The Generation That Remembers a Future It Never Had
- Rich Washburn
- 38 minutes ago
- 15 min read
My 16-year-old daughter reacted to the possible return of MySpace like people once reacted to a new iPhone launch. She has no MySpace nostalgia. She never had a Top 8, never broke a profile with bad HTML, never waited for somebody's page song to load over dial-up. Yet she is genuinely excited to "go OG" on it. And the fact that OG is literally Olivia Grace is just too perfect. That tells me this may be bigger than millennials trying to resurrect their adolescence. Younger people seem attracted to the exact things
MySpace represented before social media became one giant algorithmic shopping mall:
A page that actually belongs to you. A look you chose. Music you picked. Friends you deliberately added. Posts shown in the order they were posted. And absolutely no invisible machine deciding which three people are allowed to see what you made.
Gen X and millennials are hearing, "You can go home again." Olivia is hearing, "Wait — you mean social media used to let you build your own place?" That is an entirely different — and potentially much more powerful — kind of demand.
The Pattern
And it's not just her. I see a lot of kids like this. My daughter has repeatedly asked me to help her get an old school iPod. Not a knockoff replica. She's like, "No, I want an OG. I want a real one." She wants an old school clunky camera. She already has a record player and tons of records. She has a CD player and buys CDs. I haven't touched a CD in years. We have MP3s now. We have streaming now. Don't get me wrong, she has a Spotify account. But there's a texture missing. Electronics, technology, media, entertainment — all of it got very, very shallow over the past twenty years. Accelerated significantly in the past ten. It's vapid. And I think this younger crowd is looking at that and calling bullshit. Just because they're kids doesn't mean they can't look at something and call bullshit. It's almost like their internal firmware is calling bullshit on the world we're trying to force-feed them. It's glorious. I freaking love it.
Not Nostalgia — Recognition
This is not nostalgia, because they are nostalgic for a world they never lived in.
What they are reacting to is the loss of texture. The iPod had a wheel. A camera had a shutter button. A record had sides. A CD had artwork, liner notes and a physical place in your room. MySpace wasn't simply an account — it was a room you decorated, occasionally badly, with music blasting the moment someone walked in.
Modern technology removed nearly all of that in the name of convenience. One black rectangle now contains the camera, music collection, television, library, social life and shopping mall. Everything works better, technically. But everything also feels the same.
We optimized away the ritual. And then we optimized away ownership. You no longer own the album — you rent access to it. You don't design your social page — you pour content into somebody else's template. You don't choose what you see — an engagement system does. Even photographs are being automatically corrected until everyone's memories have the same polished digital skin. It is efficient as hell. It is also increasingly fucking soulless.
These kids aren't rejecting technology. Olivia still uses Spotify. She's not trying to abandon the future and live in 2004. She wants the convenience and the artifact. She wants something physical, expressive and deliberately hers. Something that doesn't disappear because a subscription ended, an algorithm changed, or a company decided the product no longer fit its quarterly strategy. That's why "I want a real iPod" matters.
She doesn't want a replica that imitates the appearance. She wants the actual object, with its history, limitations, weight and purpose. The limitations are part of the value. A camera that only takes photographs forces you to experience photography differently than a phone that can also answer email, play TikTok, and interrupt you seventeen times while you're trying to frame the shot. Their internal firmware is calling bullshit. They were born into a world that told them friction was always bad, newer was always better, infinite choice was freedom, and an algorithm knowing them better than they know themselves was somehow a service. Yet they can feel that something is missing even when they can't initially name it. They are discovering that convenience and meaning are not the same thing.
The Ritual
"We optimized away the ritual." That hit me, because the ritual was real. So real. And close to home. Back in the day, myself and three buddies — I had a step-uncle who gave me a 35-foot Sea Ray boat. We only took it out once, but for about two years we used it as our fort. We all lived at home with our parents, but we'd go hang out at the boat. We helped restore it after Hurricane Andrew messed it up. Made it good. It was our home away from home. We started this thing, all centered around music. We called it The Ritual. Each of us would make a double-sided 60-minute mix tape. Our songs, our choices — as kids, it was all some convoluted meaning that probably didn't have much meaning, but it was The Ritual.
Once a month, the four of us would go out to the boat, each with our mix tapes, and have a four-hour listening session. We'd set up lights, set up music, just had a great time. We did all the things we weren't supposed to do, but we did it safely. Nobody did anything stupid other than clogging up the toilet, which was always fun. But part of that ritual was going to all the CD trader stores, buying and selling our CDs, discovering bands.
