This weekend, social-media users were confronted with mawkish AI-powered mush that sought to transform gauzy ’80s nostalgia into monetizable engagement bait.

If you came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, you probably encountered the popular culture’s depictions of the tail end of the 20th century. They were, on balance, not good. To survey the cultural landscape, the late ’70s and ’80s were a period typified by rampant drug use, collapsing marriages, street crime, urban decay, and, of course, the Hobbesian social atomization that followed the Reagan revolution. That was, after all, that generation’s experience.

Flash forward 40 years, and now the artists and creators have all grown up in that fateful age. Today, when the early ’80s are depicted in cultural products, they’re portrayed as an idyllic period of relative social harmony and simplicity. Life was smaller, carefree, and bereft of the disaggregating phenomena that have left young people today unmoored to life’s stable things: family, community, and a common culture. That, too, was an impression born of experience.

This weekend, social-media users were confronted with some mawkish AI-powered mush that sought to transform this gauzy nostalgia into monetizable engagement bait:

The video conveys the impression that young adults have been robbed of their birthright by the trappings of modernity. Where once they would spend their days fixing the DeLorean in their garages, going to movies, or just staring into their cassette tapes, today’s youth is plagued by devices that shackle them to screens. “No one even goes outside anymore,” did you know?

It’s not at all difficult to find contemporaneous sources fretting over the damage to “body and soul” that would be done to those who succumb to the allure of screens as far back as 1982 — a generation that now regards its youth as the halcyon days.

To the extent that the AI slop has a point, it is in the growing sense of alienation that results from attempting to substitute real community with the simulacrum of it that exists on social media. That’s a problem, but it is not an intractable feature of modern life. Recreating the kind of environment that the children of the ’80s remember takes work and personal agency, but so, too, does anything of value. It can be done — even in the states and municipalities addicted to hyperregulating your every daily interaction.

The AI video goes wrong in a variety of ways, but its biggest sin is to convey to its audience that the pathway to personal satisfaction in 2025 is closed to those who do not lock the screens out of their lives. That would be as unsuccessful as was the war on the Walkman (yes, that was one of the decade’s many moral panics).

Integrating technology into one’s life in a healthy way, with practical and self-set limits, is more feasible. For children who cannot regulate their own exposure to technology or create their own communities, parents will have to do the heavy lifting. But precisely no one is preventing you from knocking “on doors” and meeting your neighbors; certainly not the app in your pocket.

Maybe it’s more psychologically gratifying to sink into your couch, stare into your phone, and curse the modern world for manacling you to this unsatisfying reality. But those were all choices. If you summon the resolve, you can make different choices. And let the robots tell you otherwise.