Manchester based artist Sheng Lam created a series of drawings reimagining today’s most popular social and streaming platforms as if they were clunky devices from a pre-internet past. Drawn in Lam’s signature retro-anime style, the products are a reinterpretation of the cloud based services that pays a tribute to their analog roots. 

So YouTube becomes YooTube, a portable VHS player, Potify reinvents the almost-namesake music streaming service Spotify as a cassette and mixtape recorder, while PhaseBook is a drive for reading “like” floppy disks. Also part of the series: the Tweeter telegraph machine, the SoundKloud FM Tuner CD / Mp3 player and the Netflex CRT TV. Lam’s series shines an ironic and surreal light on the online services that today we give for granted, giving us an opportunity to reflect on the extreme dematerialization and disintermediation processes that our content consumption habits went through in the span of a couple decades.