Say goodbye to the days when devices had responsive keyboards, cameras didn’t use that new-fangled universal serial bus, and listening to music involved moving parts. Things today are just so much less… tactile. Anna Jane Grossman decided to do what any enterprising individual who finds a niche would do – she made a website and called it Obsolete. Ultimately it transitioned quite nicely into a book/encyclopedia (as these things tend to do).
Someone important once said something along the lines of, “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” In the age of iEverything, digital audio, and bladeless fans we clearly learned. So why do we give a damn about things that went the way of the cassette tape? Nostalgia, duh. And Etsy. Sure, Obsolete is a great compendium about yesteryear and all that shit our parents told us to appreciate when we were younger. However, it’s a much better reference for designing the next new, old thing. Who knows, maybe you’ll come up with the next cassette tape business cards.
If nothing else, maybe you’ll actually understand what your parents are talking about at Christmas.
