The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value

The Love of Analog grew out of wondering about my own personal practices. I've always surrounded myself with books, and I've been amassing a comic book collection since I was 12. But in the past few years, my wife and I have begun building collections of vinyl records, board games, and puzzles—and this despite the easy availability of digital equivalents for all of this stuff. Compared with their digital counterparts, analog goods are inefficient, expensive, bulky, persnickety and notoriously fragile. So, what was the draw? When I started digging into this—before “this” was a book project, when it was just a question—I saw that we weren't alone: analog was booming. Analog film was making a comeback, adult coloring books were everywhere, and musicians had started releasing albums on cassette again. Big bookstores were shuttering, but small used bookstores were rebounding, and board game cafes were opening in every city in the country. With so much working against them, I thought, there had to be some positive values that would explain the growing popularity of analog goods.

About a century and a half ago, a group of American thinkers set the groundwork for a new philosophical tradition called pragmatism. Among other things, pragmatism is very interested in values. But rather than working from the top down, talking about values in abstract terms—asking, as Socrates did, “What is justice?” or “What is beauty?”—pragmatism recommends that we start with our own activities and ask what we get out of those. Our values, the pragmatist suggests, are in the activities. That sounded like a good way to approach my question. But applying the pragmatist method is necessarily a slow, empirical, and deeply personal affair. Asking what I got out of engaging with a vinyl album rather than Spotify, or why I prefer to use paper, pencil, and ink when I have Photoshop and Illustrator loaded on my various devices, meant attending to these activities in a deliberate and contemplative manner. Happily, I was in no rush.

Ongoing thread. More from Darren Hudson Hick to follow.