Little White Wires

Why is everyone wearing wired headphones again?

(Credit: Alona)

How do you show people that you don’t care? You can’t say you don’t care — that totally negates the not caring!¹ You can’t post vague messages online anymore. You can’t even don a jacket emblazoned with the words “I really don’t care, do you?” during a visit to a migrant child detention centre, at least if you’re Melania Trump.

Instead, you have to signal indifference. Following several years of declining sales, wired headphones are enjoying something of a renaissance. It isn’t just Drake, Zendaya or Harry Styles — walk around a ‘young person’ neighbourhood, breathe in the microclimate of flavoured vapes and you’ll observe an epidemic of little white wires.

In the second half of 2025, US sales jumped 10%, rising to 20% in the first six weeks of this year. Is it a price thing? Wired headphones are significantly cheaper than their Bluetooth-enabled brethren. Is it an ease thing? Wired headphones don’t need to be charged and so won’t die on you mid-commute. A sound quality thing? A wired connection doesn’t require Bluetooth compression and has no compatibility issues.

I mean sure, maybe. But it looks a lot more like a 2010s nostalgia / timeless ‘poverty-as-aesthetic’ mashup. Hey, I’m no tech bro with my Canada Goose gilet and AirPods Max, I’m a carefree, starving artist jumping whimsically on a Lime bike, listening to indie artists who just played Mighty Hoopla.

Look, I follow vibes, am susceptible to advertising and I get nostalgic. I mean, I’ve written multiple newsletters about John Major and this evening will play a spot of Championship Manager 00/01. But the wired headphones thing doesn’t strike me as an honest yearning for a simpler time.

And I can’t decide which is tackier: signalling in-group status by pretending to be out-group, or joining an obvious trend as a way of proving you don't follow trends.

Yes, I’m painfully aware that today’s edition long ago entered chatty, yelly, “can we get the Gen Z intern to write about the latest thing?” territory and I’m sorry about that. Perhaps this is a spasm of middle-age millennial rebellion following a double-header on the oil price.