by David Sax

I originally saw this book for sale in the gift shop at The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago a number of years ago. Something about a nostaglic look at vintage and analog technology caught my attention. Perhaps I was influenced by the Art Deco style of the silver Pioneer Zephyr I had just toured. It’s been on my reading list since then and I finally got around to it this past week.

I half expected it to be a window into the past looking longingly on things we may have left behind. Instead, it was a current look at how some aspects of analog are making a comeback. I found it to be a comforting exercise in finding balance in today’s world, blending together the best of the past and present.

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.

The reading was light and easy. I was taken along on with the author on a few trips to visit various locations; a board game cafe, vinyl record pressing factories, photographic film manufacturing sites, a book store, and a summer camp to name a few. Overall this made the book quite accessible and didn’t assume you had any interest or knowledge about any of the topics. Despite some resonating with me more than others the way it was written made it easy for me to see the value and appreciate the intentionality behind the various topics.

What really tood out to me was that the common thread about most of the stories was connection. Yes, that included a connection to nostalgia ocassionally. Other connections took a front seat; the connection to creativity, other people, nature, and all of our tactile senses.

With analog gaming, whether it is an intricate board game or a child’s game of tag, all the players need to work together to create the illusion of the game. It requires a collective investment of your imagination in an alternate reality to believe that you actually own Park Avenue, and the colored slips of paper in your hands are worth something.

And that’s something we are longing for: connection. It made me realize how disconnected “search” is. At it’s core it is a self-service tool. Search enables you find something yourself using your own tastes, preconceived notions, and even pre-existing vocabulary, and I’m not talking about the filter bubble either thought that play a part in search as well. I’m talking about only being able to find things that you already know you want or need. Search is cold, and flat. There’s no curation or personal flair involved. If a search engine started exhibiting personality (if that were even possible at this point in time) we most likely would start reporting bugs against it or deem it to be of substandard quality.

…she had recommended Elie Wiesel’s brief but powerful Holocaust memoir Night to a customer who wanted something historical but readable. He returned the next day, waited nearly an hour for Bogner to arrive, told her he devoured Night, and wanted another recommendation. She handed him two options, sat him in a chair, and told him to read five pages of each. He left with Moby Dick. “Amazon wouldn’t have recommended that,” Bogner said. It would have spit out a dozen more Holocaust memoirs.

It wasn’t all about hobbies either. The second have of the book focused on ideas which included work and school. I’ve seen this first hand in my career at various workplaces. All of the digital tools I’ve had access to over the years have helped faciliate getting the job done, especially in a remote environment, but have all paled in comparison to in-person workshops with physical post-it notes and whiteboards. With an incredibly high degree of consistency, the most challenging problems I’ve ever seen myself and other professionals deal with is communication with other people. There’s so much room for misunderstanding, misalignment, bias, etc. Being able to interact with people, empathize with them, or even just simply understand where they were coming from even if you completely disagree with them is a major tool that yields incredible results.

A 2015 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research noted that jobs with increased social skill requirements have resulted in greater increases in employment and wages. This is ironic, because a big push of that same industry has been shifting educational funding away from liberal arts programs (writing, art, drama, social science) to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses, across all ages and school levels.

“But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That’s the view of a child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges us or diminishes us, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another.”

In the end, after reading The Revenge of Analog and thinking more deeply about how I come across recommendations, I was thankful that I saw this book prominently displayed at the museum in Chicago. It’s made me want to recommend this book to others and hope to find new ways to find truly personalized recommendations from other people across a wide variety of topics.

Hand selling is a book industry term, which essentially means that sales associates will place books people want to read into their hands. This involves basic human skills such as reading body language, making eye contact, inquiring about personal taste, and using human judgment to suggest the right book. Amazon doesn’t do hand selling; its software algorithms recommend titles with calculations that weigh the likeliness of what you would like to read, based on what you read before and what others who read those books also bought. Most often I find Amazon just feeds you predictably similar titles.

Sections of the Book

The Revenge of Analog Things

• The Revenge of Vinyl
• The Revenge of Paper
• The Revenge of Film
• The Revenge of Board Games

The Revenge of Analog Ideas

• The Revenge of Print
• The Revenge of Retail
• The Revenge of Work
• The Revenge of School
• The Revenge of Analog, in Digital
• The Revenge of Summer