Bad Resolution, Big Feelings: Why Choosing Worse Tech Is the Coolest Thing You Can Do Right Now

Somewhere in America right now, a 22-year-old is blowing dust off a VHS copy of Jurassic Park they found at Goodwill for $1.50, jamming it into a VCR they sourced from Facebook Marketplace, and waiting — actually waiting — for the tape to rewind. They are not doing this because their WiFi is down. They are doing this on purpose. With joy. Possibly wearing a vintage windbreaker.

And honestly? They are onto something the rest of us are only beginning to understand.

The Algorithm Didn't Ask What You Actually Wanted

Here's the thing about infinite choice: it turns out to be kind of exhausting. Streaming platforms now offer more content than any human being could consume in several lifetimes, and yet the dominant cultural experience of using them is spending 45 minutes scrolling through thumbnails before giving up and rewatching The Office for the fourteenth time. The algorithm thinks it knows you. It has studied your habits, triangulated your preferences, and served you a personalized content buffet — and somehow, you're still bored.

Dead media doesn't do that. Dead media says: here is the thing. Watch the thing. A VHS tape has exactly one movie on it. A LaserDisc doesn't care about your watch history. A mixtape someone made you in 2003 has a fixed tracklist and zero interest in your skip rate. The constraint is the feature, not the bug.

There's a growing cohort of people — skewing millennial and Gen Z, though honestly age is increasingly irrelevant here — who have clocked this dynamic and responded by deliberately reintroducing friction into their media lives. They're calling it a preference. The internet is calling it an aesthetic. We're calling it a genuinely interesting cultural development worth taking seriously.

What Counts as "Dead" (And Why It's Thriving)

Let's define our terms loosely, because the dead media revival is charmingly chaotic in its scope. We're talking about:

• VHS tapes, obviously, with their soft tracking lines and that specific hiss of magnetic tape doing its best
• LaserDiscs, the enormous, beautiful, completely impractical precursor to DVDs that a devoted cult has never stopped loving
• Disposable and film cameras, which have exploded in popularity to the point where 35mm film is legitimately hard to source in some cities
• Early digital cameras — specifically the chunky, low-megapixel point-and-shoots of the early 2000s — whose pixelated, overexposed aesthetic is now actively sought out
• Flip phones and early-era Nokias, embraced by a growing number of people who want a phone that is simply and only a phone
• Cassette tapes, which never fully died but are now outselling CDs in some markets, which is both wild and completely makes sense

Each of these formats shares a quality that modern technology has largely engineered out of existence: they require something from you. Attention. Intention. A little bit of physical effort. You have to be there for them.

The Tactile Gap We Didn't Know We Had

There's a reason people describe holding a physical object — a record sleeve, a Polaroid, a cassette case — with a kind of reverence that nobody applies to a streaming queue. Objects are real in a way that a digital library simply isn't. You can drop a VHS tape. You can lose it. You can lend it to a friend and spend three years trying to get it back. It exists in physical space, which means your relationship to it exists in physical space too.

Early digital cameras are a perfect case study in this phenomenon. The photos they produce are, by any objective technical measure, terrible. Low resolution, blown-out highlights, weird color casts, visible noise in every shadow. And yet images shot on a 2003 Sony Cybershot carry an emotional charge that a technically perfect iPhone photo often doesn't. They look like memory. They look like something that actually happened to a real person in a real moment, rather than a carefully composed content asset.

The imperfection is doing emotional labor that perfection can't.

Rebellion Disguised as a Hobby

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as nostalgia — and for some people, it probably is. But here's what's interesting: a significant portion of the people most enthusiastically embracing dead media have no personal memory of it. Gen Z VHS collectors weren't born yet when Blockbuster was a going concern. They didn't grow up rewinding tapes. They're not chasing a lost childhood; they're constructing a deliberate alternative to the present.

That's a different thing entirely, and it's worth sitting with. When you choose a format that requires effort, that limits your options, that can't be paused and resumed across seventeen devices, you are making a statement about how you want to spend your attention. You are opting out of the infinite scroll mentality and into something more like a ritual.

And rituals, it turns out, are deeply satisfying in a way that frictionless convenience often isn't. There's a reason people find rewinding a tape meditative. There's a reason the click of a cassette door feels good. The body knows things the algorithm doesn't.

Collecting as Curation as Identity

There's also a community dimension here that shouldn't be underestimated. Dead media enthusiasts are, almost universally, people who want to talk about their dead media. VHS collectors compare finds. LaserDisc devotees have extremely specific opinions about which pressings are superior. Film camera people are evangelical about their preferred stocks and development labs.

This is, at its core, a taste culture — and taste cultures have always been about belonging as much as they're about the thing itself. Finding your people through a shared appreciation for something weird and specific and slightly impractical is a very human impulse. The format is almost beside the point. What matters is that it's yours, chosen deliberately, not served to you by a machine that studied your behavior and decided it knew better.

The Panda Take

Here at Sasa Panda, we have always had a soft spot for the counterintuitive, the wonderfully impractical, and the things that require a little more love than they strictly should. Dead media fits that brief perfectly. It's weird. It's tactile. It makes your living room look like a very specific kind of fever dream. And it turns out that choosing to watch a grainy VHS tape on a Saturday afternoon, in a world where you could watch literally anything in 4K HDR, is one of the more quietly radical acts available to a person.

The tape is rewinding. The tracking lines are doing their thing. The movie is about to start, and you picked it yourself, on purpose, with your own two hands.

That's not worse. That's everything.