• 11 Dec, 2025 *

Are we all just rose glassed staring at the past?

Or have we left something behind that we’re now desperate to recover?

Being that my generational cohort is the millenials, I have an odd relationship with the vintage/retro technology of the past. I wasn’t around for BASIC programming, or the NES, but my first gaming console was a SEGA, and I used to sneak into my older brother’s room and play with his Game Boy when he went to school.

I remember Windows 98, and playing games on CD-ROMS, such as Dexter’s Laboratory: Science Ain’t Fair, and Disney’s Dinosaur/Land Before Time Activity Center. The erratic assortment of sounds associated with Dial-up connections, and getting directions from MapQuest, because it was the only available option. I remember forums, and meeting people with whom I developed friendships that lasted well over a decade, despite having never met them to this day. I remember Flash games and CD-Walkmans, Doom on floppy disks, and rewinding VHS tapes before taking them back to Blockbuster.

The first time I used a laptop, was also the first time I used a search engine, in particular, one designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. You might have heard of it...

There was certainly a magic to this era, one which continued into the era of MP3 players- there was something deeply tangible about watching the progress bar on the screen as a list of songs you downloaded were being added to your device. Particularly, the dual function of USB MP3 players for carrying music and school projects was unique in my adolescence. Even the early era of Apple devices, the iPod shuffles and touches, and early iPhone models retained this current of physicality. CopyTrans was a hit amongst me and my friends for adding music to our Apple devices without worrying about how iTunes would handle music acquired by certain means, and editing metadata to our liking.

Somewhere along the line, things changed drastically.

The Future Is Now

My first introduction to Spotify was at a house party, thrown by a friend who I’d known since middle school, circa 2011. At that point in time, I was still actively making music, and being so close to the creation of audio, distanced me from the change in the distribution of the artifacts of the creative process. It seemed like a nifty little application, so I downloaded it when I got home, but didn’t quite use it until 2 or 3 years later. Before my eyes, yet somehow unknowingly, the home for my, and everyone elses listening preferences moved from a folder on our devices, to a server, somewhere off in the hard to fathom (if fathomed at all) distance.

There was something overly-designed, and manufactured about Spotify that wasn’t present in Foobar, WinAmp and Windows Media Player, a controlling aspect that really didn’t hit me until I began being forced to listen to adds, or on shuffle mode, unless I paid a subscription.

The convenience however, eventually lulled me into a daze, the same way it did everyone else, and I looked up one day and realized that everything had gotten out of hand, and I wanted to go back: I had all of the music in the world at my fingertips and none of the ownership, none of the tangibility, none of the physicality, and to boot, the artists I loved were being shafted as well, making less money off of more music, in a complete inversion of the economic dynamics of the music industry prior.

I wanted to wind the clock cycle back, back to a time where technology was an enhancement, a tool for expanding the experience of music, as opposed to an overlord, something that had say on how I could consume my music, and what it meant to purchase or pay for it.

Music wasn’t the only victim to this dynamic and change in landscape- video games have truly been, in my opinion, gutted by this subscription, cloud based dynamic. I stopped gaming somewhere around the release of the PS3, and by time I picked it pack up when the PS4 was, not old, but not new either, there were game passes required to play online, I was paying extra for DLC, and it was repugnant. Nowadays, sometimes games don’t even have much of a story line, or campaign, that’s merely an offhand thought compared to the online multi-player aspect of the game.

Nothing really made sense about the idea of me purchasing a game, but then having to continue to purchase pieces of the game that were being continually released. I mean, sure, there were hidden characters to unlock, and outfits, and maybe some levels, but the most extreme version of this was maybe getting a Deoxys or Jirachi at some pokemon gaming convention.

In short, perhaps what I’m trying to say is that I miss the concrete feeling of ownership, the physicality, the straightforwardness, the completeness of the way media consumption used to be. The feeling of there being a solid exchange between the recipient of some media, and the producer of it- an honest exchange between parties that benefitted them both equally (well, maybe this is a bit idealistic, but it was certainly more fair than it is now, in my opinion).

Of course it’s nice to not have to lug around games and CD’s, lord knows I remember hauling a bag half my size as a pre-teen, into the car, on the way to a friends house for the weekend, but it was delightful: I had in my possession all of the media that I wanted to share with friends and there was nothing a third party or platform could do about that once the cash had been tendered.

Not to mention the amount of friendships and camaradarie of trading albums, and discs and cartridges and memory cards to friends, over weekends and breaks from school.

Perhaps I’m simply an unc, and am nostalgic for the way things were, but maybe there’s something being, dare I say, stolen from younger generations, in terms of their relationship to media, and its relationship their experience of youth, and growing up, and bonding over shared experiences with said media.

This post may be a bit all over the place, but it’s something that’s been floating around my psyche for a while now.

Maybe it’s time to wind the clock cycle back.

#media #music #technology