The revenge of analog, p.1
The Revenge of Analog, page 1
Copyright © 2016 by David Sax.
Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, an imprint of Perseus Books,
LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.
PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.
Book Design by Jack Lenzo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sax, David, author.
Title: The revenge of analog: real things and why they matter / David Sax.
Description: First Edition. | New York: PublicAffairs, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016012413 (print) | LCCN 2016027805 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610395724 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Entrepreneurship—History. | Electronic commerce—History. | Marketing. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Industries / Retailing. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture. | TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Manufacturing.
Classification: LCC HB615 .S3137 2016 (print) | LCC HB615 (ebook) | DDC 306.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012413
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction
PART I
THE REVENGE OF ANALOG THINGS
Chapter 1: The Revenge of Vinyl
Chapter 2: The Revenge of Paper
Chapter 3: The Revenge of Film
Chapter 4: The Revenge of Board Games
PART II
THE REVENGE OF ANALOG IDEAS
Chapter 5: The Revenge of Print
Chapter 6: The Revenge of Retail
Chapter 7: The Revenge of Work
Chapter 8: The Revenge of School
Chapter 9: The Revenge of Analog, in Digital
Epilogue: The Revenge of Summer
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Index
A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964
JACKIE TREEHORN: “New technology permits us to do very exciting things in interactive and erotic software. The wave of the future Dude, one hundred percent electronic.”
THE DUDE: “Hmm . . . well, I still jerk off manually.”
—The Big Lebowski, 1998
Introduction
In June 2012, a new store called June Records opened its doors in Toronto’s Little Italy neighborhood, a block and a half from a house I’d just purchased with my wife. June Records looked nothing like the dusty, cluttered record stores I’d grown up visiting. It was a modern, well-organized, well-lit retail space, almost a boutique. Walking through the neighborhood shortly after I bought the house, I was stopped on the sidewalk outside June Records by the beautiful sounds coming from the turntable playing in the window. The album was Aretha Franklin’s Live at the Fillmore West, and the combination of the Queen of Soul and a sunny summer day in my new neighborhood was impossible to resist. I walked in, asked how much the record cost, and walked away with Aretha under my arm, practically dancing down the sidewalk with elation.
Like most music fans, I’d spent the preceding decade gradually divorcing my music collection from physical reality: loading CDs into iTunes, iTunes onto my iPhone, and eventually the whole deal into the cloud. I still owned a turntable, an old Technics given to me by my friend David Levy, but it had been sitting in a box at my parents’ house for more than two years, utterly neglected. The $20 I had spent on that record at June was more money than I had spent on music of any kind over the same time.
That fall, we moved into our house, I set up my turntable, and finally played Aretha in all her sweet glory. Within a few bars of “Respect,” it dawned on me that this was the first recorded music I had actively listened to in ages. It had been months since I had opened iTunes on my computer, and I had no songs anymore on my phone. All those albums were hidden in my hard drive, nestled between old e-mails and various other files, beyond my sight. Most days I just listened to public radio in the kitchen or the car. When my brother bought me a subscription to the streaming service Rdio, I frequently found myself opening up the app, only to become paralyzed with indecision. My options were infinite, literally every single album and song ever recorded. What did I want to listen to? It was as though the ease and convenience of digital music had sucked the very fun out of listening to it. The entire world of music was just a click away, but I couldn’t even be bothered to do that. What if there was an even better song, just a few taps away? Something was missing. The way to bring it back, I now realized, was vinyl.
I found myself purchasing records whenever I could. I began by digging through the discount bins at June Records for old jazz and soul albums, but was very soon buying freshly pressed, newly released records by bands and artists I learned about by actually talking to June’s staff. Often, if something was playing on the turntable there, I’d pick it up: the harmonic guitar rock debut from local band Always, a fresh compilation from Nigerian psych-disco hermit William Onyeabor, the stripped-back instrumental hip-hop collaboration from rap legend Ghostface Killah and funk band BadBadNotGood. My new collection, which numbered maybe a dozen old records when I moved into the house, swelled so quickly, my wife declared a hard limit on the number of shelves it could occupy.
I was having too much fun to care. My modest vinyl fetish had tapped into something that was lying dormant since my first Napster download: the carnal pleasure of physically browsing and buying music. I would walk by a record store and suddenly the $10 bill in my wallet would begin burning, demanding to be spent. Half an hour later I would emerge with an album under my arm, my face swollen with pride, as though I had recorded the damn thing myself. In an age when I could have the exact same music for free, and play it on five different devices, here I was paying good money for scratchy, heavy, cumbersome discs of melted plastic that I had to play on a machine as temperamental and costly to maintain as an old car. It was totally irrational.
