America’s Nostalgia for the Future

AI’s backlash has arrived as quickly as the technology itself. Students have walked out of graduations to protest AI. Communities are pushing back against Flock Safety’s AI-powered license-plate-recognition cameras over privacy and surveillance concerns. And most recently, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, once an enthusiastic supporter of data center expansion, said the industry had “dug [its] own grave.”

A clue to understanding this anxiety lies in an unexpected event in New York City’s West Village.

Last fall, Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, opened a pop-up shop. People lined up around the block, waiting for as long as two hours to get in. They didn’t wait to see a robot or try on a virtual reality headset. They wanted a fabric baseball cap embroidered with the word “thinking.” They picked up tote bags, coffee cups, postcards, and matchbooks decorated with hand-drawn illustrations. Anthropic distributed copies of an essay by its CEO, Dario Amodei, printed on recycled paper (locally sourced, of course) and bound in navy cloth. The photography used to promote the space was shot on film and developed at a local studio.

As a powerful new technology emerges, we are increasingly drawn to the familiar.

A company building superintelligence had drawn a crowd by handing out the very things that technology was supposed to make unnecessary. The paradox is not confined to one shop in the West Village. As a powerful new technology emerges, we are increasingly drawn to the familiar. Anxiety about the future is creating nostalgia for the past.

Vinyl record sales are booming. Film cameras have returned. People are writing in paper notebooks, cooking in cast-iron skillets, and taking up knitting and other “granny hobbies.” After nearly two decades of closures, Barnes & Noble’s pace of new store openings roughly doubled in two years. Airstream still sells an aluminum trailer that looks almost exactly like the ones that rolled down the new interstates in the 1950s.

And then there is mid-century modern. We call it “mid-century modern,” but when the design emerged, it was simply called “modern.”

That difference matters. The chairs, houses, lamps, and tables that now convey warmth and nostalgia were not created by designers trying to resurrect a safer, more comforting past. As Frank Lloyd Wright is credited with saying, “The present is the ever-moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.”

Charles and Ray Eames, for example, shaped their famous chairs from bent plywood, using techniques they had developed while making leg splints for the Navy during World War II. Their fiberglass shell chairs came from a material used to house wartime radar. These designers were imagining how people would live next. What now feels retro was once an argument about tomorrow.

An aesthetic born from confidence in the future has become a source of comfort in an age when people are increasingly anxious about living in it.

That is what makes the extraordinary revival of mid-century modern so interesting. An aesthetic born from confidence in the future has become a source of comfort in an age when people are increasingly anxious about living in it. Perhaps we are nostalgic not for the past so much as for a time when we were optimistic about the future.

Examining surveys from this period, the economist Frank Levy found that expectations about personal financial improvement rose substantially in the late 1950s. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, roughly 33 percent of Americans expected their families to be financially better-off the following year. By 1961, 40 percent felt this way. The share who expected their families to be financially worse off than they had been a year earlier fell to what Levy described as a sustained historic low.

The University of Michigan asked a similar question in November 1964 and found that 46 percent of Americans expected to be better-off financially a year later and just 5 percent expected to be worse off.

Real wages were rising, and unemployment was falling. Science was turning science fiction into reality. Antibiotics transformed medicine. Commercial jets made the world accessible. In 1958, the United States put its first satellite into orbit. Within a decade, Americans would walk on the moon.

For a brief period, Levy wrote, it seemed that economic policymakers had figured out how to manage prosperity in much the same way an engineer had figured out how to put a satellite in orbit. The future was not just what came next. It was a place Americans were confidently building, and one they expected to enjoy living in.

None of this means mid-century Americans lived in some lost age of blind optimism. Jim Crow was still the law across much of the country. Women faced profound restrictions on their economic and civic lives. Schoolchildren practiced hiding under their desks in case of nuclear attack. But even in this, Americans broadly shared an expectation that progress was carrying them somewhere better.

Compare that with the American mood today.

By 2026, 59 percent of Americans said the country’s best years were behind it.

The University of Michigan still asks essentially the same question today. This May, their researchers found that only 18 percent of Americans expected to be better off in the next year, while 45 percent expected to be worse off. In 2022, 72 percent of Americans told Pew Research Center that children growing up in the United States would be financially worse off than their parents. By 2026, 59 percent of Americans said the country’s best years were behind it. Asked to imagine America 50 years in the future, Americans were considerably more likely to be pessimistic than optimistic.

The irony is that this pessimism has arrived during an astonishing burst of technological progress. SpaceX has launched 165 missions and now catches falling rockets in midair using mechanical arms. And on the streets of many American cities, people summon cars with no one in the driver’s seat. In 2025, doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine created a personalized CRISPR therapy for a baby with an ultrarare metabolic disorder.

The future that generations of Americans were promised has arrived. And yet the dominant emotion it inspires is not wonder—it is unease.

The people building AI sometimes speak in the language of abundance, claiming that AI will dramatically increase productivity, expand scientific discovery, democratize expertise, and eliminate enormous amounts of drudgery.

