Analog Revival

Less tech is more desirable.

The LightPhone

I’ve never liked the terms “smart” and “dumb” to describe technology. To me, these adjectives have a judgy tone that suggests a person is either with the times or lagging far behind. Their oppositional nature clearly favours “smart”, reserving a common schoolyard insult as a descriptor for anything that is a different choice.

The smart-dumb dichotomy disregards context. It fails to acknowledge that a smartphone may be a good choice in some situations, but not in every single one, especially if it is dominating a person’s attention and causing them to miss out on other important goings-on. Sometimes, the smartphone is the dumber phone, and the dumbphone the smarter phone. It depends on what you need it for and how you want to allocate your time and attention.

I prefer the more neutral terms “digital” and “analog.” These are less deprecating and feel less like a backward vs. forward standoff. Stripped of emotion, they allow for a fairer discussion of each side’s pros and cons. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing more pushback against references to dumbphones, dumb houses, dumb thermostats, dumb cars, etc., as these simpler technologies slowly and steadily become more desirable. Not so dumb after all, they indicate a conscious choice to prioritize certain values in life.

Analog in the News

In just the past few days, I’ve come across several news stories on diverse topics that underscore my (anecdotal) sense that analog tech is enjoying a resurgence.

For The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka wrote a piece called “The Dumbphone Boom Is Real.” He describes a “burgeoning cottage industry” that is helping people replace high-tech phones with simpler ones. One U.S.-based company called Dumbwireless, which launched in late 2022, strives to “condense and simplify” the best options to make it easier for wannabe basic phone users to make a choice. Sales have been accelerating, with $70K-worth of products sold in March 2024 compared to the year before.

The LightPhone, which I’ve been eyeing up for several years and is sadly not yet available in Canada, has apparently been flourishing in the U.S. Chayka writes that “from 2022 to 2023, its revenue doubled, and it is on track to double again in 2024.”

Looking in a different direction, Town & Country magazine published a feature story called “The Dawn of the Dumb House” by Kristen Bateman. It explains that increasing numbers of homeowners are opting to design homes that purposely lack “smart” technological features that go out of date far too quickly. The goal of one architectural client was to create “a residence that could last 30 years without another renovation.” Whether this is for financial, environmental, or psychological reasons, I do not know for sure, but I suspect it has to do with wanting a tech-free oasis.

As one design editor wrote in response to Bateman’s piece, there is now something luxurious about living apart from digital technology. We hanker for a break from it, for a place to rest and relax without feeling its constant tug at our attention. From Emily Grosvenor:

“[What] many people want right now is a place apart from technology, whether that be hiding a television screen behind a beautiful panel or going in on stylistic choices that speak to eras with far less tech. As we have become more dependent on it for work, communication, and commerce, we want less of it at home.”

Then there was a short Instagram reel sent to me by the wonderful Substack writer Laura Fenton. It portrayed an offline pop-up café in Amsterdam where people can go to hang out and interact without devices present. It shows people knitting, writing, reading—just being in the moment without their eyeballs glued to glowing screens.

Single-day events and longer digital detox retreats are organized by a Dutch group called The Offline Club that allow people to “take a break from [the] daily hustle and swap screen time for real time.” Another video depicts phones getting locked in a cabinet as people arrive at a social event. (While I recognize the irony of me finding out about this group on a social media platform, it’s a good example of the platform being used as a tool, not a toy.)

The Rise of Techno-Selectionism

I have encountered many other similar news stories and headlines over the past year that also sing the praises of analog technology, but I mention these three just because they are so recent. Taken together, they are great examples of what author Cal Newport has described as “techno-selectionism”, which I think of as a valuable middle-ground stance between the two extremes of techno-optimism and techno-skepticism.

Selectionism, Newport writes, is a “perspective that accepts the idea that innovations can significantly improve our lives but also holds that we can build new things without having to accept every popular invention as inevitable. Techno-selectionists believe that we should continue to encourage and reward people who experiment with what comes next. But they also know that some experiments end up causing more bad than good.”

Put another way, techno-selectionists aren’t afraid to try out new technologies and then reject them if they do not improve their lives sufficiently to merit permanent adoption. Techno-selectionists resist the assumption that something is good just because it’s new. They recognize that something is always lost in the adoption of new technologies, and sometimes that trade-off isn’t worth it.

Is the Future Analog?

Applied to the stories above, I see people’s choices to buy “dumbphones” (ugh, that word again), to build simpler homes, and to hang out in offline cafés not as a regression to a more primitive way of doing things, but (dare I say?) an advancement beyond so-called “smart” technologies to a place that has a certain “been there, done that” attitude of knowing it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. (Another word for that might be “wisdom.”)

I often come back to Canadian writer David Sax’s book, The Future Is Analog, in which he argues that the pandemic gave us the digital future we were promised for so long—and we hated it. It was awful. We realized that the things we love most about life are the real things, the physical things, the in-person things, the outdoor things. (Read my post about a talk Sax gave: “Is the Future Analog?”)

The vast majority does not want to go back to a life where everything we do is screen-based. And so, I see many of us moving beyond those high-tech solutions—that may have once filled a practical void but created a great yawning chasm in our hearts—toward a curious informed perspective that understands their benefit (and doesn’t necessarily wish for them to stop existing altogether), but chooses to minimize their presence in our lives.

I am very eager to see what the future holds.

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