Gen Z wants BlackBerry back. Why?

By October 20, 2025
The Bring Back BlackBerry event in Brooklyn. Image courtesy Josh McConnell.
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A few weeks back, a bunch of gadget heads descended upon a Brooklyn café to kick off the campaign to Bring Back BlackBerry.

The campaign is led by frenemy and former tech blogger Kevin Michaluk, alongside Jeff Gadway, a friend and former colleague from Research In Motion (maker of the original BlackBerry smartphones). Both are co-founders of smartphone keyboard accessory company Clicks Technology.

BBB has audacious goals, including one million petition signatures, getting Michaluk on BlackBerry’s board of directors, and a license to use the BlackBerry brand with a newly built “digital essential” phone. Both Gadway and Michaluk have deep experience rallying communities to causes (remember #TeamBlackBerry?), and the campaign is a truly first-rate marketing endeavour.

It might be more than marketing. Friend and former tech blogger Josh McConnell covered the event, noting the collective hope for a return to intentional tech. “You could feel that shared belief: that tech could once again be human-scaled, not habit-shaped,” he wrote.

The belief has resonated with Gen Z, who are romanticizing the BlackBerry era on social media despite not really being old enough to remember it. It’s not just adopted nostalgia; think of it as a generational immune response to a society built on habit-shaping technology. “I’m sick of having a slot machine that sucks my time and dopamine,” posted one petitioner about their iPhone.

That this is all for the device that spawned the term CrackBerry is ironic but also fitting. On a podcast about the life and death of BBM, The Verge’s Nilay Patel correctly identified that BlackBerry was a company built around navigating constraints: slow networks, small batteries, and tiny screens. As those constraints fell away, so too did the company’s success.

I don’t think anyone looking to Bring Back BlackBerry wants those constraints to return. But I do think they want better tools to help navigate the world at a human scale.

Douglas Soltys
Editor-in-chief

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Feature image courtesy Josh McConnell via Substack.

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