Back to the Future

There is something slightly strange about a 36-shot film camera. You load the roll. You have 36 chances. Every time you press the shutter, one of them disappears. You cannot see what you have taken. You cannot immediately correct it. You cannot take another 200 versions and decide later. When the roll is finished, you wait.

And yet, in a world where the phone in your pocket can hold thousands of photographs, a growing number of young people are deliberately choosing the 36-shot version. Why? The easy answer is nostalgia. Gen Z misses the past. They are rediscovering the aesthetics of the 1990s. They like vinyl, thrift stores, printed photographs, old cameras, analog watches, and physical books. They are romanticising a time they never experienced. There is certainly some of that. But it doesn't explain the film camera. Nobody is forcing them to use one. They are choosing a device that is objectively less convenient, less efficient and more restrictive than the one they already own. That makes the phenomenon more interesting. Because perhaps they aren't trying to recreate the past at all. Perhaps they are trying to recover something the future took away.

We tend to think of technological progress as the removal of friction. Film became digital. Physical records became streams. Stores became websites. Books became files. Cash became invisible transactions. Communication became instant. And, increasingly, creation itself is becoming instantaneous.

Every technological revolution makes something that was once scarce more abundant. The printing press made publishing abundant. Photography made image-making abundant. The internet made information and distribution abundant. AI is making production abundant. And we celebrate this, quite reasonably.

Why wait when you don't have to? Why carry something when you can stream it? Why drive somewhere when it can arrive at your doorstep? Why take 36 photographs when you can take 36,000? But somewhere along the way, something curious happens. The thing we removed was often doing more than slowing us down. It was shaping the experience.

The 36-shot limit wasn't simply an inconvenience. It made each photograph a decision. The delay between taking a photograph and seeing it created anticipation. The physical roll created a finite object. The effort involved in developing it created a sense of occasion. The limitation gave the act of taking a photograph some weight. And this is what the nostalgia explanation misses. You don't need to have lived through something to miss what it made possible.

The evidence suggests this isn't just a handful of young people playing dress-up with the past. Recent research into historical nostalgia found that 73% of Gen Z respondents were attracted to media, styles, hobbies or traditions from periods they had not personally experienced. Two-thirds said historical nostalgia helped them manage stress or anxiety about the future. That is important. Because it changes the question. Instead of asking: Why does Gen Z want the past? Perhaps we should ask: What does the past offer that the present doesn't?

Look at what keeps reappearing. Vinyl records in a world where every song is instantly available. Printed books when an entire library can fit inside a phone. Film photography when computational photography can produce technically superior images instantly. Dumbphones when smartphones have never been more capable. None of these choices makes much sense if efficiency is the only measure of value. But efficiency isn't the only measure of value. Sometimes the thing we call friction is carrying something else.

I started seeing the same pattern across very different behaviors. First, technology removes a friction. Then the frictionless alternative becomes normal. Eventually, something that was hidden inside that friction becomes visible. And when it does, culture starts to recover it. Not necessarily by bringing the old technology back. By bringing the lost quality back.

And then the cycle begins again.

That last step matters.

Because the thing being recovered isn't the friction itself.

It's what the friction made possible.

Consider music. Streaming solved an extraordinary problem. Music became virtually weightless. Millions of songs became available immediately, anywhere, without physical ownership. But something else disappeared with the friction. The album became an object.

Listening became an event. You chose what to buy. You committed to a record. You turned it over. You lived with the sequence the artist had created. And now some young listeners are buying vinyl not because it is a better delivery system for music, but because it is a different relationship with music.

A recent global survey of vinyl fans found that 76% of Gen Z respondents said they bought vinyl to have a physical copy, while almost half said they were willing to pay more because it was something they would cherish. The record isn't competing with Spotify on convenience.

It is competing on meaning. That distinction is becoming increasingly important.

The same thing appears in shopping. E-commerce removed the friction of finding something.

Search. Click. Pay. Deliver. But in doing so, it also removed some of the uncertainty and discovery that made shopping an experience. You don't know exactly what you will find.

