The Walkman Doesn’t Have WiFi

The Fine Brothers’ Kids React series on YouTube had been running for a couple of years by 2014, and the Walkman episode follows the same template as all the others: hand a child something from a previous technological era, watch confusion unfold, collect the commentary. The kids poke at the Sony cassette player, can’t figure out what the tape is for, ask why you can’t skip songs, want to know if it connects to anything.

What gets me isn’t the confusion—that’s expected, that’s the premise—it’s how quickly the Walkman looks like archaeology. Like something dug up. I had one of those in the early nineties and it felt like the future: you could take your music anywhere. The whole city became a personal soundtrack. That was genuinely new.

The kids aren’t wrong to be baffled. The Walkman is baffling now. But they’re missing what it meant to carry a physical object, to choose one tape for the day, to flip it at the end of side A. Constraints that worked as a kind of focus. The shuffle algorithm is a better technology and a worse experience—I know that sounds irrational, but I still believe it.