Book Review Friday!

Great read!

The Future is Analog, by David Sax

I recently finished an interesting book, The Future is Analog by independent journalist and author, David Sax. The author does a nice job of explaining how the reaction to the pandemic took utopian ideas by tech billionaires and their sycophants in the press and pushed them into reality for a couple of years.

The Future is Analog is not political and is a very easy read. Sax is an excellent communicator who melds an informal lexicon with illuminating prose to paint a picture that translates clearly for readers who might live quite differently from him.

Not every non-fiction writer is able to take his reader into his world. Sax does this not only with sights and sounds, but also the emotions of stress, fear, love, elation, and friendship. As an example, Sax includes the reader as he revels in his Jewish heritage by rekindling the analog task of making babka and recommitting himself to taking part in Shabbat.

He transports the reader to the deep connection and love he has for his friends by including us in his book club dinners. We are invited to take part in the joy that was experienced by the men who were there, and their disappointment in trying to digitalize it during the lockdown. By sharing this intimate, personal, and important part of his life, Sax makes himself vulnerable. His risk was well worth it. By including us in that snapshot of his life, we get to taste the wine and laugh at the jokes with the men in the club. We get to take part too, something that felt rather generous.

Like in good fiction, the reader feels present in the story and connected to the characters… and like in good non-fiction, the author’s point isn’t lost in flowery imagery.

The book is available everywhere, including Audible, if you feel like being ironic, but I’ve provided links to his website which will help you purchase it locally, as well.

I think instead of doing a classic review of his book, I’ll just recommend that you read it. I hope it doesn’t offend David, but I’d like to expand on some of the ideas he raised in the book, instead of just summarizing what you would be far better off simply reading for yourselves.

By doing this, it’s important to note that some of these comments, while inspired by Sax’s book, are not his opinions, but mine. So if something makes you mad… I’m the dude to cancel.

Beginnings

One of the reasons I chose to read this book was that the author and I are the same age. We were both born in 1979… young Gen Xers. When it comes to technology, being born between about 1977 and 1983 is a bit unique. I grew up in the 1980’s and early 1990’s in Roanoke VA. It might as well have been in the 1950’s.

With the exception of some obvious societal differences between those eras, life was very similar to that of the generations that came before me. When I was a child, there were no cell phones or internet… no social media or apps. When I went off to school or to play with friends, I had no contact with my family until we all gathered around the dinner table in the evening. We smoked inside and pumped gas before going into the station to pay for it. It was a very different time.

My parents were loving and attentive, but were not particularly involved in my social life. I got hurt and got in trouble. I said and did things that still make me cringe. Those things are now all lost to time and might or might not remain as a vague memory in the minds of friends and foes who were there, or in some cases still exist as a fading scar and interesting story, but they will never resurface to materially affect my life today.

By the time I began my junior year of high school, our family had an internet connection at our home. It was the old dial-up version of AOL. There was no video streaming and even low resolution photos took a long time to load. This was before Google and the corporate internet. It was way before YouTube and even earliest versions of social media. Back then the internet was a world of anonymous message boards, information websites, and early versions of chat rooms.

I loved that early version of the internet. First of all, I was a closeted gay kid. At 17 or 18 years old, I had actually never met another gay person before. We didn’t have any where I went to school and everyone was very homophobic (that’s not a hit on anyone… it’s just the way things were).

On that early internet, late at night after everyone had gone to bed, I found out that I wasn’t completely alone. I found out that there were, in fact, adult… reasonably well adjusted… seemingly happy… gay people in the world. They weren’t all drug addicts, creeps, and AIDSy pedophiles, not that those weren’t there too. It was with the help of that new technology that I first learned how to navigate being a young gay person at a time and in a place where those kinds of things were completely verboten.

By the time I went to college, the internet was modernizing into something you might recognize today. My senior year, when 9/11 happened, we didn’t have TV’s in our rooms at VMI (where I went to college), so the first images I saw of the burning north tower were on a news website I quickly checked when someone told me something was happening in New York. Then I ran to the PX to try and get more information on the communal TV. A few months later, when I graduated, I was using Google to search for things on the web.

During my first three years of college, if my mother or father wanted to speak with me, they would call the visitors center and a student would take the message down on a piece of paper. That piece of paper would then be handed to a supernumerary who would run (literally run) to my room and put the note on my desk. Upon my return to the room, I would see the note, go to a payphone bank below barracks, and call my mother using the calling card I kept in my hat. If nobody was home, I’d leave a message on the machine and we’d start the process over the next day.

By the time I graduated, she could just shoot me an email and my classmates and I were playing games connected to other computers on the network. The seniors just one or two classes behind me would have cell phones in their rooms. Incredible!

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I tell that story to make a relatively simple point that David Sax expertly makes in his book. We, of that “in between” generation, came of age as technology came of age. We all watched kids who started websites, only a few years older than us, become zillionaires overnight as their companies went public… Then we watched most of those same kids brought back to broke when the tech bubble burst in 2000.

We were the ones who were trying to imagine what the new digital future would look like. Would we be able to order a pizza from a website instead of calling on a telephone? How would we know they received the order? Would we be reading books on computer screens instead of printed paper? Would music be free forever now? Can something like a website actually be monetized to create a real business? Will people really pay money on the internet? Could it really become secure?

Grander predictions were also thrown out there. “One day you won’t even have to go to school. It will all be done from the comfort of your home”. Or “One day you will be able to just think of an item and it will be delivered to your doorstep”.

