Politics in the rich world, says the Economist's Schumpeter columnist, is mostly about promising to make the economy look like it did decades ago. Now Silicon Valley is at it too. Elon Musk's Tesla Diner in Los Angeles is a homage to 1950s Americana, the Cybertruck is a beefed-up DeLorean, and tech firms are pouring money into wearables designed to blend into old-fashioned objects: rings, glasses, watches and pendants. Companies that can make customers feel sealed off from the digital world are cleaning up. Schumpeter finds it a great irony that American capitalism should be so obsessed with the past as it hurtles into the future.
https://www.economist.com/business/2026/09/09/the-rise-of-retrofuturism
I'm not sure it's ironic at all.
Capitalism has always sold the past
The Tesla Diner, which opened in Hollywood last year, is quite something: curved Googie architecture straight out of The Jetsons, roller-skating waiters, red vinyl booths, 80 Superchargers out the back and Optimus robots handing out popcorn. It's a 1950s drive-in with a robot butler.
But selling nostalgia is one of the oldest tricks in the capitalist book. Britain has had a thriving heritage industry for decades: think of steam railways, National Trust gift shops and every pub ever refitted to look Victorian. And back in the 1980s writers such as Patrick Wright were already describing how a whole economy could be built around packaging a comforting version of the past. What's new is only that it's the tech industry doing it, the very sector that's supposed to be all about tomorrow.
Nostalgia for optimism, not chrome
I think what people are really buying isn't chrome and milkshakes. It's the optimism of an era when the future looked like something worth looking forward to. The 1950s imagined jetpacks and rocket cars, but also rising wages, secure jobs and homes ordinary people could afford. Today's future is more likely to be pitched as AI taking your job while the climate goes haywire. No wonder people would rather eat a burger in a flying saucer.
There's a hard-nosed commercial logic to it as well. The diner opened at a time when Tesla was, as Design Compass reported, struggling with seven straight quarters of falling sales in California. When your product has lost its shine, wrapping it in the warm glow of Americana is a fairly obvious marketing move.
The Faraday cage economy
The more interesting trend is the demand for technology that hides itself..... for example glasses that look like normal glasses, and gadgets that promise to keep the digital world at arm's length.... The quiet boom in so-called dumbphones, basic handsets that make calls and not much else, is the same instinct taken to its logical conclusion.
Final thoughts
Retrofuturism isn't a paradox, it's a symptom. When people stop trusting where the future is heading, they reach back for the last time it looked promising. That's as true of politicians promising to bring back the steelworks as it is of billionaires building 1950s diners. The trouble is that you can't actually go back, and nostalgia is a lousy substitute for a future people genuinely want to live in. Until someone offers one of those, expect a lot more chrome.
