeat wasn’t inevitable, and it wasn’t because they were wrong about what was happening. They were right that the new machinery was being deployed to immiserate them. They were right that the owners didn’t give a damn about “progress” except insofar as progress meant cheaper labor and fatter margins. They were right that technology isn’t neutral, that the same loom can be a tool of liberation or a tool of domination depending on who controls it and for what purpose.

What does any of this have to do with some TikToker asking you to buy a flip phone?

Precisely nothing. That’s the point.

The Luddite resistance was collective, material, and aimed at the actual structures of power that determined how technology would be used. It cost people their lives. It required solidarity across trades and towns. It was, in the most literal sense, a fight, not a vibe, not a challenge, not a content vertical.

Old Tech 2026 is an individual consumer choice dressed up as social movement. It proposes that the problem with technology is your relationship to it, not the economic structures that shape how technology is developed and deployed. It suggests that the solution lies in purchasing different products, not in challenging who profits from production. It is, in other words, the exact opposite of Luddism,a privatized, depoliticized, thoroughly defanged imitation that borrows the aesthetic of resistance while abandoning everything that made the resistance meaningful.

The Luddites would have had some thoughts about content creators monetizing their name to sell digital detox courses. None of those thoughts would have been polite.

William Morris and the Birth of Bourgeois Guilt-Shopping

If you want to understand how authentic critique becomes premium product,the precise mechanism by which rebellion gets strip-mined for brand value,you could do worse than study William Morris.

Morris was a nineteenth-century English artist, designer, writer, and socialist who looked at industrial capitalism and saw exactly what it was: a system that degraded workers, uglified the world, and reduced human beings to appendages of machines. His response was the Arts and Crafts movement, a coordinated effort to restore dignity to labor and beauty to objects by returning to traditional methods of production. Handmade, not factory-made. Craft, not mass production. Human skill, not mechanical reproduction.

The diagnosis was correct. Industrial production was degrading. Factory labor was alienating. The mass-produced goods flooding Victorian markets were often ugly, shoddy, and designed for nothing but profit. Morris saw clearly that the problem wasn’t technology per se,he wasn’t opposed to tools or techniques,but the social relations surrounding production. Workers were exploited. Consumers were manipulated. The whole system optimized for accumulation at the expense of human flourishing.

His solution was to create an alternative: workshops organized around craft principles, producing beautiful objects through meaningful labor. The famous Morris & Co. designs,the wallpapers and textiles and furniture you still see reproduced in upscale home stores,were supposed to be a rebuke to industrial capitalism, a demonstration that another way was possible.

And this is where it gets painful.

Because Morris & Co. products were expensive. They had to be. Handmade goods cost more than factory goods, that’s the entire point,you’re paying for skilled labor, not machine time. Which meant that the people who could afford Arts and Crafts furniture were… the wealthy. The very people benefiting from industrial capitalism were the primary consumers of the movement designed to critique industrial capitalism.

Morris understood this problem and it tormented him. He was an active socialist, gave speeches, organized, and genuinely wanted his ideas to transform society. He was not a hypocrite,he was a man caught in a contradiction he couldn’t resolve within his own lifetime.

But the market didn’t share his ambivalence. The market just saw opportunity.

Arts and Crafts became a style, detached from its politics. The aesthetic of handmade,the rough edges, the visible joinery, the natural materials,became signifiers of taste and class, markers that the consumer was sophisticated enough to reject mass production. The critique became the brand. The rejection of industrial capitalism became a premium product category within industrial capitalism.

You can buy “Arts and Crafts style” furniture at Target now. It costs slightly more than the particle-board stuff. It’s manufactured in factories overseas. William Morris would have burned it all.

The trajectory is so perfect it should be carved above the entrance to business schools: radical critique → authentic movement → aesthetic identification → market segmentation → premium product line → mass-market knockoff → critique absorbed, defanged, and converted to revenue.

Old Tech 2026 isn’t even at the “authentic movement” stage. It’s already entering market segmentation with the boutique dumbphone category pre-built and ready for expansion. The Light Phone III,the most prestigious of the anti-smartphone smartphones,costs $700. Eight hundred dollars for a device that makes calls and sends texts. Eight hundred dollars to prove you’ve rejected consumer culture.

At least Morris made wallpaper that was actually beautiful. These people are selling you the absence of features and calling it enlightenment.

Back to the Land, Forward to Whole Foods

The 1960s and 70s produced the largest deliberate exodus from mainstream American life since religious dissenters started founding utopian communities in the nineteenth century. The back-to-the-land movement saw hundreds of thousands of people,mostly young, mostly white, mostly middle-class,abandon cities and suburbs for rural homesteads where they would grow their own food, build their own shelters, and live in harmony with nature and each other.

