The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter

by David Sax

Within a few bars of “Respect,” it dawned on me that this was the first recorded music I had actively listened to in ages.

Digital music is also "recorded."

The way to bring it back, I now realized, was vinyl.

Huh?

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 couldn't have said it better myself!

They aren’t pushing the digital world away. Rather, they’re pulling the analog one closer, and using its every advantage to succeed.

So, please turn off your phone. Shut out the digital world as best you can, and embrace the silence while you turn the page. Have a seat someplace comfortable, and if you have a turntable, turn it on.

Ain't happening, Dude!

(George Benson’s Beyond the Blue Horizon, still one of my favorite jazz albums),

This stuff,” he said, sweeping his arm across a laboratory of painfully restored, forty-year-old gear, “was designed by musicians primarily to record them. Pro Tools was designed for engineers.”

Take “Five Years,” the opening track on David Bowie’s masterpiece The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, an album Scott had engineered. “The end of that song is so emotional,” Scott said. “Bowie literally had tears streaming down his face as he was singing it.” Today, an audio engineer would smooth out those cracks in Bowie’s voice with Pro Tools as he sang his heart out, even though that shaking voice is precisely what makes the song’s finale so arresting.

Because, to paraphrase Mark Twain, a great live band is a bolt of lightning, and an iPod is a lightning bug.

Although the fully paperless office has yet to come to fruition, certain paper artifacts are now largely digital.

“You can waste time with all kinds of stuff,” Allen said, “but the digital world provides a lot of opportunity to waste a lot of time.”

More than half of Paperless Post’s new business now comes from paper.

A beautiful paper object has a far greater chance getting past the gatekeepers of assistants and into the hands of such people as Michelle Obama and Bill Gates than does a quickly deleted attachment.

“Digital natives are actually the most interested in paper,”

You can see photographs from this heyday online: packed lunch halls, women working under shiny microscopes in pristine laboratories, company beauty pageants, and football tournaments.

So why not include photos or, at least, a link?

I filled dozens of books with these photographs.

But, apparently, not this one.

There are dramatic photographs of Kodak factories being dynamited into oblivion, with the telltale LCD screens of digital cameras and phones in the foreground capturing the destruction with telling irony.

cooperative medical crisis game Pandemic

Guinea Pig (about furry animals, not human experiments).

“Not more money for magazines or more magazines being sold, but more magazines starting, thanks to technology.”

Startup Print magazine model: Get efficient before getting big.

For all the bravado about the death of print, most digital publications still spend more than they make.

When that pops up, you’re immediately looking for the X to close it, but when a print ad comes, you aren’t ripping it off the page because we forced you to see it.”

Most new independent print magazines opt to sell their issues rather than give them away, because the free-content model is deeply troubled, even digitally.

Standage felt the paper edition of The Economist had actually grown because of something he called “finishability”: the ability of readers to actually finish an issue. A magazine has a defined beginning, middle, and end, and reaching that end is incredibly satisfying.

But to write without having that final transfer of ink to paper, to publish without actually printing off a physical publication, and then having someone pay to bring those pages home with them, is devoid of any true sense of accomplishment.

Really? How about conveying info? Isn't that an accomplishment?

Grayson suggested changes to the store’s layout and merchandising, including more books displayed on tables to encourage easier browsing, a new vinyl record section, and a home library setup service, with books chosen for a client’s literary interest or by color scheme (all-white libraries were hot in the Hamptons).

White supremacists in the Hamptons? ;-)

In 2014, 18 percent of American travelers used traditional travel agents, compared to 12 percent in 2013.

Albertsons and Kroger, actually replaced expensive automated checkout kiosks with human cashiers, because they found the humans worked faster, customers preferred them, and theft actually decreased.

Does NOT surprise me! It would be sooo easy to steal in the self-scan lane.

Returns tend to happen more with online purchases than in-store ones, because customers have never actually held the merchandise, such as the sleek leather oxfords I ordered from Zappos for my wedding, which emerged from their box looking perfectly suited to a cheap pimp.

My experience is the opposite: I'm much more likely to return a walk-in retail purchase.

but I could read without having to charge a battery.

We're only talking about every 3 weeks or so! Big deal!

I could accidentally step on a book and not have to pay Amazon $140 for a

Really?! Clumsy fool! You need to take better care of your stuff.

Today, I get books at t...

Thanks to the Kindle, I use the library far more frequently and conveniently.

Instead, mis-communication led to misunderstanding and we both felt ripped off.

I don't understand how this could happen!

While this sounds high-minded, it doesn’t only apply to artisan industries, such as watchmaking or food. Over the past few years Toyota, once a pioneer of automated manufacturing, has been replacing some robots with human workers at assembly plants across Japan, to develop new skills, improve manufacturing processes, and ultimately build better cars.

The difference now is the speed and scale of digital disruption, which has accelerated exponentially, and the fact that all of that digital progress has not resulted in any real gains in productivity.

Maybe not 'all," but some parts are highly productive.

Shinola’s workers aren’t just the people who assemble the product; they are the product, and that prevents the product from becoming a commodity good whose price is the main factor in its success.

In global assessments and test scores, American students perform meagerly, far worse than those in other wealthy nations, and often less than some developing nations.

And we spend a ton of $ for this substandard education.

We won’t need their education. We won’t need their thought control. The walls will come down, and a bright new future will emerge.

Channeling Pink Floyd? ;-)

“There’s been this pattern of hype claims of the transformation of schooling, leading to academic studies that bred dissolution, and ultimately blame on teachers,”

Teachers' unions and political correctness moreso than teachers.

North Carolina public school students who were given free laptops, and what it found was the diametric opposite.

The amazing thing about all this is how the people most responsible for education policy fail to learn from their mistakes.

Dollars spent on digital education technology are dollars that cannot be spent on teachers, building maintenance, or textbooks.

One of the hottest topics in the field today is the notion of teaching so-called twenty-first-century skills. These are the building blocks for innovation, and include such buzzwords as creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, communication, empathy, and failure. These differ greatly from the classic Western educational fundamentals of reading, writing, arithmetic, science, and so on, because they are so-called soft skills, more a series of behaviors than specific factual knowledge.

By day they wrote code, but at night they collected vinyl records, were starting a craft brewery, played board games, or repaired old motorcycles.

He has a more liberal definition of analog than including I do. My definition contrasts with 'digital.'

The most revealing conversations I was having about analog were almost always with those who worked in digital technology, because they wrestled with these questions daily.

Every person who enters the meeting spends the first half-hour quietly reading, and the discussion begins only once everyone has finished the memo.

They are not embracing analog because it is cool. They do it because analog proves the most efficient, productive way to conduct business. They embrace analog to give them a competitive advantage.

Once the paper designs allowed an idea to evolve into a more concrete state, the process invariably moved to the computer where the design could be refined and tested. But when it made that transition to digital, it was more thought out, and frankly better than a design that began on the computer.

Danzig proposed the integration of analog safeguards into critical systems. These include placing humans into decision-making roles, employing analog devices as a check on digital equipment (physical switches, for example), and providing analog backups if digital systems are attacked.

Computer engineers have a real fear that the inevitable progress dictated by Moore’s Law could hit a wall in the next decade as processors grow beyond our ability to feed them adequate supplies of power.