Strange thing

Nostalgia, it’s not what it used to be.

A peculiar trait, irrational and innately human. Whether one leans toward The Summer of ‘69, When We Were Young or Yesterday, there seems to be something deeply cathartic about harkening back to bygone days, a time when life seemed simple and carefree.

We travel halfway across the world to gaze at collections of dated artefacts languishing in glass enclosures, we consider hopelessly antiquated cars cool, and we happily pay a premium for anything shrewdly promoted as vintage or retro. We like our jeans pre-torn, our pictures washed out and our literature printed.

It turns out that nostalgia is good business.

Take Kate Bush, for example. Thirty-seven years after the first release of Running Up That Hill, the acclaimed track surges to pole position in the UK charts and reportedly earns 63-year-old Kate a cool £2 million in royalties (unlike many artists, Kate Bush owns the entire recording copyright to the original recordings of her music).

Running Up That Balance, indeed.

A fluke, one might surmise. The serendipitous outcome of a wildly popular Netflix series predicated on the revival and celebration of 80’s kitsch?

“I mean, what’s next: VHS tapes?”, you ask.

Funny you should mention those. In Australia, sales of VHS tapes are almost doubling year on year as global collectors pay big dollars for rare tapes that would have otherwise been sent to a landfill. A quick glance at Ebay will have you treasure hunting those dusty, forlorn boxes in the attic as old VHS tapes trade hands at £100-200 apiece, up to £1,000 for rare editions.

A similar trend is reinvigorating vinyl. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, in the first half of 2020, vinyl albums surpassed CD sales for the first time since 1986 (yes, people still buy those too). Such is the fervour that in 2021, an order of 500,000 vinyl copies of Adele's new album led to manufacturing delays across the entire industry.

And while for much of 2021 we were being brainwashed into believing digital keepsakes (the controversial NFTs you may have heard about) were set to dominate the collectibles sphere, it’s physical trading cards that saw a massive boom in production over the last year, with over 9 billion(!) new Pokémon cards printed.

Digital console gaming has seen steady growth over the past three decades but it’s the board game industry that’s experiencing a veritable renaissance, with classic titles returning to the limelight and ‘indie’ games increasingly emerging into mainstream stores. Even quintessentially digital gaming experiences are being adapted to the physical realm. Angry Birds is a board game now.

Ok, so what is going on here and what, if any, significance can we attribute to this resurgence of the old, the quaint and the bygone? Is this, as 10cc crooned in 1975, just a silly phase we’re going through or should we stop, collaborate, and listen?

As a technology and innovation advisor I spend most of my time looking at technology trends while also keeping an eye on the societal trends that drive the adoption or abandonment of innovations, and what I’m noticing - and now signalling - is a profound divergence between where we’re told we’re going and where we seem to be going.

Newton’s Third Law isn’t just a physics phenomenon, it’s a cultural reality as well; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every dogmatic claim by techno-fetishists that we are on a one-way track to complete digital assimilation there is a counter push by an ever-growing number of people from often surprisingly young demographics.

What I am predicting is nothing short of a mass techno-backlash, fronted by uninterested or even militantly opposed youths who will, driven by nostalgia and anemoia (a word coined by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and which means: nostalgia for a time you’ve never known), rise up to reclaim their rights as disconnected, analogue human beings, freed from the shackles of the digital pseudo-lives dreamed up by the platform overlords of Menlo Park.

You’re loving this, I can tell. Rejoice and revel in the “nothing beats face to face” doctrine that permeates the meetings sector, content in the knowledge that you’re safe from all this tech jargon.

Not quite. My worry is that it is precisely the impending techno-backlash and the fierce pendulum swing back to the offline world that will lead to complacency and a false sense of security. What is happening is not the erasure of three decades of relentless, breathless technological advancement but the deepening of its impact.

 Yes, we will step away gradually from our addictive, obsessive always-on relationship with technology. It’ll be a healthier and more sustainable relationship, marked by shorter but much more intense bursts of engagement with an outsized effect on our work and life.

 The difference in impact between spending no time in virtual reality environments, for example, versus spending an hour or two per week immersed in virtual worlds to learn, collaborate, and create may seem negligible, but it will make all the difference between staying relevant or joining the ranks of the unemployable and economically irrelevant.

 All you need to know for now is that this cognitive dissonance is acting itself out and that the resurgence of retro and real does not mean we should falsely conclude that digital had its time.

The pendulum always swings back. Mastering this equilibrium is your golden ticket to a sustainable relationship between your assimilation of impactful upcoming technology and the urge to play Kate Bush on a Walkman.

So, when you do run up that hill, make sure it’s with one eye on the future.

About the author:

Marc is a speaker, author and educator in the field of digital innovation, design thinking and user experience. His mission is to demystify the digital world and to empower organisations with the tools, insights, and skills to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution. More information on https://www.inspirelimitless.com/