TikTok is more oriented toward consumption than creation. On Twitter, we can post whatever we want (within reason) but it ultimately has to conform to what we call “The Discourse,” the ever-changing set of opinions and arguments that defines discussion on the platform. On Instagram, users are allowed to express themselves by posting their own photos but also, increasingly, sharing images that already exist - fashion or architecture shoots, symbols of aspirational lifestyles instead of actual reality. The tactility and creativity that existed in spaces like Neopets or Geocities or an Oekaki BBS have been lost in favor of civilization-scale social networks, which tend to trade diversity for scale and speed. A lot of people, myself included, are feeling drawn back to those tactile, flawed graphics - for the column, I interviewed artists, designers, and trend forecasters who were all adopting them once more.įrom Maria Vorobjova’s video “ Wood Wide Web ” That simplicity wasn’t the slick minimalism of today’s digital platforms it was just the limit of what could the consoles could support. We got excited when video games went from 32 bits to 64.

It was a time of glitching polygons and pixel art. It also recalls the messy aesthetics of that era’s technology, before everything was optimized and smoothed. (You should read that first here I want to dwell on the idea a little more.) Digital nostalgia colors our fondness for things like Geocities, where users made their own sloppy HTML pages festooned with GIFs and clashing colors. In my New Yorker column, I labeled this feeling digital nostalgia, a desire to return to a simpler, messier, and more human digital lifestyle. We know what it’s like to live on the internet now - it mostly sucks, or it primarily sucks, with intermittent bright spots. New bits of content have no incremental value when there are thousands of them every day. You don’t “log on” because you’re never off. Now, they generally feel banal and repetitive. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, on-screen experiences - whether playing video games or logging in to AOL Instant Messenger - felt novel and radical, something like figuring out a different way of living. It’s so appealing, I think, because it recalls a time when “the internet” and “technology” weren’t solely about vast, inhuman online platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The Pocket Pikachu is as futuristic as any device that has debuted in more recent years. Even turned off, it’s irresistible, like tangible evidence of a future that never happened. I need to buy an eyeglass screwdriver to take it apart and replace the battery, then we’ll see if it still works. The body is clearly assembled from plastic panels, a contrast to Apple’s vacuum-sealed designs. The plastic housing is a little scuffed but it’s still bright yellow. I recently rescued the device from my parents’ house. I was always thinking about what the tiny pixelated Pikachu on the LCD screen was doing and what I might need to do to keep it alive - feeding, cleaning, accruing in-game points - the way I now think about the iPhone in my pocket. Essentially a knockoff Tamagotchi featuring the yellow Pokemon instead of an anonymous blob, the Pocket Pikachu was my first encounter with passively present technology. The device was the Pocket Pikachu, which Nintendo released in 1998. The only social networking it allowed was showing it to my friends, most of whom were not interested.

It was not connected to the internet, but it did measure my steps. I couldn’t use it to tweet, but I could play games. When I was in elementary school in the late ‘90s, I had a mobile technological device that I carried around with me everywhere.

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