The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter

by David Sax

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

The choice we face isn’t between digital and analog. That simplistic duality is actually the language that digital has conditioned us to: a false binary choice between 1 and 0, black and white, Samsung and Apple. The real world isn’t black or white. It is not even gray. Reality is multicolored, infinitely textured, and emotionally layered. It smells funky and tastes weird, and revels in human imperfection. The best ideas emerge from that complexity, which remains beyond the capability of digital technology to fully appreciate. The real world matters, now more than ever.

Meanwhile, the previous disadvantages of vinyl records now became attractive. Records are large and heavy; require money, effort, and taste to create and buy and play; and cry out to be thumbed over and examined. Because consumers spend money to acquire them, they gain a genuine sense of ownership over the music, which translates into pride.

“With vinyl, you’re on your knees,” White told Billboard. “You’re at the mercy of the needle. You watch the record spin and it’s like you’re sitting around a campfire. It’s hypnotic.”

The Moleskine had no special features to invite this, aside from its simple design. It just happened to be the perfect blank slate for Getting Things Done devotees to hack for their purposes, a true tabula rasa. “Getting Things Done isn’t a paper-dependent method,” Allen told me last year. But, he said, the “easiest and most ubiquitous way to get stuff out of your head is pen and paper.” A pen and paper requires no power source, no boot-up time, no program-specific formatting, no syncing to external drives and the cloud. “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.” And wasted time was the stated enemy of Getting Things Done.

What the skeptics failed to see—beyond the surge of new apps, social networks, and connected digital devices—was that Moleskine’s greatest achievement was making the art of note taking a key behavior of the digital era. Whether it was a journal entry on vacation, a brainstorm for a new startup, such as AirBnB, or just the daily scribbling of work and life, Moleskine had made the action of putting pen to paper desirable for tech-savvy consumers, and others saw an opportunity to profit.

“Digital natives are actually the most interested in paper,” said Chris Harrold, the creative director at Mohawk Paper, an eighty-five-year-old paper company in upstate New York that supplies MOO. “They don’t have a nostalgic association with it. They find it really beautiful, and refreshing. Their digital devices are a commodity; a commodity delivery platform. But print has an ability to organize information in a special way. The web is just this endless loop of information.”