The motivations were familiar: alienation from consumer society, disgust with political corruption, desire for authenticity and community, belief that the mainstream was spiritually bankrupt and practically doomed. The Vietnam War, environmental degradation, political assassinations, and the general psychedelic suspicion that consensus reality was a trap all contributed to the sense that dropping out was the only sane response to an insane society.

For a brief moment, it looked like something was actually happening. Communes sprouted across the American countryside. Publications like the Whole Earth Catalog provided practical guidance for homesteading. A genuine counter-culture was assembling itself on land nobody else wanted, proving that another way of life was possible.

Then reality set in.

Subsistence farming is hard. Actually hard, not Instagram hard,the kind of hard that breaks your back and your relationships and your faith in human nature. Many communes collapsed within a few years, destroyed by internal conflicts, inadequate planning, and the discovery that romantic visions of collective harmony tend to shatter when someone has to clean the composting toilet in February.

The people who stuck it out fell into two categories: the genuinely committed, who redesigned their lives around sustainable practices and became the nucleus of later environmental movements, and the trust-fund refugees, who could afford to fail at farming because they had family money to fall back on.

This second group is important because it explains everything that came after.

When the back-to-the-land movement receded in the late 1970s, it left behind not a transformed society but a transformed market. The ideas about organic food, environmental sustainability, natural materials, and holistic living didn’t disappear,they got commercialized. The counterculture didn’t defeat the mainstream. It got acquired.

Whole Foods, founded in 1980, is the direct inheritor of back-to-the-land idealism. It sells organic produce and natural products at premium prices to affluent consumers who want the feeling of opting out without the inconvenience of actually opting out. You can buy the virtuous self-image of someone who grows their own vegetables without growing any vegetables. You can purchase the identity of someone who rejects industrial food without rejecting the industrial food system. You can consume your way to authenticity.

The pattern should be clear by now. Every attempt to escape consumer capitalism becomes a new market segment within consumer capitalism. The escape becomes the product. The rejection becomes the brand. The counter-culture becomes the counter where you buy things.

And it gets worse, because the premium pricing of “authentic” goods doesn’t just commodify the critique,it actively prices out the people who were doing it first.

Organic food used to be what poor people grew because they couldn’t afford pesticides and processing. Now it costs three times as much as conventional produce. “Sustainable” fashion used to be called “used clothing” and it was where broke people shopped. Now it’s called “vintage” and a worn-out denim jacket costs more than a new one.

The gentrification is literal. The displacement is real. And the gentrifiers never notice because they’re too busy congratulating themselves on their mindful consumption.

The Light Phone and the $700 Rebuke to Materialism

Let’s talk about the Light Phone III, because it perfectly crystallizes everything wrong with the Old Tech 2026 phenomenon.

The Light Phone is a “minimalist” phone designed to free you from smartphone addiction. It makes calls. It sends texts. It has a few basic tools like maps and an alarm. It does not have a web browser, social media apps, or any of the other dopamine-delivery systems that make modern phones so compulsively usable.

This is a reasonable concept. There’s genuine value in a device that does less, that resists the attention-capturing dynamics of smartphone design, that lets you be present in your life instead of perpetually half-absent in the scroll.

The Light Phone III costs $700.

Let me say that again: seven hundred American dollars for a phone that makes calls and sends texts.

For comparison: you can buy a perfectly functional smartphone for under $100. A basic flip phone from a carrier costs around $20. The TracFone my grandmother used until she died cost $15 and did everything the Light Phone does,it just didn’t come wrapped in the aesthetics of intentionality.

The Light Phone isn’t selling a phone. It’s selling a statement. The statement is: I can afford to spend $700 to prove I’ve rejected materialism. I can purchase my way out of consumer culture. I have the disposable income to make my minimalism visible, legible, and aesthetically coherent.

This is not an escape from status competition. It is status competition in a different key,competitive minimalism, conspicuous non-consumption, the flex of owning less. It’s the same game with different rules, and the entry fee just went up.

Meanwhile, the actual cheap phones,the ones that cost $20 at Walmart, the ones that people on fixed incomes and tight budgets actually use,are getting harder to find. Carriers are phasing out 3G networks. Basic phone support is dwindling. The infrastructure that made simple devices viable is being dismantled precisely as wealthy consumers discover the virtue of simplicity.