The public hears something different: Will my job still exist in five years? Can I trust anything I see online? Why is my electricity bill going up? Why does a technology built to connect us keep leaving people more alone? How do I know if my children are talking to an AI companion?

This gap shows up in nearly every poll. In one Pew survey, 47 percent of AI experts said they were more excited than concerned about the growing use of artificial intelligence. Just 11 percent of the public said the same. By 2025, half of Americans said AI made them more concerned than excited.

Technology has never advanced faster, and yet Americans seem less sure about where it is heading.

Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in the physical structure that has come to define the AI boom: the data center. Windowless, built at an inhuman scale, and designed to house machines rather than people, it is a building that does not convey wonder or awe.

Increasingly, people do not want to live near one either. In August 2025, Americans were roughly split on whether they would support a data center near their home. A year later, opposition had risen 33 percentage points, from 42 percent to 75 percent (with more than six in 10 strongly opposed), according to polling conducted by Embold Research for Heatmap.

The AI boom, so far, has produced a fenced building full of machines that nobody outside the industry is invited to enter or even understand.

Some of that opposition is about real, legitimate concerns over land use and the ugliness of transmission lines. But symbolically, the data center is close to perfect at capturing this moment. Mid-century technological optimism produced objects and buildings that invited ordinary people to picture themselves living inside the future: the ranch house, the interstate highway, the commercial jetliner, the Eames chair in the den. The AI boom, so far, has produced a fenced building full of machines that nobody outside the industry is invited to enter or even understand.

Every technological revolution eventually must answer the same question: What does all of this do for me? Steve Jobs understood this better than almost anyone in the modern technology era. Apple rarely asked consumers to get excited about processing speeds or storage architecture. For example, the first iPod could hold five gigabytes of data, but that was not the promise. The promise was “1,000 songs in your pocket.” The technology disappeared inside a picture of a better everyday life. In fact, the first commercial barely explained anything. Instead, it just showed a guy moving songs from his laptop to his iPod and dancing out the door.

AI has largely flipped that formula. The industry can tell us how many parameters a model has, how much compute trained it, and how it scored on the Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Diamond test. But no one has ever felt better about their life because a model scored 80 percent on the Massive Multi-Discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Pro benchmark. The AI industry keeps selling the gigabytes. What it has not yet produced is its equivalent of “1,000 songs in your pocket”—a simple, emotionally compelling account of how ordinary life becomes better.

In fact, some leaders building these systems are doing the exact opposite and making a case for how AI will make life worse. Anthropic’s CEO told Axios in 2025 that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. In 2023, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Amodei, and others signed a remarkable statement declaring that mitigating the risk of human extinction from AI should rank alongside pandemics and nuclear war as a global priority. OpenAI itself used similarly stark language when it wrote that superintelligence could lead to the “disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction” and said such systems might arrive within a decade.

Honesty about risk matters. Mid-century Americans lived under the shadow of the bomb and stayed optimistic anyway. But they could also see what they were getting in return from a better job, a home of their own, new appliances, or a child headed to college. If the future is described mainly as something we must compete with or survive, it is not surprising that people would oppose it and look backward for reassurance.

The future was not only built. People were invited in.

The answer is not simply better marketing. Mid-century optimism did not come from Eames chairs. It came from an economy that delivered and public choices that let ordinary people share in it. The GI Bill sent millions of veterans to college. Federal mortgage programs turned renters into homeowners. The interstate highways came with on-ramps. The future was not only built. People were invited in.

The AI boom needs to build those on-ramps. That starts with being specific about what an ordinary Tuesday could look like. A mother in rural Arkansas whose toddler spikes a fever at 2:00 a.m. gets medical guidance in minutes instead of facing a long drive to the nearest emergency room. A woman newly diagnosed with breast cancer understands her pathology report before her first oncology appointment and walks in with the right questions. A high school student who has fallen behind in math gets a tutor with endless patience who knows exactly where she is stuck. A plumber who wants to open his own shop gets the help of an accountant, a lawyer, and a marketing firm he could never have afforded through AI agents. A family whose baby is born with an ultrarare disease is no longer told that nothing can be done.

None of this is science fiction. Early versions of each exist today. What is missing is the ambition to make these on-ramps universal and the will to put them first.

The crowd in West Village was not lining up for the past. They were lining up for something warm, human, and made for them. That is what Americans want from the future too.

America has always been a country of explorers and pioneers. We are a nation that builds the future. There is no other technology more promising in that function than AI. The challenge for this generation is not merely to build more powerful AI models but to make sure their power reaches the kitchen table, the classroom, the clinic, and the corner store.

AI companies have gotten very good at telling us what their models will one day be able to do. What almost none of them have done is show people what an ordinary Tuesday looks like once those models can do it. The answer to our present nostalgia is not to retreat further into the past. It is to make the future feel, once again, like somewhere worth wanting to go.

John Bailey is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.