Today, as I floated through my commute from work — which usually consists of dissociating from the chaotic present-moment of the subway car and alternating between Spotify and TikTok depending on if I have service or not — I saw a jarring video.
“I work in IT,” user @tallphilippe began, “...Apple is going to release an AI agent and embed it into Siri, basically giving Siri the kind of capabilities that ChatGPT or Claude has. The drawback is that it appears Apple is going to force your phone and all the information contained therein — all of it, your files, your contacts, your notes, your emails — to be read by that AI agent.”
I rolled my eyes.
I probably should feel livid and empowered to do something about it. I should probably feel concerned that my privacy, or the illusion of it, is disappearing. But in 2026, nothing feels absurd anymore. I have gotten too used to being angry — or too tired of it.
I grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley and watched iPhones and Teslas take over. I was in 8th grade when T**** got elected, graduated high school in a global pandemic, and was a sophomore in college when ChatGPT came out. Last week, I found out Palantir is building two huge data centers in my hometown.
The technological and AI revolution has exhausted me — Big Tech has seemingly encroached on all of our lives in a way too big and powerful for the small person to do anything about. Every year, another part of life becomes automated, digitized, optimized, and streamlined.
I notice more and more restaurants and cafes opting out of forced socialization with a cashier in favor of ordering at a screen. Convenience is the lie they sell us. Faster. Easier. Less work for the consumer.
When we have the world on our screens at our fingertips, when we can get anything we want as soon as we want it, when we get used to instantaneousness, we forget patience, slowness, and the physical reality we really exist within. Infinite choice is exhausting, and convenience has started feeling more like surrender than liberation.
I’m tired, and it seems like my peers are, too.
They call us “Digital Natives,” those who grew up alongside technology. We saw our parents use landlines, flip phones, and paper maps, having to push a button four times for one letter and use critical thinking to figure out how to get to their destination. We watched the birth of social media and were the first citizens of this digital reality that became layered over the physical one.
We have watched our VHS tapes become monthly subscriptions. We watched photo albums become cloud storage. We went from flipping pages to scrolling feeds. Now, we are watching AI automate everything, from cars to customer service to creative work itself.
But when the pendulum swings too far one way, it’s bound to swing the other, and the Creative Renaissance is in full swing. Gen Z craves real, human creativity more than ever. We’re nostalgic in ways that often confuse older generations because we are nostalgic not only for our own childhoods, but for eras we never even experienced. We idealize the slowness of the 90s and Y2K, obsess over film photography, record shops, third places, and vintage clothing. We can’t escape the digital world, and so we romanticize the analog one.
People my age are obsessed with digital cameras, or “digis” as we cheekily refer to them, even though most of us have had a high-quality camera in our hands via smartphone since middle school. On the subway, I’m seeing more wired earbuds than AirPods. My friend Tyler just bought a cassette player in lieu of using Spotify. The Nothing Phone is blowing up, and people are literally locking their phones in boxes to focus. These little trends serve as a peephole into a much larger truth of cultural angst.
This is deeper than aesthetics and nostalgia-driven microtrends. The irony is that none of these technologies is objectively better than their replacements; smartphone cameras are more convenient than digital ones, and Spotify is easier than cassettes. AirPods are probably more practical than untangling a pair of wired earbuds every morning.
Practicality no longer feels like the point. We are opting out of the more convenient option in favor of the nostalgic one.
For years, convenience has been treated as the ultimate good. Every technological advancement promises a more frictionless existence. But after decades of optimization, many people my age seem to be discovering that convenience is not the same thing as fulfillment. In some cases, convenience has come at the expense of ownership, intentionality, and genuine engagement with the world around us.
Lately, I’ve noticed the term “Physical Media” everywhere. People post physical media hauls on TikTok. Entire accounts are dedicated to DVD collections, CD shelves, and VHS archives. The physical media collector has become an identity unto itself.
The term refers to tangible objects used to store, transport, or playback data and entertainment. Vinyl records. CDs. DVDs. Books. Magazines. Zines. Things you can actually hold. Things you actually own.
According to the Digital Entertainment Group, Gen Z is driving record sales in the US, with DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra HD sales declining just 9% in 2025, compared to a 20% decline in both 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, social media is flooded with posts titled things like "physical media girlies just want one thing," "why I'm going analog in 2026," and "my physical media wishlist."
This resurgence may hide behind the facade of nostalgia, but it’s deeper than nostalgia itself — it’s our way of fighting back. It’s no coincidence that the Physical Media resurgence is happening at the same time that AI, streaming services, and algorithms are growing into the dominant infrastructure of modern life.
I think physical media is becoming popular because ownership itself is becoming rare. For most of human history, purchasing something meant possessing it. Today, increasingly, it means renting access to it. We don’t buy our music collections anymore, we stream them. We don’t buy movies, we subscribe to platforms that license them. We don’t own software; we pay monthly fees to access it. Even our photographs, conversations, and memories often live on platforms controlled and owned by someone else.
Streaming was said to simplify entertainment… instead, it just fragmented it. You need nearly every major platform just to stay culturally in the loop. Bianca Garcia, a customer of Vidiots, a publicly-accessible rental library of over 70,000 titles on DVD, Blu-Ray, and 4K Ultra HD, told the LA Times, “At this point, I’m forced to have six different subscriptions, which is insane, and I still can’t find what I want to watch. Why am I paying this much for them to give me a movie for a year and take it away?”
People are tired of paying more and owning less. They’re tired of media disappearing because of licensing agreements and entire libraries existing at the mercy of corporations. They’re tired of being tenants in their own digital lives.
Physical media offers something increasingly difficult to find in the modern internet economy: permanence.
In August 2025, Rolling Stone published an article by CT Jones about the HBO Max series Love Life. After being cancelled, the show spent years bouncing between platforms. Sometimes being available, sometimes it was completely inaccessible. Fans repeatedly asked where they could watch it. Eventually, it resurfaced on Netflix, but the situation exposed something uncomfortable about streaming culture: we don’t actually own anything.
The creator of Love Life explained that this reinforced why he continues collecting physical copies of the movies and shows he loves. Physical media preserves work as it exists. It remains available regardless of shifting corporate priorities. It treats art as something worth cherishing, rather than just consuming.
Physical media is built around permanence. Streaming is built around convenience.
And in a digital world where media can be edited, rotated, removed, hidden, demonetized, or made inaccessible overnight, owning something that cannot quietly disappear feels radical. As we lose our digital autonomy, we are rediscovering the value of physical ownership.
I think this resonates so deeply with Gen Z because we occupy a uniquely strange position in history. We remember the world before everything became digital, but we are young enough to have spent most of our lives online. We remember DVDs. We remember iPods. We remember family computers. We remember when social media was supposed to be social.
We may be the last generation with a living memory of both worlds. Maybe that's why physical media feels so important right now. We are the ones who can do the most to preserve it. Not because we fully reject technology (we did pretty much build the culture surrounding it, after all), but because we understand that convenience isn’t everything. Access isn’t ownership. In such a crazy world where it feels like we can’t control anything, we can at least have some things to truly call ours.
And in this culture where more and more of our lives are driven by subscriptions and algorithms and AI, oh my! The quaint nostalgia we feel really serves as a quiet defiance.