The poor were there first. They’ve been using flip phones and basic devices for years, not because they were making a lifestyle statement but because that’s what they could afford. And now the gentrifiers are showing up, rebranding “budget option” as “intentional living,” and the market is responding by pricing simplicity as a premium good.

This is what gentrification always does. The value created by the original inhabitants,the “character” of a neighborhood, the “authenticity” of a practice, the “simplicity” of a technology,gets captured and monetized by newcomers who can outspend the people who were there first. The brownstone gets renovated and rented for $4,000 a month. The flip phone gets redesigned and sold for $700.

The displacement is the point. That’s how the alchemy works. You can’t sell “exclusive” if everyone has access. Gentrification requires scarcity, which means gentrification requires exclusion. The Light Phone is worth $700 precisely because most people can’t or won’t pay $700 for a phone that does less. The price is the product.

Vinyl, DVDs, and the Resurrection of Dead Formats

The Music Industry Association of America’s 2024 year-end report confirms what anyone who’s walked into a record store lately already knew: vinyl is back, and it’s expensive.

Vinyl revenue has grown every year for nearly two decades, and 2024 was no exception. Collectors and casual buyers alike are paying premium prices for records that cost a fraction as much in their original pressing. The average price of a new vinyl LP has increased roughly 20% since 2020, even as manufacturing technology has improved and production has scaled up.

Why? Not because vinyl sounds better,audiophiles can argue about warmth and analog fidelity until the heat death of the universe, but the technical case is questionable at best and the average consumer isn’t buying vinyl for accurate frequency response. They’re buying it for the ritual. The physical object. The album art at scale. The act of flipping the record. The intentionality of sitting down to listen rather than letting an algorithm drip-feed sonic content into your ears.

These are not stupid reasons. There’s genuine value in ritual, in physical engagement with music, in resistance to the frictionless consumption that streaming enables. The critique embedded in vinyl’s revival,that we’ve lost something in the transition to infinite, fungible, contextless access,is correct.

But the critique has become a price point.

The people who never stopped buying vinyl,the DJs, the collectors, the dedicated fans who maintained the format through its darkest years,are now competing with a flood of new buyers who have more money and less investment. Record stores that survived by catering to a niche community are now boutiques serving an affluent clientele. Prices rise. Selection gentrifies toward safe, high-margin reissues. The original community gets priced out or drowned out.

The DVD/CD revival follows the same script. The Washington Post recently profiled the return to physical media, framed,of course,as a reaction against streaming’s limitations. You don’t own what you stream. Content disappears without warning. Algorithms control what you see. Physical media gives you control.

All true. All reasonable. All about to be monetized beyond recognition.

Already, “collector’s edition” Blu-rays cost $30–40 for films you could stream for free with a subscription. Already, limited pressings and special releases create artificial scarcity. Already, the “ownership” argument is being packaged and sold at premium prices to people who want to feel like they’ve rejected the streaming paradigm without actually doing anything particularly inconvenient.

And no, this “gentrification of yesterday” thing is not just a clever metaphor you and I invented to feel smart. The thrift economy is getting squeezed in measurable, boring, real-world ways. A Goodwill employee in Ohio told a reporter their store’s prices had risen “about four or five times” in roughly a year and a half, and Goodwill confirmed they price based on the surrounding retail market, not on any charitable notion of “keep it cheap for people who need it.”

Meanwhile, demand is surging, and the market is doing what markets do: taking your coping mechanism and converting it into a premium experience. Foot traffic to thrift stores is up hard compared to pre-pandemic baselines (one retail analytics report put Q2 2025 thrift visits up 39.5% vs Q2 2019). And Goodwill itself is leaning into the glow-up, redesigning stores to attract a wider and more affluent audience, while reporting record sales and expansion. When the “flip phone lifestyle” crowd shows up, it doesn’t just make a cute TikTok. It changes who the store is for.

Then you get the accelerant: shocks that push more people into secondhand at once. When tariffs and price hikes drove more shoppers toward resale in 2025, traffic spiked on resale apps (Depop downloads up 68%, Poshmark 28%, eBay 15%, per one report), and even that coverage flagged the obvious downstream effect: higher demand can mean higher prices, which means thrifting stops being a safety net and starts being a contest. Pair that with the broader secondhand boom (the U.S. secondhand apparel market growing 14% in 2024, per ThredUp’s report), and the ending writes itself: the “return to simpler times” becomes a landlord.

The poor never left physical media. Lots of people still buy DVDs at Walmart because they don’t have reliable broadband, because they can’t afford multiple streaming subscriptions, because the public library lends DVDs for free. These aren’t lifestyle choices. They’re economic realities.