Smashing Pumpkins, Dinosaur Jr., Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots. A lot of it started with radio — those were the hooks — and you went and found the album, listened to the rest of it, found adjacent artists. That whole thing was The Ritual. And that whole thing has been basically reduced down to the same behavior you see in a dating app. Which is equally as fucked up. This is the missing part of the experiential equation. And I think the generation that we got rid of that for is saying, "We want it. We deserve that." And they do. They absolutely do.
The Inverse iPhone Moment
Olivia wasn't politely interested because her dad told her an old website was coming back. She was launch-day excited about a product she has never used. That means MySpace isn't landing in her head as retro technology. It's landing as new technology with features her generation has been denied.
To us, customizable HTML, profile music and a Top 8 sound primitive because we remember the crude implementation. To her, they sound almost radical:
"You mean I get to build my own page?" "You mean it can look different from everybody else's?" "You mean I choose the music people hear when they visit?" "You mean my friends' posts just appear in order?"
Those should sound like basic features. Instead, to a sixteen-year-old raised inside standardized profiles and algorithmic feeds, they sound like liberation. That excitement resembles the early iPhone launches. The first iPhone was exciting because it collapsed a pile of separate experiences into one magical object.
This may be the inverse moment: people are becoming excited about technology that gives the separate experiences back.
The iPhone said, "Everything can live in here."
The modern platform economy eventually added, "And everything will look the same, be rented rather than owned, and be arranged by us."
Now this generation is asking, "Okay, but where is my part?"
That visible excitement is her recognizing an unmet need before she necessarily has the vocabulary to explain it. She can feel that MySpace offers something fundamentally different from Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat. Not necessarily more advanced, but more hers.
When AI Makes Everything, Substance Becomes Everything
Here's where this connects to something bigger. AI can make anything now. You can produce whatever the hell you want. Most of my social media is fully automated by an agentic AI, and that's fine for what it is. But what this generation is talking about is substance.
Everyone's like, "We're gonna lose our jobs, AI's gonna take our jobs." Nah, dude. AI is gonna let you focus on what's actually important — the substance, the shit that people are actually gonna miss. If the last generation is missing cassette tapes and records and the tactileness of the 80s and 90s — and they never even lived it — there's some sort of biological imperative to have substance in your life. You know something's wrong. You don't need to be taught something's wrong.
As bad as the vapid stuff is now, it's going to be a million times worse in the AI era because of all the AI slop and the ease of producing it. But it calls out the thing: the judgment, the taste, what makes it real, what puts something behind it other than just a series of characters or some AI-generated image.
I'd prefer a shitty thing by a human than something pretty by an AI. Doesn't mean I'm not gonna use AI literally every day, all day as a tool. But there's certain things that don't need it. I have a garden out back. I dig it and I till it and I plant and I harvest by hand. Almost none of it has any value other than the motions and the activity of doing it. I'm not a farmer, but something inside me needs to do it. I buy my produce at the grocery store. But I am driven to do this, and it's deeply fulfilling in an almost mysterious way.
I think my daughter's generation is about to bitch-slap society with that lesson.
The Triangle Completes
This connects to two other pieces I've been working on. "The One-Person Frontier Lab" is about what happens when execution becomes cheap. One person, with enough compute and enough clarity, can now do work that once required a whole organization. The distance between knowing what should happen and actually making it happen has collapsed. That makes human direction — the ability to structure intent, choose the path, and recognize what matters — the expensive part now.
"We Ripped the Future Into MP3s" is about the human experience surrounding technology: the little room, the Winamp server, the traded hard drives, the Trends CDs, the arguments, and the fact that one saved MP3 carried an entire period of your life across twenty years. The technology matters, but what gives the story weight is that people were together, discovering something, making judgments, and attaching the future to a place and a memory.
The full sequence is almost:
1. AI collapses execution.
2. Abundance destroys production as a reliable signal of value.
3. Meaning, judgment, taste, intent, story, and lived experience become the scarce layer.
4. A younger generation — already suffocating in frictionless abundance — starts instinctively demanding the missing texture back.
That's why Olivia's reaction to MySpace matters beyond MySpace. She is reacting to the same structural change I described in "The One-Person Frontier Lab," except culturally. When anyone can produce anything, the question changes from "Can you make it?" to "Why did you make it, what does it say about you, and why should anybody give a shit?"
AI can make the file. It cannot decide, on its own, which file four friends will still care about twenty years later. That is the human job now.
The frontier lab isn't just a production machine. It is a judgment amplifier. A person with no taste can now produce a hundred times more garbage. A person with judgment can build something that previously died inside their head because the execution cost was too high. AI multiplies both. It doesn't resolve which one matters. Intelligence becomes a utility. Execution becomes abundant. Content becomes ambient. And meaning becomes the organizing layer that tells all that capability where to go.
