The Friction Economy: Why Gen Z Is Trading Smartphones for Dumb Devices

There’s a special look kids give a floppy disk. They turn it over, tap the little metal shutter, and then ask, politely but devastatingly: “So where do you plug in the Wi‑Fi?” It’s the same energy adults bring to a rotary phone: reverence, confusion and the suspicion that someone is filming a prank video. After a decade of making everything frictionless (from playlists to payments), it turns out we’re developing a taste for a little friction on purpose.

When Windows 95 Becomes a History Class

A recent Fast Company story argued that retro tech isn’t just nostalgia merch, it’s becoming curriculum. In 2021, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee history professor Thomas Haigh began teaching a course on the history of computers after noticing that many classic histories of the 1980s–2000s assume students already know what it was like to live with desktop PCs, early consoles, and floppy disks. His students didn’t.

So Haigh built what amounts to a time machine with power cords: a lab stocked with machines from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s so students can experience “normal” computing from those eras: saving to disks, booting up creaky operating systems and learning how much patience it used to take just to open a file.

That hands-on approach matters because modern tech is designed to disappear into the background. The cloud is “just there.” Subscriptions renew themselves. Devices update while you sleep. Retro tech forces the opposite: friction you can touch and systems you can understand. It’s technology with visible cause-and-effect, and, for a generation raised inside opaque platforms, that’s basically a superpower.

The impulse is bigger than one campus. The Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder invites the public to “turn on, open up, play and create” with still-functioning obsolete media, and it hosts events (including repair-focused workshops) that treat old devices as something you can actually tinker with.

And there are plenty of “learn the past” programs for younger kids, too: the Computer History Museum publishes activities and classroom resources for learners of all ages; the National Museum of Computing in the United Kingdom runs learning visits and “Digital Future Days”; and the Vintage Computer Federation’s Commodore Classroom teaches BASIC (and even 6502 assembly) on real Commodore 64 hardware.

A Quick Sweep of the Retro-Tech Market

Of course, retro isn’t only educational, it’s commercial. The same digital economy that made everything instant has also made “slow” feel premium. Consumers are buying limitations on purpose: fewer apps, fewer notifications, fewer ways for a device to phone home (or to accidentally approve a one-click checkout).

Retailers have noticed. Fast Company has chronicled the rise of nostalgia-fueled gadgets and peripherals: new hardware engineered to look like old hardware, but (usually) with fewer mysterious beeps. And businesses like Retrospekt have built serious operations restoring and selling classic instant cameras and expanding into other throwback formats like cassettes and Tamagotchis.

6 Retro-Tech Trends That Are Charming, Weird or Both

Landlines, but for kids. A startup wants the home phone back in the kitchen: voice calls only, no texts, no doomscrolling, with parents approving contacts. The most disruptive feature is that it can’t “like” anything.

The dumbphone renaissance. Some Gen Zers are ditching smartphones for simpler phones as a digital detox, for less dopamine, more presence and the satisfying clamshell snap of a tiny rebellion.

Mechanical keyboards as identity. Retro-styled, loud, clicky keyboards are a booming subculture because, apparently, the future of productivity sounds like a 1992 computer lab.

Instant cameras and the luxury of consequences. Retro photography restores scarcity: you get one shot, you wait, you keep the print. In an era of infinite cloud storage, limitation reads as intimacy.

Typewriters as anti-surveillance tech. Young people are gravitating toward tech they can see into and understand, and nothing says “data minimization” like a device whose only analytics are ink on paper.

Retro gaming as a social ritual. The point isn’t perfect frame rates; it’s gathering in the same room, sharing a controller and arguing about who “really” won, like nature intended.

The Future, With a Little More Friction

Retro tech is having a moment because it offers something our always-on economy rarely does: boundaries. Devices that do fewer things. Media that can’t ping you. Systems you can understand (or at least open up without violating a warranty).

Teaching kids how recent tech used to work won’t turn them into Luddites. It will make them sharper consumers in the cloud era. They learn that “seamless” is a design choice with trade-offs, and that convenience always has a cost, sometimes paid in money, sometimes in attention, sometimes in data.

Also, it finally clears up a major misconception: the floppy disk is not, in fact, “the save emoji.”