Technology exists in parallel

We like to think of technology as a neat timeline: floppy disks to cloud storage, Walkmans to Spotify, CRTs to OLEDs. Each invention pushing the last one off the stage like a new headliner. Better specs, faster chips, cleaner interfaces. Still, progress doesn’t always replace what came before. Some technologies just run alongside each other, each tuned to a different way of living or thinking.

The Wall Street Journal piece called Young People Are Falling in Love With Old Technology is only the last of a series of articles in the media about Gen Z’s fascination for retro tech. The subtitle says it all: driven by a feeling that they’ve lost control to screens, teens and twenty-somethings are resurrecting CDs, flip phones, and digital cameras. It sounds like a rebellion against the frictionless infinity of modern devices. When everything is seamless, something in us starts missing the seams.

Of course, this idea of “tech in parallel” has its limits. You wouldn’t want to run your job today off a Pentium II. You can’t exactly join a Zoom call from a Nokia N70. Connectivity and processing power genuinely benefit from linear progress. There’s no arguing that modern tools outperform old ones in raw capability.

But capability isn’t everything, because productivity isn’t everything. Joy, comfort, meaning, they all matter and they don’t always track with performance. That’s why people still play their old Wiis, or hunt down Game Boys and NES consoles. Retrogaming isn’t just nostalgia, it’s a reminder that the experience mattered more than the specs. The way a controller fit in your hand. The pixel art that left room for imagination. The simplicity that made space for fun.

It’s not just games. Look at the comeback of analogue film. Gen Z photographers are lugging around 35mm cameras and waiting a week for their shots to develop. It’s inefficient, expensive, and—somehow—completely worth it. Because each frame feels deliberate. You think before you click. There’s weight to the moment.

Or vinyl records, whose sales have been climbing steadily for years, and even audiocassettes, which anyone who’s been at a record fair will tell you—they are definitely making a comeback. Not because they sound “better” (they don’t, at least not objectively), but because they sound human. Warm, flawed, textured. You have to flip them halfway through. You can’t shuffle—hell to that. That friction, that slowness, becomes part of the pleasure.

Tech promised us efficiency, and we got it. But in the process, we lost a bit of texture. A flip phone conversation feels different from a FaceTime call, not because of quality, but because of boundaries. There’s an end to it. When you hang up, you’re really done. No push notifications waiting to drag you back in the system.

Maybe that’s the deeper pattern here: people reaching for parallel timelines where technology feels contained. Where it serves us without absorbing us.

Take cars, for instance. We’re living through the rise of electric vehicles. Fast, quiet, algorithmically optimised. Yet the classic cars market is growing. Not for their emissions or reliability, but because driving an old stick-shift on an open road still makes your heart race. It’s mechanical empathy, the feeling that you and the machine are in it together.

There’s something psychologically rich about that. A kind of multi-threaded relationship with progress. You can love your Tesla and your turntable. Stream Spotify during your commute and play vinyl at night. Use ChatGPT for work and a fountain pen for journaling and reflection. These aren’t contradictions, they’re choices across parallel lines of technology, each tuned to a different tempo of life.

If you squint, you can see how this challenges the Silicon Valley story of endless upgrade cycles. The idea that newer equals better, and older equals obsolete. That’s true for processors, sure, but not for people. Humans crave contrast. We want silence after noise, tactility after touchscreens, effort after ease. It’s not regression, it’s rhythm.

There’s also a cultural honesty in this shift. The return of analogue isn’t anti-tech, it’s pro-agency. It’s the recognition that progress doesn’t have to mean deletion. That we can hold onto older technologies the same way we hold onto languages or recipes, because they express something about who we are.

Maybe technology was never meant to replace itself in series. Maybe it was always meant to coexist in parallel, like genres of music or forms of art. Synth pop never really replaced jazz, they just served different purposes and created different atmospheres.

So when a teenager picks up a flip phone, or when someone dusts off their old Canon, they’re not being ironic. They’re just tuning into another frequency. A slower, simpler one that still works. And maybe that’s not even nostalgia, it’s the realisation that progress isn’t a race. It’s a palette. And sometimes, the older colours are the ones that make the picture feel alive again.