I’m not about to argue with my techie friends that the digital world isn’t full of wonderful, even magical, conveniences. But analog technologies, whether vinyl, film, or ink on paper, persist, even though by comparison with digital alternatives, analog is inconvenient.
I wouldn’t think of reading a novel on a tablet, and I even prefer reading magazines on paper. That indulgence comes with a price. Consider Vanity Fair’s Holiday 2018/2019 double issue. It finally arrived at my house a few days ago, well after the February number had tumbled through the mail slot.
What use is a holiday gift guide if you get it in mid-January? The answer is, more than I would have imagined.
Though it may not have been any use in buying anything (a relief, no doubt), the magazine suggested something that would have seemed silly 10 years ago, that nondigital technologies aren’t just obsolete leftovers but desirable luxuries.
The first page of the gift guide presented an example of analog music that was both retro and futuristic at the same time: copies of the “golden record” carried into deep space by the NASA space probe Voyager. If LPs can be relevant to the intergalactic spacefarer who finds them a thousand years from now, mightn’t LPs retain relevance for us beyond the ease of streaming?
The appeal of analog is, in some large part, the very fact that it is difficult. Digital means thousands of songs in your pocket. Analog means schlepping old milk crates heavy with albums.
Nondigital goods also make for successful luxury products because they are stubbornly expensive. Basic packs of Polaroid film, for example, work out to about two bucks per self-developing picture.
That may be news to those who had good reason to think Polaroid instant photography had long ago been irrevocably lost. Crushed by the proliferation of digital cameras, Polaroid’s suits surrendered to the new technologies that made Polaroid’s version of “instant” seem awfully pokey. They shuttered the factories where the film was made, including one in the Netherlands.
A group of photographic enthusiasts bought the Dutch factory, rescuing its irreplaceable machinery from the slag heap of lost tech. They set the equipment right and started making film. They later acquired the Polaroid trademark and have now begun selling cameras as well as film.
Which is how a rehabbed Polaroid camera came to be included in Vanity Fair’s list of luxury goods for the holidays. The luxury is tied up not only in what it costs, but in how that cost affects its use. Smartphone cameras are incontinent, capable of taking dozens of images in cost-free bursts. By contrast, a Polaroid camera is anything but rapid fire; at $2 a picture, it encourages photographers to take time composing each shot.
In another endorsement of analog pleasures, Vanity Fair’s website suggested a variety of pricey writing papers such as notecards from Barney’s. But then Barney’s had to go and ruin it, offering to “have your message penned by a robot, then stamped and mailed while you’re on the go for hassle-free, high-tech luxury.”
What happened to the trouble-taking ethic essential to the analog aesthetic? Analog is luxurious not because it’s hassle-free, but because it says you have the luxury of time to concentrate on what you’re doing without succumbing to the digital-age demand that everything be efficient.
Which makes me wonder what a little more analog luxury would do for me. I might be a more thoughtful and deliberate writer if I put words together, not on my computer, but on the 1930s L.C. Smith Super Speed typewriter I have here on my desk.
Then again, that would be hard. It would most definitely not be hassle-free. It wouldn’t exactly feel luxurious. Come to think of it, what are the chances the nice people at Barney’s might lend me their writing robot?
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
