Every time I return home after a term at college, I sit at our home PC and log on to be greeted by a familiar sight: A glowing, grassy hill rolling underneath a bright, blue sky lightly sprinkled with clouds. I chose this background deliberately: Bliss, the iconic wallpaper of Windows XP, is a warm reminder of a simpler time. For a moment, I don’t feel like I’m logging onto a modern computer to take on modern burdens. I feel like I’m at home in a past when technology was a source of comfort.
I’m not alone in my longing for bygone tech and its aesthetics. This nostalgia has become a collective sensation for much of Gen Z. We’ve caught on to the term Frutiger Aero to encapsulate the vibrant, glassy, eco-futuristic design language that dominated our screens from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, when our generation was in its early formative years. A search of #frutigeraero on Instagram yields dozens of videos paying homage to the aesthetic through collages of desktop screens and other icons, with comments often mourning the “future we were promised.” Bliss makes a frequent appearance here, too.
However, while this design style was indeed a very real part of our childhood, there’s a lot about our collective nostalgia that can’t be explained by what we’ve actually experienced in our past. Upon closer inspection, it would seem that much of this yearning is targeted towards a past we never got to know, or one that never existed at all. This shared memory helps us better confront the problems of today’s technology, but we should be careful not to let it define our view of the past.
Let’s start by returning to the Frutiger Aero videos on social media. Many of these videos feature artwork of dreamy landscapes and peaceful liminal spaces that seem, at best, like exaggerations or romanticizations of the original aesthetic that we were likely to interact with as children. When I think back to my childhood messing around on my mom’s Windows Vista laptop, the aesthetic felt a fair bit more muted. Some natural landscapes, some glassy buttons, but nothing nearly as pervasive as these videos would suggest.
In other cases, it seems that Gen Z is straight-up confused about what era it’s nostalgic for. Bliss itself was a product of the Y2K era, not Frutiger Aero. In fact, the aforementioned videos feature many Y2K aesthetics and technology (iMacs galore) under the “Frutiger Aero” name even though these styles largely preceded our memories. Some videos even feature edits of the Windows 95 startup sound, which, by Gen Z standards, is much closer to being a prehistoric relic than a piece of our childhoods.
Frutiger Aero is certainly a real design style that we certainly have real memories of, but Gen Z has revised and extended it into a unified aesthetic that has become detached from the technology we actually grew up with. What, then, explains this collective hallucination of the past?
For me, the nostalgia I have for these technologies from before my time feels too real to be something I’ve completely made up in my head. Perhaps these much older aesthetics feel more familiar to us because they share more similarities with the tech that we grew up with than the tech we have now: more color, more texture and the absence of social media and artificial intelligence. Our mind links them to the memories we have of the tech we did grow up with. That might explain why we include them under the same “Frutiger Aero” umbrella.
The extension of Frutiger Aero to include dreamlike landscapes and liminal spaces also plays into the escapist desire of a generation that is increasingly feeling the pressure of adulthood. The inclusion of technologies that predate us, in addition to triggering memories we do actually have, also indulges this desire to escape from modern technology and all the burdens we associate it with and instead return to a time that we perceive as being simpler and safer. Turning this design style into a ubiquitous aesthetic allows us to paint the entire past as a colorful, optimistic world of which Frutiger Aero was a definitive feature, creating a clear contrast with the pessimistic present.
The reality, however, is that Frutiger Aero was just a small part of the aesthetic of its time, limited to smartphone and computer screens. Tech wasn’t some dreamy escape in the past either. I’d wager that people in the 2000s weren’t opening their laptops and jumping with joy at the sight of bubbly icons and pretty landscapes. They were probably, like us today, dreading having to send emails, write essays or fill spreadsheets.
None of this is meant to say that our nostalgia isn’t based on something very real or that it doesn’t have a purpose. As I have made clear, I myself deeply engage with this sentimentality. Our vision of past aesthetics, romanticized as it may be, is still based on our true experiences interacting with a style of technology that was in many ways genuinely better than what we have today. It was in fact more colorful, perhaps more creative and it at least professed to believe in the potential for harmony between tech and nature. I do truly believe, even after taking off the rose-tinted glasses, that modern tech is comparatively more soulless, and that we’ve lost something beneficial.
Letting ourselves fall into this nostalgia allows us to think more critically of the present and the future. It drives a desire in us to fight back against problematic developments and strive to bring back what good things we’ve lost. Thinking comparatively about the past is even more important now as we are trying to figure out the effect that artificial intelligence will have on our society. The rising generation needs to think back to a time before AI or even social media and consider: “Are things really better now?” But the other half of thinking critically about our future is to also have an honest understanding of the problems of our past, as there are lessons to learn here, too.
So let us reminisce about a past when computers were shiny portals into lush, bubbly utopias. But let us also think about the past in its entirety. Our memories are here to comfort us, but our present warrants its own perspective.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
