Seems kind of harsh on the kids. Sure they don't need tech to play and won't notice it immediately but tech proficiency is so important and this day and age and he's setting his kids back with this, I want to say selfish, project.
Take John Romero, who loved playing video games, but didn't have the endless quarters to play them in the arcade. So he started creating games by programming them, playing them and tweaking them endlessly. And that's where he learned game design (he was the designer of Doom and Quake).
This isn't to say that this is the "greatest generation" of technologists or something -- they were merely well-suited for what came afterwards, which was an exciting time anyway.
However, I will venture to say that those who come of age in the early years of a certain technology, art form or skill seem to have fewer limits on their creativity. When you have stood on the shoulders of giants your whole life, you are much less likely to have "ground-level" ideas. You want to program the next great MMORPG, not a game about mutant camels.
So maybe this is a poor technological environment on the average, but it could be argued that it could engender a rare sort of brilliance as well. Since it seems that there is certainly an eccentric streak at work (parenting as performance art?), that seems like a possibility.
"So why 1986, you ask? Because that was the year Blair and Morgan were born. “We’re parenting our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it’s like," Blair explains."
• That not having access to technology at home for one year will have a meaningful impact on digital fluency 10+ years later.
• That in the technology vacuum no other skills or furtherment will develop which outweigh any minor delay in digital fluency.
I'm far more worried about what kids miss out on by being immersed in (distracting) technology than the negative consequences of them having a little less of it.
Starting this late, they never reached the level of proficiency required to close the hedonistic feedback loop and learn how to saturate their minds with awful internet memes (and harmonise with the hivemind's sense of humour). They also never adopted the socially calculating mindset that you see in the kind of person who grew up on MySpace and Facebook.
If their 5 year old is getting to spend half the day in the year 2013 with his classmates, & half the day with family in the year 1986 it sounds like the best of both worlds doesn't it?