I wasn’t alone in this madness. Every few months, I’d stumble on a new record shop that had just opened, or an older one that was suddenly expanding to a second or third location. Each time one did, it seemed like a minor miracle. Record shops had been doomed to extinction in the collective imagination ten years before, deployed as a metaphor for dying retail businesses that failed to adapt to the digital era (“If bookstores don’t figure out the web, they could go the way of the record store”). Nobody opened new record stores. No one.
Then, overnight it seemed, these retail dinosaurs were not only back from the brink but walking among us, and multiplying in every corner of the world. News stories about the death of the record store were replaced by stories about the anomaly of record stores defying the odds, new record stores like June opening, and finally confident declarations that record stores were not only back, but were actually thriving. The number of new vinyl records pressed and sold has increased more than tenfold over the past decade, resulting in a similar boom in turntable sales, and record stores opening. June Records, for example, has grown its sales by roughly 5 percent, every single month since it opened, according to the store’s co-owner Ian Cheung, doubling its revenue pretty much every year that June Records has been in business. Just last month, yet another record shop opened a few blocks away from June. Cheung told me he isn’t worried about competition. The more record stores that are out there, the more relevant June seems.
More significant than the sales was the demographic buying these records. Andrew Zukerman, a long-haired, appropriately opinionated clerk at June (basically your prototypical record store guru) characterized the average customer of record stores over the previous decade as “crummy old men looking for great records in dollar bins.” You know the type: graying ponytail secured behind a balding crown, tattered Jane’s Addiction concert T-shirt tucked into patched black jeans, endless soliloquies of cultural superiority emerging from their lips.
Around the time June Records opened, something dramatic changed in its customer base. The crummy geezers were very quickly supplanted by younger customers; music lovers in their twenties and even teens, kids who grew up with digital music, people who had only ever listened to music as free virtual files on Apple devices. And there was one other demographic that came as a surprise.
“Girls!” said Cheung, with the exasperated relief of a man who stumbles upon a river after wandering the desert. “When girls started buying records once again, you knew things had changed.” Zukerman just nodded his head. “When girls started shopping for vinyl, you saw the look in these old guys’ eyes.” It was a look of fear. The return of the female vinyl record buyer, in ever growing numbers, signaled the return of the record shop to its proper place in the cultural landscape; somewhere young people came to discover music, and one another. Somewhere cool. atOptions = { "key" : "1b615abd71df449e94c36ff5e000f6b1", "format" : "iframe", "height" : 50, "width" : 320, "params" : {} }; -->
r />
Everyone from the media to the music industry struggled to explain the surprising return of vinyl records worldwide. Commonly cited marketing buzzwords, such as authenticity, nostalgia, and millennial, were deployed in various combinations. Others just pinned it on the dreaded hipster, that ill-defined species of early aughts youth culture, which remains the preferred scapegoat for any urban gripe, from gentrification to the tightness of jeans.
I saw the return of vinyl records as part of a bigger phenomenon. The Revenge of Analog.
Five years before June Records opened, I attended a retreat in Park City, Utah, organized by a Jewish organization called Reboot. The weekend included all sorts of activities designed to reexamine Jewish identity and culture, and a part of this required everyone in attendance to abstain from technology over the Sabbath, the twenty-four-hour rest period between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday. When I unplugged, I found the experience so restorative that I regularly began observing my own digital Sabbath when I returned to Toronto, even though I wasn’t religious in any other way.
A few weeks later, my girlfriend (now wife) and I were invited to a Friday night dinner at a friend’s place. There were eight of us at the table, and during the entire meal, everyone except my wife and I held a BlackBerry smartphone, typing away through appetizers, mains, and dessert. We just sat there dumbstruck, kicking each other under the table each time someone blanked on the conversation and returned to their tiny keyboard, while their chicken grew cold. This was the first time we had both witnessed such a fundamental change in human social behavior at technology’s hands, and it shook us both to the core.
Of course, we were observing just the tip of the iceberg looming on the horizon. Within months of that night the first iPhone would appear, and all of us would embrace its seemingly limitless capability to captivate our attention. Soon, my wife and I were just like every other couple; our faces buried in screens at the dinner table, blind to the world around us, and to each other.
Later that night, back at the apartment I shared with my good friend Adam Caplan, the story of the awkward dinner quickly turned into a long conversation about the way digital technology was changing our lives. Adam, who is a teacher and extremely tech savvy, strongly believed in the transformational power of digital technology. But he openly acknowledged that digital’s gain was not without sacrifice.
Adam had recently brought over a turntable from his parents’ house, along with the bulk of their records (including the complete works of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass), and that vinyl collection provided the soundtrack to, and impetus for, that pivotal chat.