When the gentrifiers arrive, when physical media becomes a “movement” instead of a necessity,the market responds by segmenting. Premium editions for the intentional consumers. Shrinking selection of budget options for everyone else. The thrift store DVD section picked over by resellers hunting for collectible titles.

You’ve seen this movie before, if you can still find a reasonably priced copy.

The Colonizer’s Gaze: Nostalgia as Extraction

There’s a term in academic circles,”the tourist gaze”,that describes how visitors to a place see it differently than inhabitants. The tourist gaze aestheticizes, simplifies, and flattens. It looks for the picturesque, the authentic, the characteristic. It sees what it came to see and ignores the complicated, mundane, resistant realities of actual life.

The nostalgia gaze works the same way.

When Ava and her 200,000 interested followers talk about returning to flip phones and disposable cameras and DVDs, they’re not remembering the past,they’re imagining it. They’re constructing a fantasy of simplicity from the aesthetic residue of an era they either didn’t experience or didn’t experience as working-class reality.

The actual early 2000s were not simple. They were chaotic in different ways than now. People had flip phones because smartphones didn’t exist yet, not because they’d achieved enlightenment. People bought DVDs because streaming didn’t exist yet, and before that they bought VHS tapes, and before that they went to theaters or didn’t see the movie at all. People used disposable cameras because they couldn’t afford real cameras, and the pictures mostly came out terrible, and you wouldn’t know until you paid for developing and opened the envelope to discover twenty-seven blurry shots of your thumb.

This wasn’t intentional living. It was just living. It was the ordinary material reality of a particular moment, shaped by what technology existed and what people could afford. There’s nothing inherently virtuous about it. There’s nothing inherently superior. It was different, not better.

But the nostalgia gaze doesn’t want “different.” It wants “better.” It wants a usable past, a past that validates present discontents, a past that can be adopted as identity and performed as critique. It wants, in short, a product,and the actual past isn’t a product until someone extracts and processes and packages it.

This is the colonizer’s gaze applied to time instead of space. The same process that looked at indigenous practices and saw raw material for extraction, that looked at working-class neighborhoods and saw undervalued real estate, is now looking at the recent past and seeing an untapped market. The colonizer doesn’t ask what the original inhabitants want or need. The colonizer takes what the colonizer finds valuable and leaves the rest to rot.

What gets extracted from early-2000s technology culture? The aesthetic. The objects. The vibe. What gets left behind? The economic conditions that produced those objects. The people who used them not by choice but by necessity. The complicated, unglamorous reality of actually living with technology that was slower, clunkier, and more limited than what we have now.

The Old Tech 2026 movement doesn’t want to live in the past. It wants to visit,to tour the museum of recent history, pick up some souvenirs, and return to the present with enhanced identity credentials. It wants the Instagram version of 2005: filtered, curated, cropped to remove anything that would complicate the narrative.

And like all colonizers, it transforms what it touches. The vintage shop that used to sell cheap used electronics now sells curated vintage tech at boutique prices. The flip phone that used to be the budget option is now the statement option. The DVD that used to be the affordable alternative to theater prices is now the collectible alternative to streaming.

The colony never stays undiscovered for long. The rents always go up.

The Class Politics of “Unplugging”

Let’s be clear about who can actually do this.

Switching to a flip phone in 2026 is not a neutral choice. It’s a choice available to people whose jobs don’t require constant connectivity. It’s a choice available to people who don’t rely on smartphone apps for banking, for healthcare coordination, for gig work, for childcare logistics, for the thousand daily tasks that have migrated to digital platforms over the past fifteen years.

If you’re a freelance writer who can check email twice a day and nothing catches fire, you can use a flip phone. If you’re a home health aide whose scheduling app pings shift changes in real time, you can’t. If you’re a trust fund kid doing a gap year of intentional living, you can use a flip phone. If you’re a single parent coordinating school pickups and doctor’s appointments and after-school activities across three different apps, you can’t.

The ability to unplug is class privilege. It’s as simple and as brutal as that.

This doesn’t mean everyone who participates in digital minimalism is wealthy or that the concerns driving the movement are illegitimate. Smartphone addiction is real. Algorithmic manipulation is real. The mental health costs of constant connectivity are real and they fall on everyone, including and especially people who can’t afford to opt out.

But the solution being proposed, individual consumer substitution, voluntary technological downgrade, the purchase of simplified devices, is available only to people with economic slack. The rest just have to cope.

