Rewind
I’m glad technology has made so much of life easier. I’m less convinced we’ve kept track of what we’ve lost along the way. Rewind is where I started taking inventory.
I was writing essays about abundance, technology, and AI when I started collecting everyday things technology had made unnecessary. The list became a project of its own: an illustrated trip from the 1970s to today, built with AI, and full of routines we once took for granted.
Finding a song on a cassette. Waiting for film to develop. Printing directions before a drive. Rewind revisits all of them, along with the once-unremarkable business of leaving the house and being unreachable.
You’re allowed to miss it
Open a story and leave a reaction: glad it’s gone, miss it, or too young to remember. Your choices collect into a personal Rewind. You don’t have to be consistent. You can appreciate streaming and still miss the video store.
The larger question keeps turning up in my essays. Making life easier is usually appealing. But judgment, taste, and critical thinking get better when we use them. If AI does more of our choosing and thinking, what happens to the skills we’re no longer practising?
Rewind lets you start with something you remember, then decide for yourself whether losing it was entirely an improvement.