TECHOCENE: RETURN OF THE GADGET

HANNAH ONGLEY BREAKS DOWN SOCIETY'S NEWFOUND INTEREST IN THE TECH TOYS OF Y2K.

By Hannah Ongley

I recently started CBT for insomnia and it has changed my life profoundly. Nicotine cravings are way up, weights in the gym are down, and staying awake until the ungodly hour of 10 p.m. feels like torture. I’m allowed as many cans of Celsius as I like, provided I drink them all before 10 a.m., but no sleep-tracking devices. I’ve never used them anyway, certain (rightly) that the biometric feedback on how quickly I’m dying due to lack of sleep would only exacerbate the anxiety surrounding it, but the number of people who claim to have found the Oura Ring helpful for this sort of thing is staggering. One sliver of (non-bluelight) light is allowed: the Tamagotchi. Checking its health metrics and filling up his hunger hearts with a nutritious mix of meals and snacks has been a wonderful respite from the Apple Health app.

I got the idea from Coperni’s Fall 2025 show for Paris Fashion Week. Staged as a LAN party, it featured models wandering among old PCs and CRT monitors, carrying working Tamagotchis embedded in a reinterpretation of the Coperni Swipe bag. Tamagotchi, however, didn’t need a fashion show to become a coveted accessory. The Tamagotchi Original Celebration Y3K was released last year, along with a series of limited-edition shells. And at $29 on Amazon, it’s probably the cheapest and easiest-to-come-by nostalgic gadget on the resale market—which, thanks largely to Gen Z, is increasingly packed with lo-fi tech devices like digital cameras and MP3 players. iPods (especially the Nano and Shuffle) are in hot demand among those of us looking for a dedicated, screen-free experience dedicated solely to music. The Sony NW-A306 Walkman offers the nostalgia of portable music players and loses the distractions of a smartphone. Lately, TikTok users have been posting photo dumps from the Canon G7 Mark 2 along with tips on the best settings.

The appeal of these gadgets to Millennials is obvious. But even Gen Zers, who never knew the terror of a Tamagotchi screen filling up with turds faster than you could hand the device to your mom to nurture it back to health, are suddenly enamoured with Y2K cool. Why are we all so obsessed with these kinds of outdated gadgets? What is it that we’re really longing for? Likely, it’s a time when technology and the future felt thrilling, not threatening. Tamagotchis once symbolized a childlike inclination to nurture; now, they feel like a metaphor for our relationship with devices: always on, always needing us, even when you’re asleep, or supposed to be.

In the early 2000s, technology was sold to us as sleek, liberating, and full of promise. Internet cafés, Bluetooth headsets, WordPress blogs, and customizable avatars ushered in an era marked by a belief that tech could level the playing field. This was a time when tech was a personal accessory, not just a tool for productivity. Miu Miu’s micro mini skirts, tiny bags, and shiny fabrics are emblems of tech and fashion’s obsession with compactness and novelty. Today, Kim Shui plays with synthetic textures and body-hugging silhouettes that recall the slick, space-age optimism of the turn-of-the-millennium tech boom. And who could forget the iconic Motorola Razr? The Razr was arguably the first gadget to transcend the functional device category, transforming into a luxury accessory that consumers felt an emotional connection to. The recent Razr+, combining Y2K aesthetics with cutting-edge tech, shows Motorola is still fluent in the visual language of longing—for fun, freedom, and agency in a post-optimism age. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 6, meanwhile, is the first to feature a crease-free screen, causing a stir of genuine excitement in a time of tech burnout.

Tangibility and tactility—clicking real buttons, loading film, flipping a phone shut—also offer a kind of digital grounding in our ephemeral app-based world. The return to simpler gadgets—flip phones, digital cameras, MP3 players—seems to mirror a broader desire for boundaries and aesthetic separation from our all-in-one surveillance devices. It’s been years since the Y2K tech boom was revealed to be little more than a retro-futurist fantasy. Our disillusionment with the Silicon Valley elite is still growing, exhaustion coalescing with terror as we look forward to increasingly centralized power, ever more algorithmic manipulation, and data exploitation—digital monopolization instead of democratization. Choosing “obsolete” gadgets becomes a quiet protest. Using a digital camera isn’t just quirky, but a way of opting out of facial recognition and cloud synching.

It isn’t just consumers feeling burned out on boring tech. The other day, I was listening to an interview with Moni Wolf, a former industrial designer at Motorola, about the halcyon days of gadget design that spurred the rise of the Razr. The then-start-up decided to design not in Silicon Valley but in Milan, where trend forecasting was conducted with an eye to emerging markets and relayed back to Chicago. The center was on a redesigned floor of an industrial building, located among the furniture fairs and fashion shows, where researchers, model builders, and a UI team “lived the dream,” driven by optimism (informed, not blind), innovation, and collaboration. There was pressure to innovate, but the solution was not sleeping in tiny pods in the office hooked up to sleep-tracking devices. They took vacations and even, god forbid, sabbaticals.

Wolf believes that designers have to get off the productivity treadmill if we’re going to have fun gadgets again. “If you don’t have fun, you’re not going to come up with amazing ideas,” she says, adding that one person will never be as good as a team of people who can inspire each other. “Unless we learn how to be idle—which is essential to having good ideas—we will not get out of this rut.” We, the consumers, are learning that opting out of hustle culture is good for the soul—maybe those at the top of today’s tech giants would be better at designing fun devices if they had lived experience of fun. And speaking of soul—that cringey “Hello Moto” welcoming message was supposed to be the soul of Motorola speaking to you. The designers also had a genuine emotional connection to the product.

Where does this leave us in 2025? Wolf makes another great point about the future of entertaining tech gadgets: We can’t design things for the landfill. On one hand, today’s ephemeral, all-in-one devices are spurring a desire for the tangible: bright gradients, bubbly textures, liquid-like UIs, and the glossy translucent plastic that’s appearing everywhere from fashion collections to product packaging. On the other hand, tech advancements like AI and vibecoding offer new means of moving from flat, minimalist aesthetics back to something more vivid, tactile, and interactive like Windows XP 2000, old-school website buttons, and skeuomorphic icons.

From the rudimentary emblems of Web 1.0 to the humanist HD sheen or Frutiger Aero, Gen Z’s remixing of the visual codes of early-internet optimism is a direct response to the frictionless, numbing perfection of Instagram and Apple’s aesthetic. It’s also nothing new—a generation of millennials learned HTML and CSS by customizing our MySpace profiles, creating highly personalized worlds of glittery graphics and sensory clutter that Facebook didn’t allow. The Y2K gadget revival is overwhelmingly pro-tech, but maybe the products themselves are just stand-ins. What we really want is a different relationship with technology, one we were promised but never got—where we play an active role, creating and customizing, not limited by authoritarian design codes nor big data. Coperni’s LAN party and all the glossy plastic gadgets are ways of remembering what the future used to feel like—and asking if we still want it.