Two months ago, shortly after Australia's social media ban for teenagers went live, New York magazine published a piece I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Published under the nauseatingly named section "Reasons to Love New York", "How the Phone Ban Saved High School" comes in guns blazing with its title alone, but the subtitle that follows it was what drew my attention. It takes a weirder turn, seeming to posit that the problem with high school was that kids weren't gambling enough: "Since the bell-to-bell device lockup, teens have rediscovered the simple pleasures of conversation and poker." Ah... The land of the free!

Jokes aside, were it not for the bizarre mention of poker as a "simple pleasure" on par with the basic human act of conversation, I wouldn't have even thought twice about this headline, let alone allowed it to live rent free in my mind for an extended stay. There's an unceasing wave of similarly presented pieces appearing on every magazine, newspaper, TV program, short and long-form video platform or social media feed available, showering us in age-old adages about the value of human connection with some buzzwords of the moment peppered on for flavor. We've heard it all before, and I am, admittedly, quite tired of it, but, alas, the promise of high-stakes tales of underage betting in between math classes was simply too good to ignore, so I had to click the article and read through.

After jumping the publication's paywall through means I unfortunately cannot disclose but wholeheartedly encourage you to use, I found myself awestruck by the presentation. It contained the expected platitudes about childhoods saved from certain doom by forced abstinence from the unholy glow of an LCD, of course, but what stood out to me was how this voyeuristic stroll through school playgrounds painted its otherwise milquetoast scenery in the unmistakable color palette of millennial nostalgia.

Though its headline and picture highlighted card games and comradery, the actual text was of such a particular cultural context that you could carbon date the author's birth year. These children were "talking to one another as if they were in a Brat Pack movie" and there was "an alphabet of new analog hobbies popping up just about everywhere". We even hear of one child who swapped Spotify for his dad's old CDs on portable CD player:

The tales of teenage Texas Hold'em I so wanted to laugh at were delegated to barely more than a single anecdote, and instead I was faced with Discmans, mp3 players and Game Boys being given the same symbolic weight as board games and sports. Items that, in my own childhood, were often vilified in much the same way as smartphones.

The way this author's childhood nostalgia overlapped with my own lived experiences of education had to me laid bare the artifice of yearning for a "pre-tech" existence. If a Game Boy is now a delightful little gadget for teenagers to play with between classes, won't smartphones eventually also become a gleefully simple retro computing device once something better comes along? If high school's "salvation" can be recognized by way of a return to 80s kid comedy antics and Weezer CDs, are we really chasing solutions to the ills of technology, or just blind nostalgia?

Examining this feeling has led me down an endless spiral full of wistful screeds pining for the bygone halcyon days of dial-up internet, cathode ray tubes and iPods, all wrapped in the assertive yet distinctly unchallenging tone of therapized searches for 'wellness'.

Since reading this article, I've found its specific strain of longing well beyond coverage of the current hot button issue of teenage phone & social media bans. Every "tech detox" testimonial and guide to quitting social media I've found seems to, much like this NY Mag article does, revel in satiating the reader/viewer's presumed desire to return to the way things were 'in the before times'. However exactly when those times were is a notion that seems to fluctuate from person to person, generation to generation. Millennials sing odes to Discmans and early internet forums, while Gen Z, the people around my age, seem to take the iPod and MySpace as their respective muses.

Regardless, this desire to wind time back, embodied through brief vicarious escapades to the familiar interfaces of the telephone keypad or the click wheel, reads to me as a distinctly conservative reaction, one whose traits remind me of an enduring conservative ideal: the pastoral.

Quick explainer: The pastoral ideal is, as the name implies, a romanticized abstraction of the feeling of the way of life of a sheepherder. Though echoes of it exist pretty much everywhere, the artistic genre of the pastoral, where the ideal originates, stays mostly in the realm of so-called "high art", serving as a voyeuristic object of delight for many who hold the bucolic lifestyle in high regard but have never lived it, and almost certainly never intend to. Most importantly for this essay, it does not concern itself with the less romantic aspects of this way of life. Its art will never depict the dirt under its countryman's nails, the many insects that surround him and his animals, or the assortment of horrible odors all around him. Even when it opts to depict the arduous manual labor involved in the lifestyle, it won't choose to do so in a negative manner. It's an aestheticized ideal that has historically been a vehicle for conservative thought leaders to extrapolate their ideological opposition to the 'modern', 'urban' way of life from, while averting the reality of the material conditions of the very lifestyle they idealize.

It is precisely this process of conservative ideological construction that cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams examines in his book The Country and the City, where he noted how the pastoral showed the same ever-shifting temporality of the 'before times' that we now see everywhere in tech detox culture. The genre and its ideal had been built on one central conceit: a return to a life that symbolized a "Golden Age" we've since strayed away from, yet every tangible definition of when this era happened and what its customs was incongruous with one another. One decade would admire the simplicity of a previous era, yet reports from that era would be pining for an even earlier era while denouncing the excesses of their contemporaries. As he put it: "When we moved back in time, consistently directed to an earlier and happier rural England, we could find no place, no period, in which we could seriously rest."

Decades later, our search for rest remains unfulfilled. If we were to repeat this same backwards movement Williams described in '73 (but with a focus on communication technologies), we'd no doubt find ourselves jumping from cellphones and social media, to desktop computers and internet forums, to television, to radio, to the penny press, to books inked and bound by hand, to rolls of papyrus, to words etched in stone; and still never find a truly ideal era where we had no complaints about our choice of devices for communication.

Therefore, continuing with this analogy to the pastoral, exchanging Spotify for a decades old iPod is to me something more akin to deciding to live in the woods after you've earned your money working a corporate job, rather a real truly impactful ideological choice. Your taste, your friends’ taste, the culture around you and the artists you listen to will all still be deeply impacted by Spotify's algorithm and horrifically low pay — much like how a picturesque country house is still just a little retreat that nevertheless exists inside A Modern Society which you can't escape from and must always interact with in some capacity (not to mention that you need to be quite well-off in the first place to even be able to make the decision to escape the city).

When we dream of MySpace pages, MSN Messenger chats and iTunes libraries, we're not creating a different future, we're collectively rewriting our own past while carefully neglecting to mention the downsides. Technology sucked back then too. We don't need to be singing the praises of the record companies, the Apple Computer or the Nintendo of the 90s just because they've all gotten even worse since then. When we do so, we're retroactively approving of their past methods, and laying the groundwork for us to retroactively approve of their current methods once something worse inevitably pops up.

When we celebrate the way technology influenced our lives in the past, we're creating a world where someday streams that pay fractions of a cent, predatorily monetized children's games and maybe even "prediction markets” may get glossed over as ‘not that bad’ by the rose tinted glasses of hindsight. We should be careful not to signal that the conflict that matters in our judgement of technology is that of the familiar vs. the new, that of nostalgia vs. novelty. We ought to seek a relationship with the technology that surrounds that isn't avoidant and regressive. Indulging in the comfort of our uncritical and fallible memories is not the same as developing media literacy.

Whether we're legislating or just personally negotiating what technology should do and how it should mediate the present and the future, the past should never be a golden idyllic standard we strayed away from. Our current issues have antecedents. As a great thinker once put it: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

Because, fundamentally, even if I chose to opt for something more analogue in my moments of leisure, my family will still message me on WhatsApp, my friends will still be on Discord, and the writers I enjoy will still be writing on Substack. I can’t opt out, and it's likely you can't either. I want to find a way to exist in this world without enabling its worst habits. Let's find a way to make this work.

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