This is how lifestyle movements always work. The diagnosis is often correct: industrial food is unhealthy, consumer culture is empty, digital technology is manipulative. The prescription is always privatized: buy organic, shop intentional, unplug. And the politics gets erased in the translation from systemic problem to individual solution.

The systemic problem with smartphone technology isn’t that phones exist. It’s that platforms are designed to maximize engagement regardless of user wellbeing. It’s that data extraction funds surveillance capitalism. It’s that network effects create lock-in and interoperability is deliberately hobbled. It’s that public infrastructure has been allowed to decay while private platforms became the default commons.

None of these problems are solved by buying a Light Phone. None of them are addressed by switching to DVDs. None of them disappear when you use a disposable camera.

What does happen is that the people who can afford to buy their way out of the problem do so, and then congratulate themselves on their mindful choices, and then maybe post about it on the social media platforms they’re definitely still using because the flip phone doesn’t have a camera and the disposable takes three weeks to develop.

The rest get to watch the prices rise.

What Would Actually Help

If you’ve read this far, you might be wondering: okay, smart guy, what’s your solution? You’ve spent five thousand words dunking on people who are at least trying to resist the attention economy. What’s your alternative?

Fair question. Here’s what I’ve got.

Recognize the difference between individual coping strategies and collective political action. If using a flip phone makes your life better, use a flip phone. If going to therapy helps, go to therapy. If deleting Twitter preserves your sanity, delete Twitter. These are all fine choices. They are not political acts. They do not change the system. They are ways of surviving within the system, which is a necessary and human thing to do. Just don’t confuse survival for resistance.

Support policies that address the actual problems. Data privacy legislation. Antitrust enforcement against platform monopolies. Interoperability requirements that break lock-in. Public investment in non-commercial digital infrastructure. Algorithmic transparency mandates. These are boring, unglamorous, policy-wonk solutions. They don’t make good TikTok content. They might actually work.

Stop gentrifying the past. If you want a flip phone, buy a $20 TracFone instead of an $700 Light Phone. If you want DVDs, hit the library or the thrift store instead of the collector’s market. If you want to develop film, find a community darkroom instead of an upscale boutique. You can engage with older technology without turning it into a premium lifestyle category. The technology itself doesn’t care how much you paid for it.

Center the people who never had the option to leave. The digital divide isn’t nostalgia, it’s poverty. Millions of Americans lack reliable broadband, can’t afford smartphones, depend on public libraries for internet access. These are the people who have been using “old tech” all along, not by choice but by exclusion. Any movement that claims to challenge tech hegemony but ignores the people already outside it isn’t a movement. It’s a brand.

Accept that you probably aren’t going to unplug. Most of the 200,000 people who expressed interest in Old Tech 2026 will not follow through. Most of the people who do follow through will quietly re-adopt smartphones within six months. This is fine. The technology isn’t going away, and the social infrastructure increasingly assumes you have it. The goal shouldn’t be escape, it should be reform of the conditions that make escape seem necessary.

The Renovation Complete, the Original Tenants Gone

Here’s how this ends:

Old Tech 2026 will get some press coverage. A few thousand people will actually try it. Content creators will document their “journey” across platforms they claim to be rejecting. Premium dumbphone sales will tick up. Vintage electronics will get more expensive on eBay. A few trend pieces will declare that Gen Z has discovered the beauty of physical media.

Within two years, the aesthetic will be fully commercialized. Urban Outfitters will sell decorative flip phones for $40. Spotify will launch a “vinyl experience” mode with fake crackle and enforced album-length listening. Apple will introduce a “minimal mode” that costs $5/month and does what free apps already do. The rebellion will be complete, which is to say: packaged, sold, and defused.

Meanwhile, the actual problems, platform monopoly, data extraction, algorithmic manipulation, digital exclusion, will remain untouched. The system that produces smartphone addiction will keep producing smartphone addiction. The companies that profit from attention capture will keep capturing attention. The infrastructure that forces participation will keep forcing participation.

And the people who could never afford to opt out, the people for whom flip phones were never a statement but simply what they had, the people who’ve been using DVDs because the internet is too slow or too expensive, the people whose jobs require the apps and the connectivity and the constant availability, will watch their options narrow as the gentrifiers discover the charm of simplicity.

The neighborhood is renovated. The rents are up. The original tenants are looking for somewhere else to live.

But the exposed brick sure is lovely.

Brian Ragle writes about technology, labor, and the various ways capitalism eats its critics. He keeps a collection of old tech in the same way he keeps a pile of lumber scraps in the garage: not as lifestyle artifacts, but because you never know when something might come in handy, and he’ll probably cannibalize them for parts before he’d ever throw them away.