Would You Go Back to a Time Before Smartphones If You Could?
PodcastsWould You Go Back to a Time Before Smartphones If You Could?Turns out, looking back is also about looking forward.By Julie Beck and Natalie BrennanIllustration by The Atlantic. Tech-focused nostalgia has become a potent cultural force in recent years, driving sales of “dumbphones,” iPods, CDs, and other retro technology. According to a 2023 survey, 67 percent of Americans wish they could go back to a time “before everyone was ‘plugged in.’” The psychologist behind that survey, Clay Routledge, has found that this sort of nostalgia is more than just a yearning to go backwards.
- ▪PodcastsWould You Go Back to a Time Before Smartphones If You Could?Turns out, looking back is also about looking forward.By Julie Beck and Natalie BrennanIllustration by The Atlantic.
- ▪Tech-focused nostalgia has become a potent cultural force in recent years, driving sales of “dumbphones,” iPods, CDs, and other retro technology.
- ▪According to a 2023 survey, 67 percent of Americans wish they could go back to a time “before everyone was ‘plugged in.’” The psychologist behind that survey, Clay Routledge, has found that this sort of nostalgia is more than just a yearnin
The Atlantic files mainly under culture. We currently carry 338 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Atlantic |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/07/would-you-go-back-to-a-time-before-smartphones-if-you-could/688011/?utm_source=feed |
| Publication time | 2026-07-27T06:00:00-04:00 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T10:01:10.915Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T10:01:10.915Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | cnuEwjykriDP · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
PodcastsWould You Go Back to a Time Before Smartphones If You Could?Turns out, looking back is also about looking forward.By Julie Beck and Natalie BrennanIllustration by The Atlantic. Source: Noel Hendrickson / Getty.July 27, 2026, 6 AM ET ShareSave Listen−1.0x+Seek0:0035:03Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket CastsBack in the ’90s, before everyone had smartphones, were things just … better? Tech-focused nostalgia has become a potent cultural force in recent years, driving sales of “dumbphones,” iPods, CDs, and other retro technology.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Atlantic.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Atlantic