Steampunk Stops Being Fantasy
Here's where it gets wild. Steampunk stops being fantasy the moment fabrication becomes personal. It always looked irrational because we were judging it through the old industrial model. Advanced technology came from giant companies, standardized factories and global supply chains. If Apple built the future, the future naturally arrived as millions of identical glass rectangles.
Under that model, nobody would put an advanced computer inside a brass clock, a cassette player, a leather-bound book or a pocket watch unless it was a novelty prop. It would cost too much to design, manufacture and support. But AI, additive manufacturing and components like the ESP32 change the economics of weirdness.
You no longer need a market of ten million people to justify a device. You may only need one person who wants it badly enough to describe it, generate the enclosure, adapt some open-source code, print the parts and assemble the electronics. Suddenly, the question is no longer: what device can a corporation profitably manufacture for everyone? It becomes: what device would I build for myself?
That is a massive timeline shift. And fragmentation may be the wrong word, because fragmentation sounds like the system broke apart. This is more like technological individuation. Devices stop being universal appliances and become expressions of the people who carry them.
One person builds a walnut-and-brass music player with a physical tuning dial, local storage and an AI DJ that understands their entire listening history.
Someone else builds a translucent 1990s-style pager that is actually a private messaging device, voice assistant and local agent.
Someone wears the giant clock necklace — Flavor Flav, by the way — but the clock is now a display, camera, communicator, environmental sensor and AI interface. It looks absurdly old-school while containing technology more advanced than an entire 1990s computer lab.
Another person carries something that resembles a Victorian pocket watch. Open the lid and it becomes an e-ink interface for a personal agent.
Someone builds a cassette player where each physical cassette is not music storage, but a tangible profile, playlist, model personality or digital world. Insert a different cassette and the device becomes something else.
That is no longer steampunk as an aesthetic. It is steampunk as architecture. Old interfaces. Modern intelligence. Personal fabrication. Local ownership. Visible machinery. Objects with identity. And the old interface may not merely be decorative. A dial is sometimes better than a touchscreen. A switch tells you its state by looking at it. A physical object can constrain behavior in useful ways. A dedicated device doesn't contain twelve other apps trying to interrupt the reason you picked it up.
We spent years assuming technological maturity meant abstraction: hide the gears, remove the buttons, make everything invisible. But visible mechanisms create comprehension and attachment. You understand a switch because you moved it. You understand a tape because it has a beginning, an end and two sides. You understand a dial because its physical position means something. The glass rectangle replaced all of those interfaces with one infinitely reconfigurable surface. That was incredibly powerful, but it also made every interaction physically identical. Banking, romance, music, work, grief, entertainment and friendship all became the same thumb movement on the same slab. Personal fabrication allows those experiences to separate again. Not because they must, but because somebody decides they should.
Forking Hardware
People will fork hardware the way they fork software. They will remix devices. They will inherit somebody's music-player design, replace the screen with Nixie tubes, add an offline model, alter the controls and publish their version. Somebody else will turn it into a necklace. Another person will build it into the dashboard of a 1972 truck.
Hardware develops scenes, genres and subcultures. That is where Olivia's generation and the generation behind hers could alter the timeline. They may refuse the choice between "old and soulful" or "new and capable." They will simply combine them.
They keep the tactile interface. They add modern intelligence. They reject mass sameness. And because AI handles so much of the design and software complexity, taste becomes the limiting factor again.
The question is not whether someone can build it. The question is whether they can imagine an object worth building. Which loops directly back to the Meaning Economy. When anybody can fabricate a highly capable device, the valuable part becomes the conception: Why does this exist? Why does it look like this? What ritual does it support? What does it prevent? What does it make someone feel? A bespoke retro music player may be objectively less efficient than a phone. That can be precisely why it is better. It creates a boundary around listening. It announces that music is what you are doing now.
Your clock necklace might be ridiculous, theatrical and completely impractical. It might also be the only computer in the world that feels unmistakably yours. So yes: fucking steampunk. Not steam engines powering impossible machines. Human taste wrapping advanced intelligence in objects that preserve history, ritual and personality. We thought steampunk imagined a future in which Victorian technology somehow continued evolving. The real version may be stranger: every era continues evolving at once, because individuals can finally choose which parts of history their future is built from.
AI Is the Cauldron
AI is the cauldron. Not the finished culture. Not the style. Not even the point. It is the thing hot enough to melt previously separate materials together: Old interfaces. New intelligence. Personal memory. Open hardware. Local fabrication. Music, fashion, identity, utility and ritual.
Until now, those things mostly lived in different worlds. Art was art. Electronics were electronics. Nostalgia was nostalgia. Product design belonged to companies. Software belonged to developers. Manufacturing belonged to factories. AI starts dissolving those boundaries. A person can now begin with something deeply personal — an old radio from their grandfather, a childhood toy, a 1980s cassette player, a piece of jewelry, a family photograph — and turn it into functional technology without needing to become an electrical engineer, industrial designer, programmer and manufacturer first.