The experience of listening to a record was less efficient, more cumbersome, and not necessarily sonically superior to a digital file played on the same stereo. But the act of playing a record seemed more involved, and ultimately more rewarding, than listening to the same music off a hard drive: the physical browsing of album spines on the shelf, the careful examination of the art on the sleeve, the diligent needle drop, and that one-second pause between its contact with the record’s vinyl surface and the first scratchy waves of sound emerging from the speakers. It all involved more of our physical senses, requiring the use of our hands, feet, eyes, ears, and even mouth, as we blew dust from the record’s surface. There was a richness to the vinyl record experience that transcended any quantifiable measurement. It was more fun precisely because it was less efficient.
That experience was different, Adam told me, because it was analog. Analog, in the broadest sense of the term (and the one I’ve grounded this book in), is the opposite of digital. Digital is the language of computers, the binary code of 1’s and 0’s, which in endless combinations allow computer hardware and software to communicate and calculate. If something is connected to the Internet, runs with the help of software, or is accessed by a computer, it is digital. Analog is the yin to digital’s yang, the day to its night. It doesn’t require a computer to function, and most often analog exists in the physical world (as opposed to the virtual one).
As I began to see the world through this prism, I noticed something going on. Certain technologies and processes that had recently been rendered “obsolete” suddenly began to show new life, even as the world around them was increasingly driven by digital technology. Every week I’d walk down the street and find a new boutique focused on an analog pursuit that had nothing to do with computers: letterpress cards and invitations, film photography, handmade leather goods and watches, new print magazines, fountain pens, and, of course, vinyl records. A board game café opened up around the corner from our apartment, and it had a line out the door from day one.
I spend most of life as a writer, but I also do some investing in startups, and the trend I was noticing ran counter to the standard narrative around innovation in our economy. Everyone was supposed to be on the cusp of inventing the next great app, but the new businesses that seemed to matter in my life were something else entirely. They were places with walls and windows that sold things you could hold in your hand.
It was as though analog was becoming newly relevant, right as its very obsolescence was supposedly assured. The Revenge of Analog represented a resurgent and reimagined value for nondigital goods, services, and ideas, precisely when the transition from analog to digital was supposed to be total. But as digital technology assumed an increasingly large role in our lives, it almost seemed as if an alternative, postdigital economy was emerging as well. Although I first saw this trend blossoming in trendy urban neighborhoods, it quickly spread out into mainstream consumer culture. Initially it appeared as a trickle, but soon the Revenge of Analog was a torrent rushing all around me.
I’d meet with a technology company founder at a suburban Starbucks, and he’d be taking notes in a Moleskine journal, along with every other person in the place. A chain store, such as Urban Outfitters, suddenly carried a vast selection of new Polaroid film cameras, while Whole Foods announced it would be selling vinyl records. Each day the news would feature a new story about a fresh analog trend. Courses on mindful meditation, and luxury corporate retreats that forced participants to unplug, were proliferating in Silicon Valley. Books about the perils of digital distraction and the benefits of face-to-face interactions became best sellers. The very same friends who ignored me during that dinner a decade back now put their phone away during meals. Academic studies about the importance of real-life interactions, screen-free parenting, and reading on paper appeared regularly. Amazon actually opened a physical bookstore in Seattle, following other online retailers into the brick-and-mortar locations they once vowed to topple. Even cassette tapes reappeared. All of a sudden, analog was a buzzword.
How had this happened? Had I drifted into some sort of Wes Anderson–directed fever dream of handmade, curated preciousness? Was I simply noticing all of this because it fascinated me, or was something deeper driving this? Had our digital love affair reached some threshold, triggering a shift in momentum away from the tremendous and seemingly inevitable march of digital progress that had defined my entire life, for reasons that spoke to a deeper human truth? In a world increasingly defined by digital technology, why was I witnessing the Revenge of Analog?
Every day we turn around and something else has been enhanced, altered, or shaken up by digital technology: our car, our house, our job, our sex life. In the clean, orderly narrative of technological progress, the newest technology always renders the old one obsolete. We evolved from listening to music live, to listening on wax cylinders, then vinyl records, cassette tapes, compact discs, MP3 downloads, and now wireless streaming services. The future of music listening clearly points to services that are cheaper, faster, higher quality, less costly, and entirely virtual, as it does for so many other elements of our lives touched by digital technology.
Up until very recently, if something could be digitized, its fate was a foregone conclusion. Magazines would only exist online, every purchase would be made through the web, classrooms would be virtual. Any job that could be performed by a computer was already redundant. Our world would be successively rendered into bits and bytes, one program at a time, until we reached a state of digital utopia, or the Terminators came for us.
