Analog Future?

Further thoughts on a fascinating book

I was in The Bulwark back at Christmas time with a review of a neat book: The Future Is Analog, by David Sax. Sax’s books could almost be mine. His first was an appreciation of the vanishing Jewish deli (okay, for me it would be the Italian deli); a more recent entry probed the phenomenon of young people rediscovering technically obsolete but wonderfully tactile technologies. (I was thinking of that book, in fact, when I wrote this other Bulwark piece, in appreciation of clock radios!)

This book uses “analog” to mean much more than record players and cassette tapes. What Sax really means is anything that it isn’t digital, i.e. the real world. It’s a defense of the real, the physical, the in-person, as opposed to the digital one we test-drove during the early days of the pandemic. That, Sax argues, was basically what the promised “digital future” would look like. The pandemic let us test it out, and all it really did was remind us how pale an imitation it all is of the real thing.

I noted that while Sax is sharply critical of lockdown life, particularly remote schooling (there’s a little vignette where he finds his son in the bathroom singing “I’m a penis!” instead of logging on to remote school), he never gives any opinion on the underlying public health policies themselves. I think this is actually a strength:

Sax’s whole book only makes sense for those who did in fact go through lockdowns, the extended post-lockdown period of caution, and the turn to digital-everything. For those who work with their hands—or for those who pulled their kids out of shuttered public schools, moved to “freer” states, or continued to hold weddings, funerals, and holiday dinners—The Future Is Analog will read like a dispatch from an alien planet. Whatever can be said about such pandemic objectors—much of it not flattering—it is at least true that they do not need to be reminded of the centrality of real, in-person gatherings, school, or worship.

Sax does not address any of this, nor does he actually criticize public health measures, despite critiquing their effects and realities.

In the end, this does-he-or-doesn’t-he makes it possible to enjoy The Future Is Analog no matter what you actually thought about the wisdom of lockdowns or the various pandemic-era public health policies. Because we can all agree that living through them sucked.

I also want to revisit this bit from my review, where I find that a lot of his points basically pass the common-sense test:

A simple question can help determine whether Sax is merely stating his own preferences or noticing something real: Do his claims ring true? Or do they seem overstated or even contrived?

“Each task was just another interaction on the same three screens: phone, laptop, TV.” Feels true.

The Netflix queue is like “a buffet that gets more unappetizing the longer you stare at it.” Yeah, feels true too.

Getting outside involves “beautiful discomfort,” a kind of good friction. Yep.

A quote from one of his interviewees: “No one remembers their best day of watching TV.” Damn.

There are many more such observations, many of which put into words the unease I felt, and heard about from others, in the period Sax is talking about.

I said there are many more, so here are a few more:

“Each chime of an email, ping of a Slack message, or welcoming tone of a fresh video meeting brought an unnamed sense of dread to the surface.”

“When the physical space of work is undefined, the work expands to fill any void it can.”

“The way ideas took shape in a physical, analog space over time was missing.”

“Shopping is a richer experience than purchasing.”

Flat and blank are the two words I’ve used these last two or three years to describe this all to myself. And that’s more or less correct.

Sax makes the point that this was not lockdown life per se; it was life lived online.

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What really struck me, out of everything in the book, was the discussion of videoconferencing. At one point Sax mentions virtual happy hours. God, I remember that. My wife had one or two. They tried to play games; you had to decide if you wanted to really have a drink sitting alone at the desk.

In the summer of 2020 we joined a virtual birthday party for a friend, and for 40 minutes we just sat there at our table, listening to her and a friend or two, or a friend of hers and another one or two, having conversations that had nothing to do with everyone else. We kind of sat there awkwardly until most people left, and then had a few minutes to talk to her for real.

And then there are Zoom calls. I don’t even use Microsoft Teams, and that little ding announcing a meeting still fills me with dread.

Sax speaks to some neuroscientists and other experts who suggest that this isn’t just a feeling, like “I don’t want to have another video call.” It’s something deeper: something about videocalls doesn’t quite work with our brains. I got a little more abstract and wrote:

Underneath Sax’s descriptions of the frustration, boredom, loneliness, and mental disquiet of pandemic life there is an almost metaphysical critique, an argument that something about digital technology just doesn’t quite jibe with our humanity. (This deep critique is reminiscent of the old claim that vinyl records sound or feel warm, in some immeasurable but real way.) As if feeding our analog brains a digital diet is something like feeding beef cattle corn; it works in a limited way, but it causes side effects and discomfort. What we perceived merely as discomfort or frustration was perhaps evidence instead of some fundamental incompatibility.

What we perceived merely as discomfort or frustration was perhaps evidence instead of some fundamental incompatibility. Are our brains “analog” in some fundamental sense? When people perceive a “warmth” in analog sound, or an eeriness in video calls, are they subconsciously sensing something real?

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One big chapter is about work. Sax comes down largely in favor of the commute and the physical workplace, for reasons that by now you can probably guess.

I only ever had one job to which I commuted. don’t miss commuting, really; I don’t miss spending $17 and over two hours to sit in a tiny shoebox of an office with crosstalk and gossip and a phone ringing every 30 minutes. I don’t miss most of my coworkers (my two immediate editors for my first three-ish years are a big exception.)

I don’t miss any of the particulars, per se. What I guess I do miss, to Sax’s point, is the mental stimulation from all of that stuff that was just sort of automatic. You didn’t have to seek it out consciously, you didn’t have to resist the gravitational pull of your bed or your home. You had to go to work, so you went to work. In the book, Sax talks about this as discomfort or friction that is productive.

It’s kind of like the difference between running into friends in college versus having to make plans with them as an employed adult. The setting of college, and the expectation of commute and office attendance facilitate certain things that are hard to engineer on your own.

Land use is the same. My mother used to say, when I observed the spread-out nature of our rural-exurban Central Jersey home, that “you make your own neighborhood.” She would rattle off all the people we knew and chatted with regularly: the mailman who knew me for 20 years, the two librarians who watched me grow up, our church friends and homeschool friends, the checkout clerks, waiters and waitresses, and even gas station attendants.

Yet that was something that the physical setting of our community worked against; it was something that flourished not because of, but in spite of physical separation, distance, and utter dependence on the car for daily tasks. Here’s another line from Sax: “The more we intentionally plan every interaction, the less likely those interactions are to lead to anything significant.”

I have repeatedly come across the notion from some conservatives that there’s something lazy about what I’m saying here; that urbanists are people who want to outsource, as it were, the work of community-building to the built environment rather than take responsibility themselves. As though making good things easier to do were illegitimate.

All of this brings home that incentives and circumstances matter. This is something that conservatives understand well in regard to markets, but less so in regard to human behavior. It reminds me of a concept in Catholicism: the “near occasion of sin.” It is considered a sin not just to actually commit a sin, but even to put yourself in a situation where you know you will be tempted. Of course, you’re supposed to resist temptation, if you find yourself feeling it. But you’re not supposed to court it. Deliberately testing your willpower isn’t virtuous.

This is all tangential, maybe, but I think about it when I consider how hard it would be to choose to go back to commuting to an office, and yet how beneficial it might be. Like exercise.

There’s still a lot in my notes from this book, and I’ll probably come back to it one more time. That’s a wrap for today!

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Related Reading:

Cultivating Contentment

Waking Up to the Joy of Clock Radios

Mechanical Romance

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