Why New Fiction Is Obsessed With Old Technology

The Atlantic

30-01-2025

'When a moment means more,' reads a 1984 ad for blank Kodak VHS cassettes, 'tape it. And keep it.' Keep it? That was a fib. As old-timers know, VHS tapes don't keep well—they wear out; crack; demagnetize into staticky oblivion; disappear into attics or the unloved corners of yard sales. Playback devices have grown scarce and expensive; a Japanese firm that operated the last VCR assembly line ended production in 2016.
Despite their obsolescence, however, cassettes routinely appear in popular culture four decades after their heyday, usually serving as surprising symbols of stability and truth. In modern reality, most media are streamed, digitized, and easily vaporized; not so much owned as leased; pockmarked with ads and often tweaked (or falsified) via AI. In modern fiction, meanwhile, vintage media have emerged as tactile objects that symbolize integrity, solve the crime, and radiate realness.
Catherine Airey's debut novel, Confessions, is a new entrant in this growing subgenre. In the modern-day timeline of this multigenerational family drama, Lyca, an extremely online member of Gen Z, is investigating the mysterious estrangement of her grandmother and great-aunt. The internet offers no clarity on the matter: 'I learnt the hard way that googling for answers doesn't just give you them; it leads you into a hall of mirrors, down infinite rabbit holes, leaving you with can upon can of worms.' Some answers can't be generated by a search engine, Airey suggests. She is only the latest in a wave of writers distilling the anxieties of the digital age into a celebration of the analog.
The popularity of Stranger Things seems to have a lot to do with the trend; the Netflix series' mid-'80s aesthetic helped revive a 'kids on bikes' young-adult genre in books and on TV, where teens go spelunking through a spooky town's secrets. In Jane Schoenbrun's 2024 horror film, I Saw the TV Glow, tapes of a Buffy -esque drama connect a pair of teens attending Void High School (VHS). In Wim Wenders's 2023 film Perfect Days, a man cleaning toilets in Tokyo uses audio cassettes and an old camera (with film!) to shape and capture an existence beyond his humdrum job. Over the past five years, novels including John Darnielle's Devil House, Jeneva Rose's Home Is Where the Bodies Are, and Ransom Riggs's The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry have all turned on their protagonists resolving the past via old media. Hybrid essay collections such as Chris Campanioni's forthcoming VHS use analog recordings to explore family history.
To an extent, each of these works satisfies a nostalgic urge. Several of the novels sport visual references to cassettes on their covers, which serve as canny triggers for Boomers and Gen Xers raised on mixtapes (or younger generations who wish they'd been). And although such works channel specific pop-culture memories, they also position old media as avatars of an overarching '90s value: cultural authenticity. The janitor at the center of Perfect Days warms to a young woman who appreciates the sound of his Patti Smith tape, but becomes cranky toward the co-worker who sees his cherished objects only as collectible commodities.
Yet old media, in these new works, aren't just cozy reminders of the past—they actively disrupt the fictional present. These recordings shed light on characters' mysteries and personalities; they also set plots in motion. Early in Confessions, in 1977, Róisín—Lyca's great-aunt—is enchanted by the Golden Record attached to the NASA Voyager probes, a collection of songs, voices, and nature sounds meant to explain Earth to possible alien civilizations. 'Like a time capsule for other forms of life to discover,' Róisín tells her mother. 'And they're actually gold.'
The record is an early indicator of what old media will do throughout the book: save, compress, reveal. Confessions opens in the '70s in County Donegal, Ireland, where Róisín and her sister, Máire, are fascinated by a house occupied by the 'Screamers,' a group of devotees of primal-scream therapy. The Screamers' peculiarity makes them fodder for horrific folklore about what really goes on in there. But it's also an escape hatch: Máire joins the Screamers as an artist in residence, setting off a series of events that will eventually encompass sexual assault, 9/11, the Irish battle over abortion rights—and an antiquated video game.
Threaded through this story, which stretches to 2023, are excerpts of Scream School, a text-based choose-your-own-adventure video game about two sisters who have been sent away to a Donegal boarding school. The game becomes an allegory for the novel's larger story, which explores Róisín's and Máire's fates through the lives of Máire's daughter, Cora, and Cora's daughter, Lyca. As Confessions moves into the '80s, Róisín takes up residence in the old Screamers house, which a woman named Scarlett has converted into a Victorian-style B&B that is actually a front for then-illegal abortions.
The physical game cartridge (complete with a J-card) plays a key role in revealing all of this, but it's one of many forms of old media in which Confessions marinates: grainy videos of post-9/11 Manhattan uploaded to YouTube; an old Pentax film camera; handwritten letters; penciled gameplay maps. All of these artifacts add up to reliable evidence in the case of the separated sisters.
In 2018, Lyca is tasked with using the Scream School cartridge to put the story together. With the help of a tech-savvy schoolmate who procures a vintage Commodore 64 computer ('It's from the eighties,' he says, adorably), they work through the game. No magic wormholes open up ('It's not a very good game,' he says), but the experience sets Lyca on the path of accessing family histories, as game maps and letters expose a long-held secret. To keep the letters safe, Lyca stores them in an old laptop—useless as a piece of technology, but essential as a hiding place—as if the letters themselves were a hard drive, only more valuable, because they hold information you can't access through a web browser or alter with a keystroke.
Confessions is based on a true story: A County Donegal building was home in the 1970s to the Atlantis Foundation, a group of primal-scream practitioners. From the early '80s to early '90s, the building housed a women's commune called the Silver Sisterhood, where residents cosplayed as Victorian-era women for tourists. They also developed text-based video games such as Jack the Ripper and The Secret of St. Bride's. The commune was generally averse to technology, but as one leader later explained, 'unlike television, which … is passive and mind-rotting, computer games call for concentration and commitment.'
All new technologies stoke anxiety in artists. Today, AI companies are feeding the texts of books into large language models, prompting authors to pursue legal action against the firms to preserve their copyrights and their livelihood. In his forthcoming history of mechanized art, The Uncanny Muse, the cultural critic David Hajdu argues that the onset of artificial intelligence is just the latest iteration of an ongoing worry that computers might eventually outperform human creators. 'The idea that machinery could replace people—and, in some ways, surpass them in performance—became a truism,' he writes. 'Why shouldn't a machine do the work of a human being, if the human body is essentially a machine, anyway?'
Not all disruptive technologies are created equal, though; tools like ChatGPT raise the stakes for the role of the creative human being in the way that, say, the Moog synthesizer never did. Artists are responding to this dizzying change by remembering a time when technology was a tool for creativity and connection. I Saw the TV Glow imagines a culture unpolluted by the internet, as substantive and innocent as the videotapes its characters pass around like samizdat. Similarly, the game in Confessions is a way of concealing the central family history and documenting a fight over the control of women's bodies. For safety's sake, the details are hard to search for—encoded in physical artifacts only a human could decrypt.
Airey's debut is a historical novel, but its concerns are lodged in 2025. It arrives at a time when artists are looking for ways to represent our strange reality. For many of them, it seems that the answer is in the past, on tape.