They still need judgment. They still need taste. They still need enough understanding not to burn the house down. But the distance between "I wish this existed" and "I made one" collapses. And that creates something genuinely new: not merely consumer electronics, but technological folk art. Objects built from personal history. A music player designed around the albums someone inherited from their father. A wearable assistant inside a giant Flavor Flav clock because that image meant something to the person who built it. A bedside device styled like a 1940s radio because that shape feels calm and familiar. A little handheld computer that looks like a Game Boy but runs a local vision model. A garden controller housed inside an old seed box, using AI to manage irrigation while preserving the physical ritual of planting and tending.
These aren't skins applied to generic devices. At their best, the history changes the function. The form creates a different behavior. The object supports a particular ritual.
The physical dial slows you down. The cassette determines the mode. The clock limits the information. The dedicated player separates music from notifications. The object says: this is what we are doing now. And yes, it reverses a century of industrial logic. Industrial culture said: make one object that works adequately for millions of people. This culture could say: make one object that works beautifully for one person, then share the recipe so everyone can mutate it into their own.
That is an entirely different relationship with technology. People stop choosing among finished identities offered by brands and begin composing their own technological identity. Their devices become closer to clothing, furniture, tattoos, instruments and rooms — functional objects that also reveal something about the person.
Apple gave us technology as immaculate industrial design. The next phase may be technology as autobiography. And AI is uniquely suited to catalyze it because AI can translate between disciplines. You can explain the feeling, the memory or the ritual first, and it can help turn that into circuitry, code, enclosure geometry, interface behavior and fabrication instructions.
That translation layer matters enormously. For the first time, "I want this to feel like listening to records in my grandfather's garage during a thunderstorm" can be the beginning of a legitimate product specification. That sentence would have been useless to a traditional manufacturing process. To an AI-assisted maker process, it may become the most important requirement. So perhaps this is one of the unexpected cultural consequences of AI: it makes advanced technology easier to build, and therefore gives people permission to make it less generic. Less optimized for everybody. More specific. More emotional. More eccentric. More local. More theirs.
The machine supplies capability. The person supplies the mythology.
And out of that cauldron comes a culture where our technology no longer merely performs tasks. It carries memory. It signals identity. It creates ritual. It tells stories.
AI may make technology powerful enough to become personal again.
The Cultural Phantom Limb
They are not nostalgic for their childhood. They are reacting to the absence of experiences they never personally possessed. They don't remember MySpace, but somehow recognize what was lost when the personal web became the platform web. They don't remember carrying an iPod, but recognize the difference between owning a music collection and merely having permission to stream one. They don't remember waiting for photographs to develop, but understand that a camera with limits creates a different relationship with a moment. They never lost those things. We did. And yet they can feel the empty space those things left behind. That is the cultural phantom limb.
Olivia's generation may be the first one forced to develop that clarity as a survival skill. They have grown up with access to everything, which means access impresses them less. They have grown up with polished feeds, which means polish increasingly feels suspicious. They are entering adulthood just as AI makes synthetic perfection nearly free. So they may begin valuing the things that cannot be infinitely generated: A real history. A visible choice. A physical object. An earned imperfection. A place with fingerprints on it. A relationship that required time. A story attached to the song.
That doesn't mean they will reject AI. Olivia wanting an iPod while keeping Spotify is the entire model. She wants the intelligence and convenience of the future without surrendering the artifact, ritual, and ownership that make the experience human.
Use AI to collapse the execution required to build a meaningful life. Do not use AI to simulate having lived one.
What They're Really Doing
The generation born after the rituals disappeared may be the generation that forces us to rebuild them — not by returning to the past, but by recovering the human ingredients we dropped on the way to the future.
They won't resurrect MySpace as it was. They'll turn profiles into personal digital worlds using AI, code, music, and art — but reject algorithmic sameness. They won't abandon Spotify. They'll carry an iPod beside it — or build something better that does both. They won't reject computational photography. They'll choose when a moment deserves a camera that can't interrupt them. They won't reject AI-generated abundance. They'll become almost religious about provenance, intent, and proof that someone actually lived behind the thing.
They won't choose between old and soulful or new and capable. They'll combine them. They'll fork hardware, remix devices, and build technological folk art that carries memory, signals identity, and creates ritual. She is not returning to our past. She is retrieving something from it. Something we dropped while running toward the future.
Maybe that is how her generation alters the timeline. They don't stop the AI future. They give it a soul before it's too late.
Rich Washburn is a technologist and strategist working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, and capital. He is Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.