Why Peeps Are Ditching Digital in 2026

If I were to walk into a music store, a flea market, or a college dorm in 2026, I'm pretty sure I would see something that I wouldn't have seen 10-20 years ago. People under thirty are buying turntables, and they're willing to pay more for an SLR from 1985 than it cost new. A growing chunk of them are even choosing $300 dumbphones with no app store over the latest iPhone. I don't think we can say this is purely nostalgia, mostly because most of the people pushing it forward weren't alive when any of this stuff was current. But I definitely think we are seeing a cultural shift to simpler tech.

Let's look at the numbers, shall we?

Vinyl is the easiest data to point at. The RIAA's 2022 year-end report put US vinyl revenue at $1.2 billion, the seventeenth straight year of growth. Luminate, the firm Billboard uses to track sales, counted over 41 million vinyl albums sold that year, the first time since 1987 that vinyl beat CDs on units. The trend kept compounding through 2023 and into 2024. Is this purely because Taylor Swift released seemingly dozens of different "limited edition" collectible vinyls for all her albums, or is it something else?

Film is harder to measure because most of the manufacturers stopped reporting unit numbers, but the indirect signs are hard to ignore. Kodak restarted Ektachrome production in 2018 after a six year pause, citing rising demand. A used Contax T2, a point and shoot you could find for around $300 a decade ago, now sells for more than $1,000 on the major used camera platforms. The Olympus Mju II tells a similar story.

Fujifilm has been quieter about it, but Instax keeps showing up in their earnings reports as a division they want to talk about. The most recent fiscal year had them shipping over 11 million Instax cameras worldwide.

So this isn't made up, the behavior is definitely real, and it's been increasing for years.

Why people say they're doing it

The pandemic reset everyone's relationship to screens (including me…but I don't want to talk about my COVID cottage core phase). Common Sense Media's 2021 census found teen total daily media use jumped from seven hours and twenty-two minutes in 2019 to eight hours and thirty-nine minutes in 2021, roughly a 17% increase, and that figure does not include schoolwork. The US Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on social media and youth mental health gave parents permission to say in public what a lot of them had been saying at home, which was that something about all this was bad for their kids and they wanted out.

Pew has been tracking how Americans feel about AI through 2023 and 2024, and the picture isn't subtle. More people are concerned than excited. The phrase "AI slop" went from niche to normal in 2024. I just saw a "Stop the AI Race" protest in the middle of San Francisco yesterday. The Atlantic, Wired, and The New Yorker have all run pieces about the creeping suspicion that the open web is going synthetic. Dead Internet Theory used to be a 4chan in-joke but now no one is laughing.

This is the appeal for analog. A vinyl record can't be slop. It has to be pressed, it has to be physically made and made well. I mean I guess it can be slop if it's not made well, but you get it.

Younger Generations are leading this, and we love them for it

If you remember when film was a chore, the surprising thing about the analog revival is that it isn't a boomer movement. The hashtag #filmphotography has hundreds of millions of views on TikTok and Instagram. Apps like VSCO, Huji, and Dazz, which add a fake film look to phone photos, blew up with Gen Z first. A large chunk of those users seem to have asked themselves an obvious question, which is why they were paying for a filter when they could buy a $40 point and shoot at a thrift store and get the real thing.

The Light Phone has been around since 2015 and stayed niche for almost a decade. In the last two years, the New York Times and Wired have both covered the broader trend of people downgrading their devices on purpose. Deloitte's annual Digital Media Trends survey has Gen Z self-reporting a desire to cut screen time in nearly every way.

The irony of sharing analog content on phones is real, and most readers will have spotted it already. Nobody is going off grid (let's not get crazy). The pattern is choosing what part of the day belongs to a screen and what part doesn't.

What it feels like

The simplest way to put it is that analog gear puts little daily pauses back in the right places. Thirty-six frames in a roll of film, sixty cents a frame, no preview, and the camera weighs a pound. You take fewer pictures and you think about each one, which sounds awful in theory and turns out to be most of why people stick with it. A turntable won't let you skip a track without standing up, and after two or three records you stop wanting to. A paper notebook does not autocorrect your bad ideas into worse ones. Nobody is throwing away their iPhone. The point of any of this is choosing where the optimization stops, because in 2026 the optimization will continue with or without you, so you might as well design your life to move at the pace that feels right for you.

If you want to start tonight, here's what we'd grab

If any of this lands, pick one thing

If vinyl is the one that calls to you, our beginner's turntable guide has setups under $300 that sound good. For film, the film photography starter covers what to buy and what it costs to shoot. Already fixing old gear? Check out our blog and forum for repair guides.

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Sources

• RIAA US Year-End Music Industry Revenue Report, 2022 (riaa.com)
• Luminate / Billboard year-end vinyl sales reports, 2022 through 2024
• Common Sense Media, "The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens" (2021)
• US Surgeon General Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health (2023)
• Pew Research Center surveys on Americans' attitudes toward AI, 2023 and 2024
• Deloitte Digital Media Trends Survey, annual report
• Kodak Professional Ektachrome relaunch announcement, 2018
• Fujifilm Holdings, latest annual report
• Atlantic, Wired, and New Yorker reporting on "AI slop" and the synthetic web, 2023 through 2024

Photo credits

• Hero turntable: Koen Sweers on Unsplash
• Record stack: Chris Boland on Unsplash
• Film camera street: Pexels
• Cozy vinyl room: Charlotte May on Pexels