Staying Analog in the Digital Age

can we do better?

This starts with the terrible noise of an alarm clock—and by that I mean my phone—jolting me awake each morning, into consciousness and an already-endless stream of notifications. And like that, I’m in it . . . the digital shitstorm that is modern life.

Eventually, however, having suffered this enough, I purchase a clock, an actual clock, an analog clock with nice music instead of that rasping alarm. Not to be hyperbolic or anything, but it honestly changed my life.

Turns out the artist who designed the clock, Jamie Kripke, lives in Boulder, as well, and he invited me to his studio where he explained the whole reason he made the thing was to get away from this kind of digital intrusion. And as we sat around talking, it almost felt, dare I say, subversive.

It might seem absurd to call a clock subversive, but when opting out of the internet is considered counterculture, having a clock that is simply, well, a clock goes against the current of society.

Perhaps this is a case for simplification, a stand against multitasking. Even if a device can do multiple things well, maybe it’s still preferable to have a device that does only one thing. Why?

I’ll answer with a story.

When I got divorced, the first thing I took were my vinyl records. One night my brother called and asked about my plans that evening.

“Listening to a record,” I said. “That’s it?” he asked. “That’s it,” I said.

Call me old fashioned but that constituted a solid evening. With no notifications pulling me elsewhere, I could just be there. The turntable spinning like a dharma wheel, right into the now. This is the beauty of disconnecting.

Physical media keeps the door closed to outside intrusions, which in a way means going off the grid, although that makes me think about disappearing into some cabin in the woods and this is something more universal. (Nevertheless, I love this quote from Edward Abbey: “High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks—chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring.”)

Because sometimes disconnecting happens right in the living room: the phone somewhere else on silent, a record playing, good food cooking in the cast iron pan. You’re there.

The author and poet Gertrude Stein once wrote about her hometown: there is no there there. Meaning her childhood memories still existed in her mind, yet the place that produced them had long since disappeared. The opposite of this is true, as well, and perhaps even more relevant, as we often long for something that never existed in the first place. We feel the there of a memory as if it had been real, but in fact it’s merely a figment of our imagination—fantasies created from snips and snaps of vicariously lived experiences, compounded evermore by our digital lives, courtesy of shared photos and videos and texts and DMs. This is the false promise of a digital utopia.

Because the only real there is here . . . here. For the digital world, by definition, is always elsewhere. Watching someone absentmindedly walking down the street while staring at their phone, you know this. You know it, too, because the instant your own screen goes dark, it’s like you’ve been transported back to the present from another dimension. What happened to that last hour?

This is part of why I like building houses for a living. One of my favorite things is rolling up to the jobsite and hearing the stonemasons tinking away with their chisels. It’s a sound humans have been making for thousands of years. I feel quite confident saying the digital realm and AI will never touch that occupation.

But this sense of return to earlier times is widely felt.

Ted Gioia

and

Ross Barkan

refer to it as the New Romanticism—a cultural pushback against an omnipresent technological reality. Consider the rise of #cottagecore: baking bread, crafting, homesteading, the popularity of Ballerina farm. It speaks to something I think we’re all craving in this modern world: tangibility.

Allow me to return again to records. I once found a trunk of old 78 rpm records in my grandfather’s basement, a time capsule that even included recordings of him and his brothers and sisters from the 1950s. Do you think a Spotify playlist will last that long?

The Vinyl Room

calls this the Legacy of Vinyl, the idea that “your story will still be there, on the surface of your records, buried underneath the grooves, blended with the stories of many others.”

my favorite New Yorker cartoon

In this digital world, where everything gets buried in the 1s and 0s after existing for ten minutes, staying analog means taking up a different kind of space—a space that leaves us vulnerable to the kind of imperfection that fundamentally makes us human.

For all the potential of digital connection, it still feels cheap compared to the real, sometimes awkward, in-person interactions. The emotions produced in these tangible spaces linger long after the moment leaves. Can we really say the same about those connections mediated through a screen?

Clothing designer

Ken Sakata

, talking about Japanese aesthetics, says: “Perfect things are really unappealing; if something is uniform and perfect, it doesn’t encourage you to participate in it because you’ll have a very human anxiety that you’ll mess it up.”

This reminds me of those old Bob Dylan records, laid down live in the studio and hardly touched up post production. They’re imperfect in so many ways, and that’s exactly why they’re perfect. When you listen to them—really listen to them—you hear all that humanity.

Which brings me back to records for the final time. Jamie Kripke, the clock-designing artist, also hosts “listening parties” where he spins vinyl and everyone simply listens, no conversations, no distractions. It’s an exercise in being there and nowhere else.

“That’s it?” you might ask. “Yeah, that’s it,” I say.

I attended one last month. In preparation for the evening, the first thing everyone did was put their phones into a wicker basket. The music was great, but that might have been my favorite moment of the night.

Here’s to keeping it analog.

-Martin

p.s. What could be better than Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash singing together . . .

p.p.s. If you’re still here, can I make an ask? Please forward this to one person you think would enjoy it. I'd love to spread the word. Many thanks.