Young people are falling in love with old technology

But for Jackson, who uses paper maps and calls the local cab company when she needs a ride, the added challenges of low-tech life are a small price to pay for what she gains.

“I have a lot more appreciation for things that I can’t access readily at my fingertips, like any kind of media," said Jackson, 17. “It is a little bit harder to make friends with people and keep in contact."

Teens and twenty-somethings may have grown up consuming media on their phones, ordering food on apps, and using rideshares, but some have had enough.

Driven by a desire to escape screens and reclaim a sense of control over their lives, they are resurrecting digital cameras, flip phones, and CDs. It’s not unusual to see them roaming the aisles of a record store or doing sidewalk photo shoots with digital cameras, as if they had time-traveled back to the early 2000s.

Lucy Jackson, far left, at a gathering of the Luddite Club.

The Luddite Club, a nonprofit group that supports taking smartphone breaks, has 26 chapters, nearly all of them at high schools or colleges. Jackson is a board member.

Musicians with younger listeners, including Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Alex Warren and Chappell Roan, sell on their websites multiple forms of nostalgic physical media—CDs, vinyl records and tape cassettes. Some, like Carpenter and Troye Sivan, even sell CD “singles," a format largely forgotten since the early 2000s.

Carpenter, Icelandic singer Laufey and Roan, all Gen Z-ers, have recently topped Amazon’s CD charts. Older artists appear on the charts too, but listeners of John Fogerty, for example, probably aren’t digital natives buying discs for the fun of it.

Even TikTok is full of videos for Bluetooth CD players, flip phones and digital cameras.

“People, especially in Gen Z, are just tired of not owning anything," said Hunter White, a 25-year-old data engineer and self-described member of “the music nerds of the internet." White said he collects CDs to escape the domination of streaming services, which he believes underpay artists and have inconsistent offerings. He sources discs from garage and estate sales, thrift shops, record stores and vendor events, and listens at home on a player Sony introduced in 2002.

To share his love for CDs, late last year White launched an app called Dissonant. (Yes, you can love physical media and still create an app.) It now has a library of 800 discs and around 350 members, mostly around White’s age. They pay to receive a CD by mail based on their taste, along with a handwritten note about the album. Members can keep the album or send it back and get a new one for free.

Hunter White said he collects CDs to escape the domination of streaming services.

Eighty percent of Zoomer respondents reported feeling that young people were too dependent on technology, according to a 2023 Harris Poll survey. And 60% said they wished they “could go back to a time before everyone was ‘plugged in.’"

“They’re doing this interesting tightrope walk," said Clay Routledge, whose research team at the Human Flourishing Lab partnered with the Harris Poll on the survey. “They like technology, but they feel like they’re missing something and want to get a greater sense of control over how they use it."

Jackson, the low-tech college freshman, recalled getting her first iPhone in middle school. Social media made her feel like she was living a double life. “There was the 3D real-life version where I was happy, and then there was this 2D world where I got to portray an image of myself," she said. “It was so fake."

As a high-school freshman, she met like-minded people who also wanted to ditch their phones and bought her first flip phone. “The way that I played music changed drastically," she said. “Navigation was a real issue. School work, you had to really be on top of it."

The point-and-shoot digital camera is one of the most prized rediscovered technologies, a must-have for nights out. There’s even a running joke on TikTok that one person in every friend group is the “digital camera friend," wrangling everyone for photos and handling SD cards and adapters. Kendall Jenner recently accessorized with a Canon PowerShot in an Instagram post.

These cameras range from as little as $15 to more than $300.

Tumasi Agyapong, a 26-year-old in Chicago, said she started getting into digital cameras around two years ago out of a sense of nostalgia and image quality. She loves that they are single-purpose, without the distractions of a smartphone. By her count, she now owns 15 of them.

“It really just comes out of wanting a detox from my phone being my everything," she said.