Good morning!
What I’m about to type may come as little surprise to readers of this newsletter, but I feel the need to say it anyway: When it comes to technology and culture—and technology’s effect on culture—we live in precarious, delirious times.
As the cultural critic Ted Gioia recently noted, “2024 may be the most fast-paced—and dangerous—time ever for the creative economy,” going on to decry what he calls “the birth of a post-entertainment culture.” Silicon Valley, he points out, is practically leading us, en masse, into a “dopamine doom loop.” He’s not wrong. (This reminds me of when I interviewed the designer Jasper Morrison back in 2018, and he spoke about how technology was turning us into “little limp puddles.”) Research shows that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, to the point that some experts—including the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of the new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press)—are referring to the situation as an “epidemic.”
Our smartphones, social media, and the internet are constantly, often literally, calling, pinging, and prodding us in ways that make us feel increasingly excitable, rushed, and reactive. If we’re not careful or proactive, all of this speed—and that’s what it is, speed—can and will impact our very selfhood. As the interior designer Ilse Crawford put it to me on the latest episode of Time Sensitive, “If you do things in a rush, ideas could slip through your fingers, but also you could slip through your fingers.”
So how did we get here? The design writer Deyan Sudjic’s latest book, The World of Analog: A Visual Guide (Prestel), provides a compelling answer. Presenting a particularly potent selection of analog products, it highlights key innovations and designs that, for better and worse, paved the way toward today’s tech-addled reality. Organized into four sections—“Sound,” “Vision,” “Communication,” and “Information”—Sudjic’s commentary delves into the appeal, both emotional and aesthetic, of everything from the Cartier Santos wristwatch (1904) and the Leica 1 Model C camera (1930) to the Sony WM2 Walkman (1981) and the Nokia 232 cell phone (1994). “It’s only now the analog world is effectively over that we can grasp its extraordinarily rich legacy, see how different life was until recently, and appreciate the creativity that went into so many now-extinct objects,” he begins the book. So many of the products Sudjic showcases, many of them only several decades old, already seem quaint.
“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Steve Jobs famously said, and in our current era of digitization and TikTokification, the most powerful product has proven without question to be Apple’s iPhone, launched in 2007. Almost immediately, the device created what Sudjic calls “a kind of mass extinction event for a vast range of analog production.” Now, more than 15 years later, we’re finally seeing—with a fuller, longer view—the zombielike effects of it, personally and collectively, on our autonomy and attention. Those analog gadgets in Sudjic’s book are also analogues for all that has changed.
But not all is bleak in 2024. There are recent technological developments, such as Humane’s Ai Pin, that suggest there could be a viable smartphone alternative on the horizon, in some form or another. Plus, there are always ways of mitigating and dealing with this barrage on a personal level. I’ve long appreciated Cal Newport’s theory of “digital minimalism,” and his latest book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout (Portfolio), seeks to redefine “productivity” in a way that’s similarly helpful. This “great rewiring” moment requires an aggressive rethink of our approach to life, our devices, and the internet in general, and Newport has proven to be a vital guide.
Another resource I recently came across, the chapbook-size The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (Metalabel), brings together essays by a collective of 11 thinkers, designers, and technologists who write about “how to survive on the internet. Not individual human survival. The survival of ideas. The survival of ways of life. The survival of different.” These pieces reflect on, to quote from the co-authored foreword, “the moment the web’s youthful exuberance and naiveté gave way to anxiety, self-protection, and a search for social structures that could provide safety, meaning, and context in a newly adversarial realm.”
It’s time the world wised up to the tech-sheen stupor we find ourselves in. After reading Sudjic’s book, I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned in particular from revisiting those old analog devices.
—Spencer
