04/29/2026
If you had a tall chrome antenna rising up off your car in 1950 you were *somebody.*
Well, not really, not on paper and you didn't get a certificate or an announcement. But the neighborhood knew. You'd pull into the driveway and there it was gleaming, tall, catching the afternoon sun like a trophy you hadn't technically won but were absolutely displaying anyway.
A chrome antenna meant you had a radio in that car. And a radio in that car meant you had arrived, because car radios were expensive.
But here's the funny, the antenna may have indicated what was not entirely true.
Because here is what people started doing. Here is the part that is so magnificently human it almost defies belief.
They bought fake antennas.
Not connected to anything. Not receiving any signal from anywhere. Just a tall gleaming chrome antenna bolted onto the car specifically and exclusively to communicate to every neighbor, every passerby, every person at the gas station and the grocery store parking lot
*We also have a radio.*
They did not have a radio.
They had an antenna. A decorative antenna. A completely non-functional piece of chrome whose entire purpose was the impression it created in the minds of people driving past.
It picked up nothing. It broadcast nothing. It connected to nothing inside that car except the very human desire to be seen as someone who had made it.
The original fake it till you make it.
And before anyone feels too superior about the whole thing we live in an era of Instagram filters and leased cars and carefully curated highlight reels specifically designed to communicate a version of our lives that is adjacent to but not always identical to reality.
We just moved the fake antenna to our phones.
Tag someone who would have absolutely bolted a fake antenna onto their car and tell us what your family used as a status symbol on your block!
