In all seriousness, I don’t think the actual cause of fake nostalgia has anything to do with either nostalgia, or a belief that old technology was in any way better. I think those young people, and by young I mean that they grew up looking at computers, are completely saturated with fast Internet content that rots their brain and cooks their eyeballs, and they see analog technology as an escape from looking at the damn screen all day where it’s either looking at shorts and tiktoks or AI brainrot. In either case, they feel that continuation of the digital overload will doom them, and they are trying to figure out a way how to escape that and still retain a modicum of functionality. Essentially, film photography, as shitty as it is today, is a way of doing photography that doesn’t require looking at the screen that is just an alt-tab away from TikTok.

Which brings us to the next point: how is my generation able to retain self-control in the same environment that makes young people go insane?

I can only speak for myself here, but it’s probably because we learned to deal with people first, and with computers later. To me, people on the other side of the Internet chasm aren’t an abstract entity. I know how to deal with people. I know when to ignore them and when to take them seriously. If they are full of shit I can roll my eyes and alt-tab. I don’t have to keep up with the latest memes in order to maintain a good impression on some herd of dumbasses. Whatever they think doesn’t matter, because they are insecure babies who didn’t read a single book between the 50 of them. Why would I even care about their opinion? If they know what’s good for them, they would care for mine.

So I don’t think it’s about technology. I have the newest, most modern technology there is, and I kept that up since the times of Commodore 64. It’s also not like I haven’t talked to people online for a long time, so I don’t know what it’s like. I’m a pro at that shit. The difference is, my ways of dealing with things and people were well formed before I ever connected to the Internet. I don’t think I perceive it the way young people do. It doesn’t influence me the way it influences them. To them, “go touch grass” is some kind of a new insult, because the implication is that they never do. It took me a while to even understand what they mean by that, because they say it as if it’s something uncommon. And then I understood that for them, it actually might be, and the “analog” hysteria means that they actually need to learn how to interact with the physical world without computers.

Touching grass.