These Kids Took Two Minutes to Load a Cassette into a Walkman But I Won't Judge

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These Kids Took Two Minutes to Load a Cassette into a Walkman But I Won't Judge

I thought I’d get nostalgic but actually just realized tapes kinda sucked.

Nostalgia can bring about some weird punishments. Case in point: this video of some kids trying to load a cassette into a Sony Walkman while their mother watches on. It's just under two minutes long, but you get to see the kids try to rotate the cassette, jam it in at 30 degree angles and speculate that you have to pull out the magnetic tape to spool it or something.

Never mind rewinding the tape with a pencil: These kids had yet to learn how to actually load the thing into the player. It's a painfully cute thing that'll make you feel old. Really old.

But there was a time when cassettes and 8-track devotees similarly looked back on vinyl and said "well, that happened." And with this video uploaded by photographer Lena Hyde, we're also getting a glimpse at slow death of something that was for years, weirdly intuitive: analog equipment.

With each succession, physical interactions have become slowly more abstracted. Loading a tape became pushing in a CD and then became scrolling a scroll wheel on an iPod, which then became a few impersonal taps on the smartphone playlist. So the notion of maneuvering anything physical is obviously lost. How do I insert a tape? Wait, let's stream it instead. (Dismissiveness aside, tape jams sucked. Let's not kid ourselves here.)

Consider this. Leaps forward in ease of use and digital formats have outmoded intimate physical interactions with electronics. Our devices shed buttons and moving parts in favor of smaller components and flash storage. Physical media might be passé in some cases, but the droll confusion of seeing someone try out something that obviously wasn't made for their generation never makes for an unsuccessful YouTube video.

And let's not pine for the old days because it was better. Let's pine because the music that came out of that era ruled despite those technological limitations.