Before the App Store, There Was the Cassette Deck

London-based illustrator Thomas Olivier, who goes by Tom le French, has been imagining what our most familiar digital services would look like if they’d been invented forty years earlier. Not just as software rendered in pixelated nostalgia, but as actual objects—things you hold. WhatsApp as a walkie-talkie. Instagram as a chunky point-and-shoot. Netflix as a slide viewer you hold up to the light.

There’s something almost therapeutic about it. The apps we use every day have become so woven into how we think and move that they barely register as designed things anymore. They just are. Imagining them rebuilt in plastic and chrome, with dials and dead batteries and signal drop, strips away that invisibility and makes them strange again. Makes you notice what they actually do.

The 1980s weren’t simpler, exactly. But the friction was honest. You knew when the tape tangled. The object told you. Now the failure is invisible—you can’t tell if the algorithm buried your post, if the server hiccupped, if you were shadowbanned before you even knew the word. Give me the walkie-talkie. At least when it crackled, you knew why.