The Analog Revolution: Long Live Friction!

The “Analog Revolution” is interesting because it isn’t really a rejection of technology. It’s more like a rebellion against the disappearance of physicality, friction, skill, limitation, and human participation. The things being rediscovered aren’t necessarily “better”—they’re things that became unnecessary, then oddly desirable.

Photography and visual arts are probably the most obvious territory: film photography, darkroom printing, contact sheets, enlargers, chemical processing, slide film, Polaroid, medium-and large-format cameras, mechanical cameras, hand-held light meters, optical viewfinders, photographic notebooks, physical portfolios, lithography, screen printing, letterpress, linoleum cuts, woodcuts, etching, engraving, encaustic painting, hand-painted signs, airbrushing, drafting tables, technical drawing, French curves, T-squares, triangles, compasses, proportional dividers, rubylith, paste-up, phototypesetting, Letraset, mechanical boards, and physical mockups.

Photography & Film Making

Music has an enormous analog-revolution constituency: vinyl records, turntables, reel-to-reel tape, cassette tapes, 8-tracks, tube amplifiers, mechanical metronomes, acoustic instruments, handwritten scores, live recording, multitrack tape, analog synthesizers, drum machines, four-track recording, record collecting, DJing with actual records, making mixtapes, radio, listening to an entire album, and actually owning the music you listen to.

Writing and publishing provide another huge field: fountain pens, pencils, mechanical pencils, typewriters, manual typewriters, shorthand, handwriting, cursive, notebooks, journals, index cards, physical dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias, physical libraries, marginalia, printed newspapers, magazines, zines, chapbooks, paste-up publishing, mimeographs, carbon paper, typewriter correction tape, rubber stamps, wax seals, physical correspondence, postcards and handwritten letters.

Then there is the lost world of paper-based information management: Rolodexes, address books, appointment books, paper calendars, desk diaries, filing cabinets, index-card systems, ledger books, receipt books, paper maps, atlases, road maps, travel journals, handwritten inventories, paper catalogs, physical archives and—one of my favorites—writing something down because you actually intend to remember it.

Music & Recording

The professions are especially interesting because the Analog Revolution could resurrect not merely objects but entire occupations. Typesetters. Compositors. Darkroom technicians. Film processors. Photo lab technicians. Projectionists. Record-store clerks. Watchmakers. Clockmakers. Bookbinders. Letterpress printers. Engravers. Sign painters. Draftsmen. Cartographers. Archivists. Copy editors. Proofreaders. Linotype operators. Film editors. Sound engineers working with tape. Radio operators. Telephone switchboard operators. Photographic retouchers who actually painted on photographs. And perhaps, in a slightly more satirical category, the professional person whose entire job was knowing where the damn thing was in the filing cabinet.

The mechanical world is ripe for revival: mechanical watches, wind-up clocks, mechanical pencils, slide rules, sextants, compasses, abacuses, adding machines, typewriters, manual cash registers, mechanical calculators, sewing machines, film cameras, mechanical watches, hand tools, hand planes, chisels, drafting instruments, manual coffee grinders, hand-cranked food processors, record players, tube radios and even mechanical toys.

Food and drink have their own analog insurgency: sourdough baking, home canning, pickling, fermentation, butter making, hand-grinding coffee, pour-over coffee, manual espresso machines, cast-iron cooking, wood-fired ovens, gardening, seed saving, home brewing, smoking meat, preserving food, farmers’ markets, handwritten recipes, recipe boxes and the increasingly radical act of actually cooking something from ingredients rather than assembling it from an app-mediated delivery ecosystem.

Printing & Publishing

Games and recreation are another major front. Board games, card games, chess, checkers, billiards, darts, bowling, pinball, model railroads, model airplanes, scale modeling, slot cars, jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, paper puzzles, tabletop role-playing games, miniature gaming, physical toys, kites, yo-yos, marbles, collecting baseball cards, collecting stamps, coin collecting, fishing with an actual fishing pole, camping with paper maps and compasses, and perhaps the most radical pastime of all: sitting outside doing absolutely nothing while waiting for something to happen.

The Analog Revolution also has a transportation division: bicycles, motorcycles, manual-transmission automobiles, mechanical watches notwithstanding, paper road atlases, road trips without turn-by-turn navigation, railroad travel, train spotting, sailing, canoeing, kayaking, horseback riding, walking, hitchhiking, mechanical bicycles, restoring old cars and learning how to repair your own machine rather than asking the machine to diagnose itself.

There is a particularly rich category involving navigation and exploration: celestial navigation, paper maps, topographic maps, compasses, sextants, star charts, field notebooks, sketching landscapes, birdwatching with binoculars, identifying plants from field guides, geological collecting, amateur astronomy with optical telescopes, meteorological observation, weather journals, and keeping a physical logbook of what you saw.

Games & Recreation

And then there are the social casualties. The Analog Revolution might include face-to-face conversation, handwritten invitations, dinner parties, cocktail parties, clubs, bowling leagues, amateur theater, community bands, jam sessions, dances, record-listening parties, book clubs, physical bulletin boards, neighborhood gatherings, letter-writing clubs, photography clubs, ham radio, community newspapers and the almost-forgotten art of making an appointment to meet someone and then actually showing up.

There is also an educational wing: memorizing multiplication tables, mental arithmetic, handwriting practice, learning to draw, physical atlases, laboratory notebooks, dissecting actual specimens, shop class, woodworking, metalworking, drafting, darkroom photography, mechanical repair, sewing, cooking, music lessons, calligraphy, penmanship, physical reference books, card catalogs, and learning things without immediately looking them up.

The Analog Revolution could even reclaim some things that weren’t technically replaced by digital technology but were nevertheless casualties of convenience: sharpening a pencil, repairing something instead of replacing it, making furniture, growing vegetables, mending clothes, polishing shoes, sharpening knives, developing photographs, making a notebook, building a radio, restoring a clock, rebuilding a carburetor, writing a personal letter, keeping a diary, maintaining a collection, learning an instrument, memorizing a phone number, reading a book from beginning to end, listening to an album from beginning to end, and spending an afternoon on a project with no measurable productivity whatsoever.

Everything Mechanical

Things that have been artificially resurrected because digital culture became too efficient. Vinyl is a perfect example. Streaming solved the problem of getting music into your ears. Vinyl resurrected the experience of having music. Film photography is another. Digital photography solved the problem of taking photographs. Film resurrected the experience of making photographs. Mechanical watches solve no practical problem whatsoever in 2026. That’s precisely why people like them.

The same argument applies to typewriters. Nobody needs a typewriter. That’s the point.

This suggests a useful distinction for the Analog Revolution: the object isn’t necessarily being revived because it is superior. It is being revived because its limitations create an experience that the replacement eliminated.

A film camera has limited exposures. A record has limited playing time. A typewriter doesn’t let you endlessly revise. A mechanical watch doesn’t synchronize itself to an atomic clock. A paper map doesn’t tell you where to turn. A darkroom doesn’t have an Undo button. A handwritten letter doesn’t arrive instantly. A woodworking project doesn’t have a progress bar.

Those limitations are not bugs.

They may actually be the product.

The Analog Revolution is the rediscovery of friction as a feature rather than a defect.