Sophie Haigney | Vox

The enduring allure of retro tech

2019-12-03T13:28:54-05:00

Festivalgoers browse vinyl inside a pop-up record store at Coachella in 2017. | Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Coachella

Neil Barratt has about 50 Walkmans. They’re varied in shape and size and color; some could fit in the palm of your hand and others are a little clunky, hard to imagine putting in your pocket. He bought most at estate sales or in charity shops or off eBay — often in need of repair, which he does in his spare time. About half are up and running, relics from the 1980s and 1990s, revived into utility. (Some, it should be said, stood the test of time on their own.) Barratt, 48, often pops a cassette tape into one and goes for a stroll around Crewe, the town in England where he lives. Sometimes, he said, he gets funny looks; he’s even been approached for a photograph in one of the local pubs. “I don’t know, maybe they’re going to put it on Twitter,” he said, laughing.

For Barratt, the Walkman is the apex of music-listening. He likes the sound of tapes, compared with that of digital music. He likes the aesthetics, which remind him of the 1980s when he was young. “There’s a nostalgic element, of course,” he said. But perhaps most crucially, he said, he likes the tactile element. In tape form, music is a tangible thing he can own. “Our digital overlords don’t want us to own anything anymore,” he said. “It’s often said that if you use iTunes, you don’t really own anything. I’ve got tapes from when I was 10 years old, and they’re mine.” So too are the Walkmans — physical and touchable and occasionally challenging — which are for Barratt a continual source of delight.

Strangely, cassette players are having a bit of a resurrection. In 2017, cassette tape sales in the US increased 136 percent, and in 2018 they rose another 19 percent. The country’s largest tape manufacturer experienced a materials shortage. Artists like Kylie Minogue and Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish are releasing tapes. Andy Pastuszak, from Philadelphia, told me that his 16-year-old son recently asked for a Walkman, because all his friends are into tapes. “This is a kid who born after the year 2000,” he said.

It’s not just cassettes. Vinyl has been exhumed in the past decade. Old red phone boxes in the UK are being refurbished to nostalgic effect. Tech companies are investing in “dumb phones” that only call and text. All the while, libraries of DVDs and CDs are still getting dragged from apartment to apartment, even when their players are starting to disappear from houses and cars.

This love of old stuff is growing, even as we throw out devices faster than ever. Electronic waste is the fastest-growing waste stream globally, and is expected to grow further, according to a 2017 United Nations report. Planned obsolescence — where companies design products to last only a few years, driving customers to toss devices and buy the latest model — encourages a culture of disposability. And yet, more and more objects are becoming magnets for nostalgia.

But why bring back something like the Walkman that’s generally assumed to be worse than its technological descendants? Paradoxically, it might be related to the sleekness of a software-dominated culture that has become increasingly anti-thing. As trends bend toward a sort of Marie-Kondo-style minimalism and things that used to be physical are increasingly digitized, some are yearning for yesterday’s junk. Ben Marks, general manager of Collectors’ Weekly, said, “I think there’s an interest in tangible goods in a way that there hadn’t been before we had so many digital goods.”

Maureen Sande, 40, still uses her DVD player at least six times a week. Like many old-tech enthusiasts, her reasons begin with the practical: Where she lives in Nairobi, the workout program she likes isn’t available on-demand, so she buys them as DVDs on Amazon. When friends come over, she says they’re astonished when they see her DVD player. “The first thing they always ask is, ‘Does it work?’ and then when they find out that it does work, they want to know if I use it,” she says. Their question isn’t unwarranted: Sales of Blu-ray discs and DVDs dropped about 50 percent between 2014 and 2018, and streaming subscription revenues surpassed physical sales of film and TV in 2016.

But there are also sentimental reasons why Sande has kept certain things. Though she has pared down her DVD collection mostly to the ones she uses, she still hangs on to her DVD sets of Friends and Sex in the City — objects that have been made mostly redundant by streaming but are touchstones of sorts for her. Indeed, Sande hung onto her VCR and about 12 VHS tapes when she got married and had to do away with some stuff. (Her husband felt, perhaps reasonably, that they could do without a VCR in 2017). “My VCR was one of my first adult purchases when I moved out of home, when I could afford to rent my own videotapes,” she said. So she kept it, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t practical; the object had taken on a life of its own.

DVDs also relate to questions of ownership — that physical sense that Barratt was describing, of having something tangible to hold. They sometimes represent a library of personal taste. Rick Paulas, a DVD enthusiast who has maybe a couple dozen DVDs in his New York apartment, said that though he’s slowing down his collecting, he probably still buys one or two movies a year. “Those are the ones that hit me pretty hard, and I will watch over and over,” he said. “I have a core of maybe five or six movies that I’ve watched 10 or 20 times, and those are the ones that, if it broke or got lost, I’d buy a new one pretty quickly.”

