You might think it’s pretty weird to hear the founders of a VR company and a social media platform publicly complaining about how things used to be better back in the dial-up days. Nevertheless, that is what happened at CES on Wednesday, when Oculus creator Palmer Luckey and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian gave a joint talk about the joys of “tech nostalgia.”

Luckey, who initially made his fortune in VR and now runs the defense contractor Anduril, and Ohanian both seemed to agree: Stuff was better in the old days.

The catch, however, is that Luckey and Ohanian weren’t really criticizing technology itself (Luckey said, during his remarks, that he supported AI and felt it was changing workflows for the better); instead, they were criticizing the aesthetics of technology. Vintage consumer tech products, they argued, are superior to today’s — and it’s the styles and form factor of the past that will determine tech’s future, they claimed.

“It’s not just about nostalgia for the old; it’s about the fact that it’s just objectively better,” Ohanian said of some older products.

After going on a short tirade about how great the 1999 first-person shooter Quake: Arena is, Luckey similarly sang the praises of old-school media. “There is something that used to exist in the intentionality of building a music library — whether that was building whole albums or building mix tapes,” Luckey said, adding that, in the era of endless downloads, you clearly “lose something.”

Luckey also pointed to younger people who are nostalgic for time periods that they don’t even remember or have any personal connection to. “Why do they think it’s good? It’s not because they’re remembering their childhoods. It’s not because they’re harkening back to some earlier time. It’s because they’re recognizing that it is literally better, some of this old stuff.”

Certain consumer trends would seem to suggest that Luckey and Ohanian are on to something. Nostalgia is obviously big across the board these days (look at all those 1980s period pieces coming out of Hollywood), but nostalgic tech design is a particularly thriving niche. Young people are overwhelmed and oversaturated by the internet. As a result, many have developed new interests in physical media — like collecting cassettes and vinyl. Meanwhile, new, low-tech devices with retro designs are also seeing an uptick in interest (just check out the Clicks Communicator phone that debuted at CES this year).

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Given that consumer interests are trending this direction, Luckey and Ohanian’s enthusiasm for vintage tech could also just end up being a savvy business strategy. That is, if Americans are feeling nostalgic, you might as well monetize it.

Indeed, Luckey has already been doing this. The defense contractor, who sports , launched a project in 2024 called — a Game Boy-like device that retails for $199, allows gameplay of old cartridge classics from the 1990s, and has been called one of “” of its kind.