The Kids Aren’t Into Retro Tech Because of Surveillance Capitalism

My kids like buying physical media. For my daughter, it’s CDs, which she listens to on a boombox and tacks the booklets up on her wall. For my son, it’s retro video games. He’s got an NES, SNES, N64, and Genesis in his room and piles of cartridges he picked up from used game shops or thrift stores. In this obsession, they’re not alone. Tons of their peers want physical media, too. They still download plenty of video games, and still listen to plenty of Spotify, but they want those cool plastic artifacts kids their age were buying in the 80s and 90s.

This is part of a larger cultural trend toward retro tech and physical media. You can see it in the cost of a used CRT TV, or an old cartridge, or the number of think pieces about young people decking out their bedrooms to look like mine and my friends’ when we were 16 in 1995. Much of the trend is driven by adults. Vinyl’s resurgence was largely a millennial and Gen X project. The CRT market is mostly retro-gaming adults. But there’s a visible and growing youth component, and that’s the part I want to focus on.

So what’s going on?

One answer, and it’s an answer I see pretty often, is that physical-media-returners are sick of merely licensing their media. They’re sick of it really belonging to Steam, or Amazon, or Netflix, or Spotify, where it can be taken away from them at any moment, and certainly won’t last forever. And they’re sick of how consuming media on other people’s servers means they’re relentlessly surveilled, data mined, and turned into a product for surveillance capitalism.

A version of that argument is a thread on Bluesky by @bammax.itch.io pushing back on a recent essay by Hanif Abdurraqib in the New Yorker on our longing for inconvenience. Bammax called the piece superficial, saying the author misses the real story, which is really about ownership and personal control and freedom from surveillance and data gathering.

Bammax is wrong about Abdurraqib in a way worth naming, because the essay isn’t actually making a nostalgia argument. Abdurraqib distances himself from the pining-for-eighties-objects crowd explicitly. He grew up with a hand-me-down Walkman and remembers the actual friction of the thing, the rewinding with a pencil when the tape got caught in the gears, the guessing game of skipping tracks. He isn’t sentimental about any of that. What he’s doing is different and more interesting. He’s making a case for what’s now getting called frictionmaxxing, the deliberate embrace of small inconveniences as a way to feel more alive and engaged in the world.

So there are at least two framings on offer for what’s driving the retro-tech return. Bammax’s ownership-and-surveillance read. Abdurraqib’s frictionmaxxing read. I want to add a third, which is that a lot of this is aesthetic. And I want to be careful about what I’m claiming for it, because the three aren’t in competition the way internet discourse usually wants them to be. All three are probably doing some work. Plenty of adults really are buying physical media because they want to own their stuff, and platform capitalism really is the reason that distinction matters now in a way it didn’t thirty years ago. Plenty of adults really are doing frictionmaxxing, consciously reintroducing inconvenience because life has gotten too smooth and something feels lost. And plenty of people, kids especially, are just responding to the aesthetic pull of physical objects. The question isn’t which of these is the explanation. It’s how they weight for different cohorts, and what exactly we mean when we say any of them.

For the kids I have visibility into, the weight is overwhelmingly on the aesthetic. Being into CDs or SNES cartridges is, for them, almost entirely about how the objects feel. They like the feel of physical media. They like the weight of it. They like seeing CDs or cartridges lined up on a shelf. They like media as a discrete thing in the world, something they can collect and touch and have be present. And this isn’t just my kids. The Vinyl Alliance survey found that 56% of Gen Z buyers cite aesthetics as a reason they collect, and 37% use records as home decor. A marketing professor at NYU calls this “symbolic consumption,” albums as affordable art that signal taste and fandom. When my son buys a used cartridge instead of playing the same game on the Switch virtual console, it isn’t because he’s worried Nintendo will pull the license or because he suspects the Switch is spying on him, and it isn’t because he’s looking to enrich his life by embracing the friction of blowing into a cartridge to get it to boot. It’s that, just like people who prefer a paperback to an e-book, he wants to buy an artifact, not software.

Here’s where I need to get more precise, because there’s a survey finding that cuts against an oversimple version of what I’m saying. When Gen Z vinyl buyers are asked why they’re into the format, about half say it “provides a break from digital life.” When retro gamers are asked, 89% cite a break from the internet and 74% say the games are “more relaxing” than modern ones. 78% of retro-tech users cite not using their smartphone as a reason for their interest. A quick read of this data might seem to support Abdurraqib’s frictionmaxxing frame, or at least the looser version of Bammax’s frame where kids are pushing back against digital saturation. If the kids are saying “I like this because it’s a break from my phone,” aren’t they telling you the preference is at least partly about digital life?

I think the answer is yes, but in a way that’s compatible with what I’m saying rather than against it. The distinction that matters is between a preference whose content includes non-digital-ness and a worked-out theoretical position about why digital life needs to be resisted. “I like this because it feels different from my phone” is the first thing. “I am reintroducing friction into my life as a deliberate spiritual discipline” or “I am resisting platform capitalism by refusing the subscription model” is the second. The first is a sensory-experiential description of what the kid likes. The second is a theory about what they’re doing and why it matters. They’re not the same kind of claim.

