Analogue People
"The folks who like to be called, what they have always been called, the folks who live and will likely die on that analogue hill".
In some way the digital video above goes with the analogue text below.
(Press Play)
Do you drive a reliable thirty year old car, sleep under an old knitted blanket, drink tea brewed from loose leaves and pass the time counting blossoms on an apple tree through the window? No, neither do I. But I sometimes visit that sort of place in my silvery edged daydreams.
There is a feeling that something went wrong. We were promised speed, ease and connection. The future was meant to free us. Bright, clean, efficient. But we never really considered what we would do once we got there. So big tech filled in the blanks for us. Business, pleasure, information and commerce now live in the same space, one swipe apart. We carry small glowing machines that eat our attention in tiny pieces. We are contactable at all times. We check in at red lights, dinner tables, in bed, at funerals. We know more than any people before us, yet often think less for ourselves. We learn fast and discard quickly. We need the next hit. AI points us in the right direction; as far as it is concerned. Some people are uneasy and think about turning back. But the system makes it hard to leave, and hard to see the others.
I imagine those others are somewhere in the middle ground, if such a place still exists. They use apps to bank, write notes or find a route, just not all the time. They still understand maps, notebooks and pencils. They can read the weather in the sky and the feel of the air, make a meal from leftovers, use cash and count the change. They might describe themselves as reasonable rather than exceptional. They move to their own rhythm.
Perhaps they are the analogue people. The name sounds faintly absurd, and they may treat it that way.
“We’re not anal,” they might say. “We’re analogue. Or trying to be.”
They are simply stepping a little to the side of the digital onslaught. They know it cannot be stopped, but they would rather travel at their own pace. They suspect the great digital wave may eventually consume itself. Who knows.
They like books with paper pages. Cars with keys. Shops where you speak to the owner. Music you can hold in your hands. Bus tickets. They cook potatoes with butter instead of ordering another quick food hit through an app that tracks them like tagged wolves. They may refuse to deal with online shops that think one purchase grants permission for endless “offers”.
People mistake this for nostalgia. It is not. Nostalgia is soft and vague. This is more solid than that. You can live it. An analogue life has weight. You carry your own shopping. A film camera makes you wait to see whether the photograph was worth taking. Gratification takes time. Older things demand patience, and patience sharpens a person.
The modern world removes friction from life, so long as you keep up with the upgrades. It wants everything smooth, fast and lubricated. But friction and grip are where thought and feeling begin. A man who can read a long novel without checking his phone every six minutes can surely still think in full sentences.
The strange thing is that intelligent people often drift towards these older ways. Not because they hate technology. Most understand it too well for that but they know every machine carries an appetite. Every platform wants time, attention and obedience. A device is never just a device. It has its own purpose. It wants your outsourced lifetime needs. It wants to understand your habits, your movements, your desires. There is a hunger in the code, and you are the first course on the menu.
In The Matrix, the machines built a false world to keep people asleep. That once sounded like fantasy. Now people volunteer for it. They stare into screens all day and call it life. The digital world washes over them. They panic when they lose connection. An analogue person notices this and moves on to something else. There will be inconvenience and conflict. Fine. Perfection becomes dull after a while. Human beings were never meant to live inside polished surfaces.
In Fight Club, Tyler Durden says that the things you own end up owning you. He was right, though not in the way he imagined. Now the things that own people are invisible. Algorithms. Notifications. Likes. Streams of endless information that leave no mark. A dried up river of consciousness.
An analogue life is an attempt to leave real footprints on the beach again, despite the incoming tide. To learn a skill. To grow tomatoes. To mend a coat. To watch weather move across the sky without reaching for distraction every thirty seconds. Knowing the names of birds, plants and trees. It sounds small, even pointless, until you try it.
Most people cannot sit quietly any more. They fear boredom. Yet boredom can carry a person into new thoughts. Sometimes even new ideas. Boredom means the mind’s doorway is open.
That is why analogue people can seem strange. They are difficult to sell to. Harder to frighten. Harder to distract. They may have missed the latest thing but remain entirely untroubled by that. A person who can entertain themselves with a book, a walk, a paintbrush and their own thoughts is dangerous to a culture built on dependency.
An analogue life will probably not make you rich. It may not even make you happy all the time. But it may return some of what modern life has slowly drained away. Real conversation. Attention. Depth. Silence. Your own mind. Imagination. Peace. The music of the spheres.
That is not nostalgia.
It is a mellow kind of resistance.