Young people embrace digital cameras, iPods and wired earphones as antidote to modern tech

On a Saturday afternoon at a DJ set, a digital camera emerges from a bag—the kind that hasn't seen daylight in fifteen years, since a family holiday to the Canary Islands. The device draws stares. "I've not seen one of these in years," someone says, and they're not wrong. Digital cameras had their moment in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before smartphones swallowed the market whole. Yet here in 2026, surrounded by technology more advanced than ever, young people are deliberately reaching backward.

The numbers tell the story. Sales of iPods and Walkman players on eBay jumped nearly 50 percent in 2025. Searches for iPod minis climbed 48 percent over a single year. Across the globe, 42 million people actively use film cameras, with more than a third of them between eighteen and thirty—a generation supposedly born into the smartphone age, now choosing to opt out. The shift isn't random. It's driven by social media conversations, by people publicly asking why they've abandoned the latest for the old.

Lily Redman, a 26-year-old content creator from South Wales, carries a digital camera to concerts and nights out. Her phone's flash produces something grainy and hyperreal, she says, while the digital camera delivers something smoother, something that feels more true. There's a quality her phone simply cannot match. When she scrolls through photos from five years ago on her phone, they look like they were taken yesterday—the technology has warped her sense of time itself. But her mother's photos from decades past, taken on older equipment, feel genuinely old, genuinely distant. They anchor her to actual history. "Phone photos have warped our perception of time," Redman observes. The digital camera, by contrast, captures a moment and holds it.

The appeal extends beyond image quality. Cheri Sanih, thirty years old, runs a Tumblr account dedicated to older technology and has watched her followers multiply in recent months. She scrolls through her mint green iPod, its library filled with album artwork from fifteen to twenty years ago, and feels the weight of childhood—the Christmas morning when she received one. For her, the device is an escape hatch. Her phone never stops buzzing with notifications, but an iPod is just music. It's a tool designed with humans in mind, not algorithms. The interface is clean. The design is beautiful. It asks nothing of you except to listen.

Monique Wellman-Mason, twenty-three, from Bristol, made the switch to wired headphones a few months ago after years of losing wireless earbuds. Yes, she spends two minutes untangling them each time she pulls them from her bag. But they stay connected. They have a microphone. They cost about twenty pounds. And they work. She hasn't gone back to wireless since. "Technology only goes up and we're always looking for the quickest thing," she says, "but this is a step back in a way—I love it."

Andrew Przybylski, a professor of technology and human behavior at Oxford, sees something deeper at work. The modern digital world drowns us in choice—so many options that we become paralyzed, unable to decide. When a new series drops, the algorithm decides for us; we binge it automatically. But when you choose to turn on a digital camera and adjust its settings, or when you manually add an album to an iPod library, you're moving toward something you want rather than having something pushed at you. You're in control. You own the experience, not renting it from a platform that could vanish tomorrow. Przybylski points to Xbox's server outage in late July, when players couldn't access games they owned on disc because the servers were down. "Imagine if a book worked that way," he says. The appeal of older technology, then, isn't really about the past. It's about agency in the present—the simple, radical act of owning what you use and deciding what you experience.