{"text":[[{"start":7.12,"text":"Coined by the author John Koenig, “anemoia” describes nostalgia for a time or place one has never known. Increasingly, those of us who belong to Gen Z find ourselves digging around in past aesthetics in search of a lost, perhaps better, time. It’s one way to combat the existential dread of living in a digitalised, AI-dominated era."}],[{"start":28.34,"text":"At a recent birthday party, a group of us gathered around as a friend unclicked a thumb-sized gadget from the handle of her handbag. We were suitably impressed: the Kodak Charmera 1987 is a throwback to the company’s first mass-market single-use camera, the Fling, released almost 40 years ago. As such, it’s a retro device with a strong “live in the moment” ancestry."}],[{"start":52.08,"text":"The Charmera was designed by Reto, a Kodak brand licensee founded in Hong Kong; Alan Mok, Reto’s CEO, says they intentionally built something that would target the younger generations. So where the Fling was analogue, the Charmera is a pleasing blend of nostalgia and modern technology. It incorporates a digital screen but, as the display is only 0.96 inches wide, you have little option but to aim your camera in the general direction of your target, choose one of the 12 filters by playing around with its buttons, maybe squint at the screen in an attempt to get everyone in the frame, then press down on the shutter with a click, and hope it turns out decent. Compared with taking a smartphone picture, it is a gratifyingly tactile experience."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":96.12,"text":"Mok says, “During this AI age, people want physical media in hand, to have organic experiences with actual life and not just in digital form.” Certainly, the Charmera is a refreshing tonic in a time of “perfection-maxxing”, when social media users strive for impossible levels of aestheticism. The grainy quality of its photos becomes a way to appreciate the imperfect, an antidote to hypersmooth, uncanny-valley AI slop. Embracing low resolution, inconvenience and even uncertainty (not knowing how the photos turned out until you transfer them to a bigger screen), feels like a small, liberating act of resistance as well as being fun. There’s a very human poignancy to it."}],[{"start":139.2,"text":"None of this will change the fact that corporations seem hell-bent on ramming AI into any crevice they can, simultaneously removing our ability to fully possess anything. The essay “Welcome to 2030” published by the World Economic Forum in 2016, and promoted with the phrase “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy”, was laughable at the time but our reality now is veering too close to owning nothing and being really unhappy about it. It’s not just the home-buying rate that is at historic lows, but ownership generally, thanks to streaming corporations that can and will remove media beloved by their audience at their whim. Sometimes it seems like any semblance of ownership can only be tethered to physical media from earlier times. They give us a way to take control of how we create our memories. Those memories are one thing that cannot be taken away by anyone."}],[{"start":191.4,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1788749203_8605.mp3"}