Why are we obsessed with technology that is outdated and clunky?

Film cameras, antiquated computers, mechanical keyboards, vinyl records—we find out why ‘nostalgia tech,’ or the longing for old technology, is gaining momentum

There are nearly 23 million posts filed under the hashtag #filmisnotdead on Instagram. A majority of them are photographs—sometimes grainy, often sepia-toned and unvarnished but always artfully composed. What unites these images from around the world is that they were shot with old and restored Kodak, Fujifilm, Pentax cameras that were all the rage last century and haven’t been in production for decades.

“I never followed #filmisnotdead on Instagram, because we feel the medium is the photographer’s choice, and that there’s nothing wrong with shooting digital,” says Mumbai-based photographer Yash Yeri, co-founder of Zhenwei Film, a professional lab that offers film processing, scanning and printing services, along with selling restored cameras and film at affordable prices. “But yes, there’s this thing now where some people go, ‘Oh I only shoot on film,’ which is great for us from a commercial point of view.”

Yeri, 26, first picked up a film camera in 2017 “just to be one of those cool kids in my friend circle”. Very soon, he was building out his own darkroom in Dombivli, from where he and his partner Aditya Tawate, a student at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, also started Zhenwei in 2019. “The perks of running a film lab and film camera store is that we get to use a different camera every week,” says Yeri, who has shot with some of Bollywood’s biggest celebrities, including a pregnant Kalki Koechlin in 2020, on film. “As someone who’s keen on using large-format cameras, I’d love to use the Arca-Swiss F-Metric 8x10. For regular 35mm, I’m in love with Canon F1 and Nikon F2 with a De2 finder. They just never die and each feels like a heavy, sturdy rock in your hands.”

The end of instant gratification?

The film renaissance has been in full swing for a while now. Smartphones with better (and two too many) lenses, MP counts and image-enhancing software are released almost every day. Despite this magically fast technology (or perhaps because of it), young people everywhere are opting out of the need for instant gratification that most technology is geared to induce. A century after the first film camera was invented, people are rediscovering the joy of slow, deliberate photo-making.

It isn’t even solely about film cameras. Mechanical keyboards are back in vogue–just look at Logitech’s fast-selling ‘Pop’ series. Those old slabs with big, bulky keys upon which most of us learned to type might be revamped with colour and neon backlighting, targeted at those who will never forget the soft clicking sound these keys made. In fact, IBM’s model ‘M’ keyboard–first released in 1985–is considered the gold standard for keyboards, a collector’s item with its buckling spring mechanism and swappable key caps, now being hailed as an example of the sturdiness and reliability one expected from gadgets a few decades ago. On platforms such as eBay, each one goes for thousands of dollars, should you be lucky enough to find one.

Retro gaming has been so popular that Sony, Nintendo, Atari and their ilk started manufacturing modern editions of their greatest ’80s and ’90s consoles, circa 2018. Typewriters and instant cameras have been rescued from the hipster’s clutches and brought into the mainstream. Antiquated PCs—bulky, beige boxes that needed dial-up connections to link to the Internet—are now collector’s items. The Nokia 3310 had its moment in the sun in 2019. And who among us doesn’t know at least one person who’s gone down the deep, expensive but very rewarding rabbit hole called the vinyl renaissance, never to return?

No longer in pursuit of the next best thing

The rise of nostalgia tech is no Luddite takeover. It’s being driven by a cross-section of millennials who straddle the worlds before and after computers became personal gadgets; and the Gen Z demographic, raised on the Internet and either already jaded with the present, or finding ironic pleasure in Y2K aesthetics. A curious mix of nostalgia, disillusionment and wariness is what’s fuelling it.

The world’s foremost cultural critics have tried to explain this. Kyle Chayka, writing in The New Yorker about pixel-art revival, notes that we are currently in the first wave of digital nostalgia. Like all pop culture, which is the result of 20-, 30- or 40-year cycles of resuscitation and inspiration, it was only a matter of time before the technology of decades past would be dredged up again. This also perhaps explains why vaporware and cybercore, powered by latex, tech wear, cyberpunk and classic 2000s fashion, are trending again).

Maybe it’s simply a yearning for gadgets that felt in sync with the real world, and that did only what was mentioned in the manual; no more, no less. Maybe there’s a psychological reason. “As humankind has progressed, the focus has increasingly been on technology, efficiency, disruption; on cheapness and mass consumption,” says Jude D’Souza, founder of Mumbai-based The Revolver Club, a community for lovers of vinyl. This has meant, among other things, a constant upgrade cycle that keeps us forever seeking the next best thing, no matter how small or meaningless that may be. “But at some point, people figured out that it doesn’t work like that. And the largest example of that is social media. It’s a hyper-connected world, but millennials and Gen Z are the loneliest generations.” D’Souza pegs the revival of vinyl on that “missing human connection”. With streaming platforms, “you have a million songs at your fingertips, in cutting-edge audio software, but where’s the touch and feel factor?” To him, records and record players are here to stay for that very reason: the ritual or experience of taking a record out of its sleeve, putting it down, taking notes, reading the lyrics. “I think it can be therapeutic.”

D’Souza has evidence in numbers. When he launched The Revolver Club in 2014, it was a fledgling community made up almost entirely of people above the age of 45, those with a certain disposable income and a strong affinity to Dire Straits and Pink Floyd. Today, the community is about 25,000 strong, and D’Souza ships equipment and records to customers from Jammu & Kashmir to the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. “Lately, I’ve realised a good 15-20 per cent of the community is under the age of 30. Over time, I’ve begun to see records of everyone from Billie Eilish to Ariana Grande to Olivia Rodrigo and all the trendiest rappers moving [quickly]. And this is only going to grow.”

Similarly, Yeri says, “The demand for film has definitely spiked, so much so that there’s no film floating in the market right now.” It’s why Zhenwei’s Instagram page recently began to hawk repackaged, specialised 35 mm film blends called ‘Sin City 1000,’ ‘You-Name-It’ and ‘Yuma 50’; each roll of 36 exposures going for about ₹400. “I hope film does make a comeback in a big way so production starts again and this distinction (and hashtags) die. This hype can end up making it only about the medium and not about the creator,” shares Yeri.

Catering to a niche

To be sure, this movement towards older forms of technology is pretty small, even if it is gaining mileage. “There will always be those guys who use special cameras and drink special coffee, talk about the ‘warmth’ they can hear in their music when they’re listening to records. And what hobby is inexpensive anymore?” D’Souza points out. “To me, music streaming is like McDonald’s, and hi-fi is a gourmet experience, with all the bells and whistles. It’s a money thing.”

The enthusiasm for nostalgia tech will probably remain niche and cyclical. “We went through cassettes and CDs, onto the wonders of streaming, and are now re-realising the value of tangibility and ownership,” says D’Souza. Maybe as we face the eerie prospect of living in the metaverse–thus realising the setting of a 1970s sci-fi film plot–we are trying to hold on to that sense of hope, wonder and desire that technological breakthroughs of the past induced.

Screens everywhere were fine for The Jetsons, but we passed the point of peak tech a while back. And because every throwback also bears a comeback, nostalgia tech’s popularity can be pegged on one simple thing: to bring back a time when we owned our gadgets, not the other way around.

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