The desire for ownership and control over content is often a driving factor for those who hang onto their music players, too. “I don’t think anyone even remembers the era of the Zune,” says Dave Thomas, 30. But he still has his. The Zune — a portable digital media player that was Microsoft’s belated answer to the iPod — was released in 2006 and discontinued just five years later. Thomas got his first Zune for Christmas in 2009, and when its hardware failed a few years ago, he took over his wife’s old one, which was sitting in a moving box. (Microsoft discontinued its support of the device, so he couldn’t just send it in to be repaired.)

The Zune is small and slim, and it contains years’ worth of his music, burned off CDs. “I think it would be silly to pay any extra money for music I already own,” he said. Ryan Lenz, 26, a teacher who still has an old-school iPod from 2012, said, “On some level, I like the fact that it still feels like something I own,” he said. “I have a CD collection and vinyl collection, which I can physically manipulate, and the music that’s in my phone, even if I’ve bought an album on iTunes, I don’t really feel that ownership.”

There’s something almost spiritual about this, too, a devotion to objects or a way of accessing something else through them. “Vinyl is an extreme example. It’s almost like church,” Paulas said. “You’re going through the motions, you open the case, you put the album in, you get the levels right, and you’re almost doing this summoning of an experience, as opposed to the necessity of an experience. You’re going through these motions that you don’t need to go through, and it brings you back, but also to a time when you probably didn’t really exist.”

The kind of ritualistic interaction with a physical object that Paulas describes contrasts with the seamlessness of digital life. The physical objects themselves are also unique; they deviate from the monotony of the sleek aesthetic that’s come to dominate the world. “I think a lot of people are maybe bored with the sameness of everything,” Marks, of Collectors’ Weekly, said. “The culture’s becoming more monochromatic in some respects. So I think that the advantage for people who are weary of that is that these objects are messier and a little more difficult to deal with.”

The difficulty can indeed be part of the fun, which is why a lot of old-tech enthusiasts are also hobbyists who enjoy repair. Marian Mihok — a repairman whom Barratt described as “legendary”— has fixed thousands of personal cassette players. He said he enjoys working with “many small moving parts, like gears, pulleys, and levers” and enjoys the tinkering. He works on personal cassette players pro bono and sells cheap parts at low prices, in part because he wants to make things last and encourage other enthusiasts. Often, he said, the players only need a new rubber belt. “They are able to operate even after 30 or 40 years,” he said. “It’s unbelievable quality when compared to the electronics of nowadays.”

Resurrected Walkmans, through durable design and the will of aficionados, have managed to outlast our relentless drive for the new. Barratt recently gave his goddaughter a Walkman after she completed an important series of high school exams. “I said to her, ‘I hope in 10 years’ time, you’ll still have this in your hand,” he said. “You won’t have that phone or the same tracks that are on it, but this will stay.”

Sophie Haigney is a reporter and critic who frequently writes about arts and technology. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Economist.

Rage rooms are the latest self-care craze that won’t make us feel any better

2018-10-22T18:03:04-04:00

People take part in a “rage session” at the “fury room” in Paris on June 12, 2018. | Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/AFP/Getty Images

As I lobbed a plate against the wall, I wondered: When was the last time I broke something on purpose? There must have been some moment in childhood when I smashed something in a primal rage, but nothing came to mind. Maybe I don’t remember, but I’ve always been a rule abider, and it’s entirely possible I’d never broken anything on purpose in my life.

I was demolishing dishes at the Wrecking Club, New York City’s original rage room. A rage room, for the unfamiliar, is a place where you pay to go break stuff. It’s one part fitness phenomenon, a kind of anti-yoga, but it’s much less about working out than about the unusual experience of smashing things to smithereens.

Female rage is all the rage these days. It has launched a thousand think pieces and served as the subject of two recently released books — Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her — that treat the centrality of rage in the feminist movement, and mad women more generally. Anger has been a clarion call of sorts for women on the left since the 2016 election: Get mad.

View Link

The Brett Kavanaugh hearings — and perhaps especially a still photo that circulated of Kavanaugh with his mouth wide open, eyebrows furrowed, face contorted into a tableau of indignant anger — have prompted related discussions about white male rage. First: Does it exist? (Conor Friedersdorf thinks no; Paul Krugman thinks yes.) If so, what does it look like and how does it manifest? What is its relationship to “I like beer,” and what is its relationship to violence against women?

I was intrigued by rage rooms against the backdrop of these conversations about anger. Smashing stuff with baseball bats seemed more akin to what some are now calling “white male rage” than the now politically fashionable rage of liberal women (also most accessible to white women). It made me think of the (mostly male) social media stunters who filmed themselves smashing Keurig coffee makers in response to the company’s boycott of Sean Hannity, or burning their Nikes in response to the sportswear brand’s ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick. Physical, violent, irrational, uncontained — I was interested in what it would be like to act out those things, for a few minutes. I decided to try.