The aesthetic I’m pointing to in my kids includes the non-digital-ness of the objects. The heft, the shelf-visibility, the object-ness, and the fact that it’s not a screen are all part of the same felt response. But the kid isn’t endorsing a position about screens. The kid is describing a taste. Part of what she likes about a record is that it’s not her phone. That’s different from her having a theory about her phone.

This matters because Abdurraqib’s and Bammax’s frames are both making the stronger claim. Abdurraqib wants the return to physical media to be a deliberate spiritual practice, a conscious choice to reintroduce friction into a too-smooth life. Bammax wants it to be a resistance to platform capitalism, a conscious choice to reject the subscriptionization of everything. Both of them are saying the kids are doing something with a theoretical structure, something they could articulate and defend as a position. What the data actually shows is kids having aesthetic preferences whose content includes non-digital-ness, which looks superficially like the theoretical positions and absolutely isn’t the same thing. “I like the object because it isn’t digital” is a taste. “I am rejecting digital life because platform capitalism is hollowing out ownership” is a theory. The kids cite the first. The writers keep hearing the second.

And saying so isn’t a lack of respect for what teenagers understand about the world. They know plenty. They know more about platform capitalism than I did at their age, because they’ve grown up inside it. The claim isn’t that they can’t grasp the ownership-and-surveillance argument. The claim is that aesthetic response and theoretical endorsement are different modes, and you can be fluent in the second while the first does its own work, with its own content, underneath.

It’s the move Jason Blakely, in Lost in Ideology, describes as the map-for-territory confusion. Blakely’s point about ideology isn’t that it’s merely distortive. It’s that ideologies are both illuminating and distortive, that they help us make sense of the world and also pull us toward seeing the world only through their features. The more fluent you become in any given ideological map, the more you’re tempted to read its features onto every piece of terrain you cross, and the more the partial picture your map gives you starts to look like the whole picture. If you’re deep into the critique of convenience culture, “I like a break from my phone” sounds like a deliberate spiritual discipline. If you’re deep into the critique of surveillance capitalism, “I like owning an object” sounds like a political stance. Neither frame is picking up a signal that isn’t there. Both are mistaking the signal for something more worked-out than it is.

This is, I think, what’s happening in the discourse around the retro-tech return. Smart people who have thought carefully about platform capitalism see the phenomenon and read it back through that frame, and the frame really does illuminate something real about why some adults are driving the trend. Smart people who have thought carefully about convenience culture see the phenomenon and read it back through that frame, and that frame really does illuminate something real about why some adults are driving the trend. But when they then interpret the kids’ survey responses through these frames, they end up turning aesthetic preferences into endorsements of theories the kids aren’t actually holding. The preference has digital-life-as-contrast built into it. It’s not doing the political work the adults are ascribing to it.

And look, there’s a separate register in which both Abdurraqib and Bammax are saying something worth hearing. Maybe convenience culture really does deaden us. Maybe platform capitalism really does hollow out ownership and turn everything into rent. These critiques are serious. I’ve written before about nostalgia culture and the ways our content economy increasingly recycles rather than produces, and I think that diagnosis is correct at the scale of markets and studios and production companies. But when you try to run any of these diagnoses down to the level of individual preference, down to what a specific teenager is doing when she spends her cash at a record store, they can’t carry all the weight. She has an aesthetic preference. Part of the aesthetic’s content is that the thing isn’t digital. That’s not nothing, and it’s not innocent of the broader digital moment, but it’s also not a theory she’s endorsing. She’s buying a CD because she wants the CD, and part of wanting the CD is that it isn’t her phone.

The deeper issue is what the over-reading tells you about the person doing the reading. When you cannot see a kid buying a cartridge without running it through some theory, whether the theory is spiritual or political or economic, the issue isn’t that the theory is wrong. The issue is that you’ve forgotten the theory was partial to begin with. The recursion back to the map is the tell. It means you’ve lost the capacity to see the thing in front of you as itself , alongside whatever your current discourse can make of it.

The adults who are thinking carefully about convenience, about ownership, about surveillance, about the subscription economy are doing real and useful work. I don’t want to dismiss any of that. But when we explain the youth component of a broad cultural trend by leaning entirely on the frames our own preoccupations provide, we translate the kids’ aesthetic preferences into endorsements of our theories, and we miss the actual shape of what they’re telling us. Which is the relatively unremarkable but actually pretty interesting fact that a certain kind of physical object, encountered at a certain moment in a digital childhood, feels nice to own. Part of why it feels nice is that it isn’t digital. That’s a preference. It’s not a politics. The kids aren’t resisting surveillance capitalism, and they aren’t doing frictionmaxxing. They just like CDs, and part of what they like about CDs is that CDs aren’t their phone.