Time in a bottle
#468: What would 1974 look like if we had mobile phones then - and what does it tell us about right now...
Every now and then a reader writes in and you know inside the first couple of sentences you’re going to run them.
Marcus Byrne is one. He’s an Irish-born Australian-based creative advisor who helps ad agencies, production departments and teams integrate AI into workflows to elevate ideas.
He spent two decades on advertising’s frontline at Leo Burnett, VMLY&R and Thinkerbell and penning four books.
His grandfather was a typesetter on Irish newspapers who died at 65 from the fumes.
His uncle Eamon was a 1970s poster artist working entirely by hand with Letraset and a scalpel.
His father was an art director and screen printer, and now his own son Dylan draws characters and uses AI to animate them.
Four generations.
And he’s not a sceptic shouting about AI from the cheap seats. He’s one of the people in the room, which is exactly why his piece lands the way it does.
He told me: “Value doesn’t come from execution. It comes from creative direction, taste, and judgement. Anyone can generate. Almost nobody can direct.”
He was freaked out when he first found AI, but then - like many of us - he began to experiment.
As he read more and more about the harms of social on kids, his fatherly instincts and creative bent went into overdrive.
He dived into his parents’ old photo albums and trained an AI on 50 or so faded prints from the 1970s, and asked: What if smartphones existed back then?
Same kids. Same summers. What came back unsettled him enough that he couldn’t stop watching it. So he asked me to share it with you.
It sits squarely on the faultline I cover.
The attention economy, the cost it’s extracting from a generation of kids, and the AI machine cashing in behind it.
Over to you Marcus…
The Big Story: Time in a bottle by Marcus Byrne
These images aren’t real. But they feel like they could be part of our history.
The grain. The muted colours. The kitchen wallpaper and the mad carpet. The cluttered rooms, the uneven pavements, the brown tiled benchtops and floral motifs printed on the wallpaper. The way light falls on a Sunday afternoon in 1974. This was our world.
I went through my parents’ old photo albums. You know the ones sitting in a shoe box under a bed that nobody opens any more. Faded. Slightly sticky and musty, the glue had lost its hold and the white paper had turned yellow. The smell was familiar and tickled the olfactory glands that triggered faded memories of a time long gone.
I am a curious creative who has embraced AI. I’ve spent 20 years in the ad industry, I teach people how to use these AI platforms, and I’ve published four books on the subject
I trained an AI model on these old photos and went through a process to create the new scenes. I asked one question:
What if smartphones had existed back then?
Same kids. Same summers but wearing different runners. Same streets with old cars. Same front steps and housing estates. Same paisley couch with earth colours near the kitchen where your grandmother stirred gravy on a Sunday and nobody was in a hurry to be anywhere else. Same everything.
Except the eyes. Downturned. Glowing. Gone.
When I watched a few of the clips back, something shifted in me. They gave me an eerie feeling I couldn’t shake. Absence. Physical presence with an emotional vacancy.
The particular kind of emptiness that settles into a room when everyone in it is somewhere else completely. The kind of vacancy you don’t notice until you see it in a photograph from 50 years ago.
And then you realise, that’s not the past. That’s last Monday.
That’s the dinner table, that’s the bus stop, that’s the living room on a Saturday morning when the whole family was in the same room and somehow completely alone.
This generation were told to go outside and not come back until the street lights came on. No negotiation. Out they went with not a care in the world. We knew where the kids were when all the bikes were on the ground outside little Jamie’s house on the corner. Was boredom a thing?
They climbed things and fell off things. They built things out of nothing and used their imagination to turn an empty cardboard box into a spaceship. They got into trouble and worked their way out of it. They learned to read faces, sit with silence and navigate conflict and resolution.
That sense of freedom created something in them. Resilience. Resourcefulness. A capacity to be present in their own life.
We gave our kids the opposite of freedom. Captured in a digital matrix, a slave to infinite content. Infinite stimulation. A machine engineered by the smartest people on earth specifically to make sure they never have to sit with themselves for a single second.
No boredom, no stillness, no deep work and no silence. Just the scroll. The infinite scroll of rubbish and negativity.
Jonathan Haidt spent years counting the cost of that decision in The Anxious Generation. The numbers don’t lie. The timeline is not ambiguous. The correlation between smartphones in the hands of children and the collapse of adolescent mental health is not a theory. The graph is clear as day.
30% of US high school girls had seriously considered attempting suicide due to heavy social media use.
57% of teenage girls now report consistent sadness or hopelessness. In 2011 it was 36%.
The loneliest people on the planet right now are not the elderly. They’re teenagers. The stealing of childhood happened fast. And it happened on our watch. What we are seeing here is the erosion of human connection.
I’m not here to make anyone feel guilty. We are parents of tweens. We’re not deep in the weeds yet, we’re on the edge of what feels like an abyss.
The way a phone changes the energy in a room. The way a kid who was laughing at the dinner table suddenly goes quiet the moment a screen appears. The way they reach for a device the second there’s a gap in the conversation, not because they’re rude, but because they’ve been trained to. We all have.
I made this video because I couldn’t stop watching it. Because the question that keeps asking me quietly, at two in the morning when I should be asleep, is not about technology, it’s about our memories, our reality.
What kind of memories are we making?
A captured memory is a photograph of a moment you were half-present for. A made memory is what happens when you put the phone down, look up and experience the moment. Simple, small experiences that compound over time into the neurological connections that form who we are. It doesn’t have to be planned. It doesn’t have to look good on a grid.
Walk somewhere without a destination. Sit at the table without checking anything. Let the conversation go wherever it needs to go. Let there be silence. Let there be boredom. Let creativity flow. Let them figure out what to do with an afternoon that has no agenda and doesn’t need one. Just like 1974.
And here’s the part that should worry us more than the doom-scrolling: AI is coming for childhood next, and it’s more terrifying than social media ever was. Social media took our kids’ attention. AI-generated content won’t just take their attention, it will be engineered to know exactly what keeps them engaged. If we drop the ball, we will see damage to this generation far beyond anything a social network has done so far.
I have no problem with these tools in the hands of responsible adults who choose when and how they use them. I use AI every day. I also use social media. We have age limits on driving cars for a reason, smartphones are no different.
I also believe we’re on the cusp of a genuine creative revolution. There are real parallels between this moment and the early days of bedroom electronic music producers.
Somewhere in a disadvantaged part of the world, a creative teen may well make the next Avatar with nothing but a creative idea, a mindset and an internet connection.
The barrier to entry has never been lower.
But a tool built for an adult’s judgement is not the same thing handed to a child’s.
Pushed on kids, with no judgement yet formed to filter it, it’s a different story entirely.
Our kids deserve more than a highlight reel of a childhood we were only half there for.
When it comes to our knowledge, our experience, our wisdom and our intuition as parents, the algorithm doesn’t get a vote.
It’s up to us.