There isn't an infinite inventory waiting for you. You have to look. You have to touch things. You might find nothing. Or you might find something nobody else has.

Research into Gen Z's vintage shopping describes this experience in remarkably different terms from conventional e-commerce: a treasure hunt, an experience of discovery, uniqueness and personalization. Again, the attraction isn't necessarily to an inferior version of shopping. It's to a version in which finding something feels like an achievement. There is growing psychological evidence behind this. Recent experimental research involving almost 2,900 participants found that exerting effort can itself increase the perceived meaning of an activity, up to a point. The IKEA effect showed something similar years earlier; people can value objects more when they have successfully invested their own labor in making them. The important word in both cases is not friction. It's investment. Effort can create ownership. Waiting can create anticipation. Limits can create consequence. Ritual can create attention. Uncertainty can create discovery. The obstacle isn't inherently valuable. What matters is what the obstacle was doing.

This is why simply saying that Gen Z is nostalgic feels insufficient. They may not be longing for a world without technology. They may be becoming unusually sensitive to what technology has made disappear.

There is another reason this may be particularly visible among Gen Z. They are the first generation to have grown up with extraordinary levels of digital abundance as a baseline. Unlimited images. Unlimited music. Unlimited entertainment. Unlimited information. Unlimited communication. Increasingly unlimited production. They didn't experience the transition from scarcity to abundance in the same way previous generations did. For many of them, abundance is simply the environment. And perhaps that changes what feels valuable.

When everything is available, availability stops being remarkable. When every photograph can be perfect, imperfection becomes expressive. When every song is available instantly, owning one becomes meaningful. When everyone can make something, making something slowly can become a form of identity. When you can know what happens immediately, waiting can become an experience. This isn't an argument against abundance. It is an observation about what happens after abundance becomes normal.

Maybe this is why the cultural fascination with the past is so interesting. The past isn't necessarily being copied. It is being mined. Young people who never lived through the analog era can still recognize something useful in its constraints. A film camera offers limitation. Vinyl offers commitment. Vintage shopping offers uncertainty. Print offers physicality. A dumbphone offers absence. None of these requires abandoning modernity. They simply reintroduce something modernity made scarce. And that may be the more interesting definition of nostalgia. Not longing for when things were better. But longing for qualities that used to be easier to experience. The past becomes a toolkit.

Which brings me to the part I don't yet know how to answer. AI may be the most consequential version of this cycle yet. Photography removed the friction of making an image. The internet removed the friction of finding and distributing information. AI is removing enormous amounts of friction from making things. Words. Images. Music. Video. Code. Ideas. Soon, perhaps, almost anything that can be described can be produced. And if the pattern holds, something may eventually be revealed inside the friction of creation that we currently take for granted. But what? I don't think we know yet. Maybe it is craft. Maybe it is authorship. Maybe it is struggle. Maybe it is the feeling of having made something yourself. Maybe it is something we don't yet have a name for. And I think that uncertainty is important. Because the point of this pattern isn't to predict what comes next. It is to notice what disappears when something becomes effortless.

That is what makes the title of this essay less paradoxical than it first appears. Going back doesn't necessarily mean rejecting the future. Sometimes it means using the past to understand what the future has accidentally taken with it. We don't go back because the old way was better. We go back when we discover that something valuable was hiding inside it.

The film camera was never really about film, any more than the vinyl was about vinyl or the printed book about paper. They're all attempts, in different forms, to recover something, not the friction, but the value the friction carried. That may be one of the stranger consequences of living in an age of abundance.

We spent generations trying to remove every obstacle between ourselves and what we wanted. Now, having removed so many of them, we are beginning to discover that some of the obstacles were doing more for us than we realised. So, we put a few of them back. Thirty-six shots. One side of a record. A book you can hold. A phone that does less. Not because we have forgotten how to move forward. But because sometimes, to understand where we're going, we have to go back and recover what we left behind.