The Wrecking Club opened its doors in midtown Manhattan in 2017, and a similar space, called the Rage Cage, opened nearby in September. There are now rage rooms in Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and other cities around the country. You pay a fee for a timed session, often a relatively high one; the lowest rate for 30 minutes at the Wrecking Club is $79.99 for a one- to two-person package. (Anger is lots of things, but it’s also marketable.) In exchange, you get an offering of electronics, furniture, dishes, glasses, and other household items; whacking implements including a baseball bat and a sledgehammer; and a room of one’s own.

Penelope Green of the New York Times described the aesthetic of the Wrecking Club’s rooms as “part CBGB’s basement circa 1977, part Stasi interrogation room,” which is nearly perfect. I would add that when I entered my rage room — where a printer, an ancient-looking computer monitor, and a bucket of dishes were balanced atop dented kegs, next to a battered foam model of a man’s torso — I thought immediately of a frat house.

There are a few rules: Don’t throw the kegs. Wear closed-toe shoes, goggles, gloves, long sleeves, and a helmet. Otherwise, you’re unsupervised and can do what you want.

How to begin? Tentatively, for me. I put on a Spotify playlist of female pop anthems that a friend had made post-election, titled “Nasty Women.” I selected the baseball bat and brought it down gently on the screen of the computer, which I expected to shatter. It barely registered the hit, or the next one. I decided to warm up with some glass; I have accidentally broken many glasses in my life, so I was confident I could do it. I perched a vase on top of a keg. I brought my bat down. It exploded instantly in a single incandescent burst. It was thrilling.

I began to rage in earnest, taking big swings at the printer with the bat and then the heavy sledgehammer. It felt like a psychopathic challenge — I had to be able to conquer this machine. Every splintering of plastic felt like a victory, and its innards of wiring began to spill out. When I got discouraged, I turned to the dishes. I threw them against the walls, where they broke instantly. It was hard to stop, even as I sweated and my right shoulder began to ache alarmingly. (Raging is extremely physical, and I’m not entirely convinced it’s good for the body.) Meanwhile, “There You Go” by Pink and “Not Ready to Make Nice” by the Dixie Chicks blared.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Rage Cage (@ragecagenyc)

There’s a sense in which this phenomenon is totally bizarre: Why pay for a space like this when you could theoretically break whatever you want in the privacy of your own home? It feels more like you’re paying for license to go wild for a little while, outside the confines of the socially acceptable.

Nearby, the Rage Cage has a cheaper deal — $44.99 for 25 minutes — for a much smaller package of breakable goods. It has a more Instagram-oriented vibe; there’s a mount for your phone in the room that allows you to film yourself, and a spray-painted bull’s-eye on the wall. But in most respects, it’s similar: a private box for your sustained smashing, four walls and empty space, and permission to do as you please.

As I smashed, I thought of a party I’d been to during my sophomore year of college. It was hosted by a sports team dominated by Very Big Guys. It was the dead of a New England winter, and they were roasting a lamb in the backyard of a house where they lived, which people ate with their hands. There were not many girls at the party. There was an excess of beer. At some point — after hours of warming ourselves with beer as we saw our breath emerge in white puffs — boys started throwing stuff off the roof. I can’t remember what, at first, but then I looked up to see a TV hurling down. I was filled with a mixture of fear and awe at the base masculine impulse to throw something. I was that guy now, and I liked it.

The impulse to destroy objects — as the Keurig smashers and Nike burners did — always seemed inexplicable. I remember wondering: They know that their Keurig will be broken now, right, and that it’s their fault? But as I became increasingly enraged at the printer’s refusal to snap, I understood it as more of a wild release of primal energy, the inanimate object as a focal point for everything else.

The question I found myself testing, as I swung a sledgehammer into a printer: Is it good or bad that I enjoyed this? One psychologist, writing in Psychology Today, theorized: Rage Rooms Not a Good Idea. He wrote that they may fuel aggression, particularly for those with anxiety and anger issues, rather than serving as a release — and I see his point. Maybe for someone like me, whose anger feels cloudy and often inaccessible, this space was freeing, but for someone who struggles to control their anger, it could be toxic.

Perhaps — related to the political discussions about rage and who’s permitted it — the utility of rage rooms varies depending on who’s doing the raging. For many women, it’s a chance, albeit an expensive one, to play a character of sorts: the frat bro, the Keurig smasher. But for others, it might be a kind of sinking into the darkness of real rage.

The rage room is a wellness product, even if it’s aesthetically anti-wellness. Like all wellness products, it sells a kind of balm to our discontents: in this case, our rage. It solves nothing, but it may be worth the money anyway, for the sweaty, wild relief of smashing stuff.

Toward the end of my session, I ran out of dishes. I couldn’t help it: I absurdly paid $20 to add on another bucket of glass and dishes. One after another, I threw them against the dented steel walls of the room. It was incredible, sublimating my anger into fireworks of broken glass. I surveyed the wreckage at the end, sweating, in the empty room.

Want more stories from The Goods by Vox? Sign up for our newsletter here.