AI’s backlash has arrived as quickly as the technology itself. Students have walked out of graduations to protest AI. Communities are pushing back against Flock Safety’s AI-powered license-plate-recognition cameras over privacy and surveillance concerns. And most recently, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, once an enthusiastic supporter of data center expansion, said the industry had “dug [its] own grave.”
A clue to understanding this anxiety lies in an unexpected event in New York City’s West Village.
Last fall, Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, opened a pop-up shop. People lined up around the block, waiting for as long as two hours to get in. They didn’t wait to see a robot or try on a virtual reality headset. They wanted a fabric baseball cap embroidered with the word “thinking.” They picked up tote bags, coffee cups, postcards, and matchbooks decorated with hand-drawn illustrations. Anthropic distributed copies of an essay by its CEO, Dario Amodei, printed on recycled paper (locally sourced, of course) and bound in navy cloth. The photography used to promote the space was shot on film and developed at a local studio.
A company building superintelligence had drawn a crowd by handing out the very things that technology was supposed to make unnecessary. The paradox is not confined to one shop in the West Village. As a powerful new technology emerges, we are increasingly drawn to the familiar. Anxiety about the future is creating nostalgia for the past.
Vinyl record sales are booming. Film cameras have returned. People are writing in paper notebooks, cooking in cast-iron skillets, and taking up knitting and other “granny hobbies.” After nearly two decades of closures, Barnes & Noble’s pace of new store openings roughly doubled in two years. Airstream still sells an aluminum trailer that looks almost exactly like the ones that rolled down the new interstates in the 1950s.
And then there is mid-century modern. We call it “mid-century modern,” but when the design emerged, it was simply called “modern.”
That difference matters. The chairs, houses, lamps, and tables that now convey warmth and nostalgia were not created by designers trying to resurrect a safer, more comforting past. As Frank Lloyd Wright is credited with saying, “The present is the ever-moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.”
Charles and Ray Eames, for example, shaped their famous chairs from bent plywood, using techniques they had developed while making leg splints for the Navy during World War II. Their fiberglass shell chairs came from a material used to house wartime radar. These designers were imagining how people would live next. What now feels retro was once an argument about tomorrow.