In the last few years, the cultural craving for physical media has been insatiable. Why is the first generation to grow up with technology now rejecting it?

The iPhone 17 just dropped, AI is running rampant, Spotify thinks I’m 74 and Elon Musk owns space. In the most technically advanced age, young people are trading it in: swapping high-resolution iPhone cameras for digital and film cameras and swapping music apps for vinyl and CDs. 

Rather than holograms and flying cars in 2025, young people are rediscovering vintage photo booths, paperback books and wired earbuds. Seemingly, Gen Z is rejecting modernity rather than thirsting for technological advancement the same way millennials did.

Much of this can be explained simply by consumption habits and trends. Perhaps consumers want to display vinyls as trophies, perhaps digicams are just a Y2K trend. 

But is it just nostalgia, or does it signal the failings of modernity? 

The Y2K tech revolution seemed limitless at one point, promising access and convenience on the virtual landscape to eliminate the physical media that “burdened” us. At one point, technology sold cutting-edge, convenient solutions. Take the iPod: a portable digital music player that eliminates the inconvenience and cost of buying separate CDs or cassettes, replacing CD players and Walkmans. Flash forward to today, it has been consolidated into a music app on everyone’s mobile devices, with a monthly subscription. 

This convenience, by way of technological advancements, has been undeniable, but it begs the question: Do we truly own anything? Buying a $10 CD along with a $30 CD player guarantees ownership and access to an album forever. But as soon as the monthly payments to Spotify stop, consumers lose access to their media, no matter how many monthly installments have been paid. 

Instagram has also become our digital scrapbooks, with young people even making secondary “finsta” accounts to share more intimate moments with a small circle of friends. Each moment is carefully curated, much like a physical photo album, allowing us a place to share and immortalize moments for free. Taking a walk down memory lane now looks like flipping through Instagram highlights and scrolling through a photo dump. 

Your phone also likely houses dozens of gigabytes of photos, voice memos and notes — we seldom realize the sheer amount of digital storage we take up until we need to switch it over to a new phone. 

Every bit of media that should be our own can only be accessed through another app and tech company. If you threw your phone in the river and forgot the digital landscape, could you still access any of those moments yourself? The truth is that if the internet died tomorrow, most of us would have nothing to show for the media that we have amassed over the years. 

At the mercy of tech companies, consumers volunteer their data to be safeguarded. For the sake of convenience, many of us begin relying on these free apps and their data banks to keep our photos and videos safe and stored. 

Snapchat similarly allowed consumers to store years’ worth of Snap “Memories”, conveniently stored off the cloud, with unlimited storage, free of cost. That is, until 2025, when the app began rolling out a monthly subscription if consumers wanted to keep Snapchat memories exceeding five gigabytes of storage. Pay a monthly subscription to keep your photos and videos backed up, otherwise lose all the dozens of gigabytes of storage over the years. 

This reversion to physical media is likely born out of a desire to be able to have something to show for our interests and hobbies, a cure or cope for this subscription fatigue. Gen Z is likely realizing the instability and uncertainty that these apps have to offer, and making the switch to something they can hold in their hands. 

On top of this subscription fatigue faced by consumers, everything is an ad. We can watch movies and make mood boards on our phones — with the stipulation that our phones have become a billboard. With consumer needs being consolidated to free apps, they pay for convenience and accessibility by sitting through unskippable ads back-to-back. Even paid streaming services have subscription “tiers”, which include a basic “Paid, with Ads” option. 

Despite these inconveniences, more and more consumers are becoming reliant on streaming platforms.  It’s no coincidence that box office attendance has dwindled in the last few years. Uniquely, the younger generation is still making it out to the box office. 

In 2024, a survey by Telefilm Canada and the Movie Theatre Association of Canada found that 84 per cent of Canadian moviegoers were under the age of 35. The same survey saw a 19 per cent drop in Canadian moviegoers as a whole since 2019, but a majority of that drop was among those above 65. Clearly, the streaming experience is not going to cut it anymore for Gen Z. There is maybe a novelty in the uninterrupted experience that was promised: pay for the product, get the service. No finicks, no ads, no silly business. 

The irony of it all is that Gen Z is not making any radical swaps and seems to be cherry-picking what technology to keep. It goes without saying that social media and digital technology have become so integrated into our daily lives that it would be nearly impossible to eliminate our reliance on them. It is unlikely that any young person would be able to get rid of their phone and go completely “analogue”. Unfortunately, the world has been designed around the ease and accessibility of technology in a way that is hard to take back. 

We are moving in a direction that forces consumers to rely on tech companies, with little assurance that they will not, at any moment, change their business practices to leech out a couple more dollars. 

The convenience that technology once promised has now fallen by the wayside. With the knowledge that consumers rely on their apps and services, companies can begin to implement predatory subscription plans or flood the app with advertisements, knowing that there is little choice but to stay. 

Gen Z is getting film photos developed the old-fashioned way, while simultaneously using AI to make their flashcards for their organic chemistry final. Clearly, Gen Z is not rejecting technology because it is obsolete. If anything, young people are clearly signalling that they have become more reliant on it than ever. But opting for analogue forms of media consumption speaks to a frustration with technology, a small protest to take back what is rightfully ours. 

In small ways, Gen Z is taking the best of technology while attempting to discard the cluttered digital mess that technology has become. In this analogue endeavour, the generation of technology attempts to reach equilibrium, one digicam photo at a time.