All these years later, some of that has come to pass… and as Sax spells out in no uncertain terms, some of it sucks.

I honestly forget whether Sax mentions the famous quote from the original Jurassic Park or if it just popped in my head, but let’s assume it was Sax: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” — Dr. Ian Malcom

Promise v. Reality

The meat of Sax’s book is about how the response to the pandemic supercharged decades old ideas of a new utopian digital future into immediate reality. He breaks down seven areas of life into seven chapters matching seven days of the week (clever!); Monday - Work, Tuesday - School, Wednesday - Commerce, Thursday - The City, Friday - Culture, Saturday - Conversation, and Sunday - Soul.

This was a smart way to break down these various areas of our existence because the digital future impacts these areas of life differently. Within each chapter, Sax goes through a basic three act structure of how we were promised an improved digital experience compared to its analog counterpart, how that ultimately failed to live up to its promise, and how the analog future can take advantage of cutting edge technology to improve what already exists rather than replace it with a “store brand” version of the thing we once loved.

For example, Wednesday - Commerce. Sax explains how restaurants, home delivery goods, Amazon, Door Dash and Uber Eats all promised to be a permanent and needed improvement over how we used to do things.

Article after article were written in the mainstream press about how nice it is not to have to get dressed up to go to a fine restaurant, and now you can have your favorite chef prepared meal delivered for you to eat in the comfort of your own home. In reality, what we got was a cold, unplated version of the meal we used to enjoy at the restaurant… delivered by a drug addict (who now knows where you live). The meal we used to love is now thrown into a black disposable container which we ate out of with a plastic fork. No ambiance, no friends to make catty comments to, no fun. On top of that, we paid full price, plus a delivery fee.

The restaurant had to give most of their profits to the delivery company and didn’t even get the customer data in return. The food suffered. The customer suffered. The business suffered. The only winner was a nameless, faceless, venture backed, billion dollar corporation from Palo Alto, Seattle, or Austin.

Maybe there are some people out there who prefer to sit in three day old sweats, shoveling a cold steak and mashed potatoes into their face instead of going to a nice restaurant with dear friends and toasting with cocktails and laughing, but I am not one of them.

The difference between a digital future that helps small businesses thrive by making that business better and more efficient, and what we saw during the pandemic was the insistence that one result was just was good as the other. Any honest idiot could tell you that the digital Door Dash black container of what used to be a good steak is far inferior to the real thing, but we all just tried to convince ourselves otherwise.

The fact is that people enjoy going to a restaurant, just like they like walking into a nice store and being able to touch items and talk to a clerk about what they should buy. More than that, those experiences are essential parts of our culture and our identity. My home town isn’t the same without the places I used to go and the restaurants I used to enjoy. It’s not the same without the people I used to interact with, friends and enemies alike. There is no “take out” version of life, and David Sax does a nice job illuminating that concept.

Why are we so insistent on the digital, anyway?

Building on some of Sax’s themes, one question that comes to mind after reading The Future is Analog is, “Why are we doing this?”

It didn’t take a genius or a PhD in sociology to predict that taking a 20 something year old city dwelling college grad and locking her in a 600 square foot apartment, removing all social contact, having all needs delivered or streamed, and telling her this is what adulthood was going to look like, was going to lead to problems.

Depression rates, drug and alcohol abuse, pornography addiction, suicidality and deaths of despair have been skyrocketing. People have been getting more and more lonely at the same rate as they have been getting more and more digital. I don’t think the pandemic started this trend, but I do think it accelerated it. Data supports that statement.

Ask yourself this question. Why do we continue to insist on following new trends when they are objectively inferior to their older counterparts? Eating a steak out of a black plastic container alone in front of a glowing screen is not even in the same universe as going to cool restaurant with friends and loved ones and sharing a meal. It’s not even close… even if you are an introvert. Unless you are a truly antisocial freak, being with loved ones and breaking bread is as quintessentially human as is walking on two legs.

Yet for some reason, more and more people are going out less. This didn’t start with the pandemic. It started years before. We are making fewer friends and having fewer relationships. Among the youngest group of adults, the Zoomers, many are forgoing romantic relationships altogether in favor of hook up apps, pornography, and solitude.

Like eating a cold steak out of a plastic container, having a random sexual encounter from an app, or worse yet, watching a video of other people having sex while sitting alone and playing with yourself, is objectively inferior to having a real relationship. It’s not even close to the same thing. Much like breaking bread among loved ones is as quintessentially human as is walking on two legs, having a loving, adult, sexual partnership is as human as is speaking a language and creating art.

Confusingly, for some reason, the trend continues… not to the chagrin of society, but seemingly with its full throated encouragement. It’s as mystifying as it is depressing. Almost every week in the New York Times or Washington Post another young(ish), lonely, childless, cat owning, female journalist writes another opinion piece about how her lifestyle is superior while not seeing its connection to how unhappy she is. Gone are the TV shows and stories about groups of friends (or God forbid… families) hanging out and having fun… mostly replaced by story after story of the lonely outcast. All of it, from the relationships to the art, is objectively inferior to what it replaced.

Covid gave us a glimpse into what life would look like if we took our new digital future to its logical conclusion… and to put it mildly, I recommend we avoid it.

The logical conclusion

Sax touches on this in his book, but he doesn’t go as far as I would. The logical end to this trend, if nothing were to change, is the Metaverse. Picture a young man in his 20’s in a 500 square foot apartment. Everything in his life is “socially and environmentally responsible™”. The World Economic Forum has replaced that cold, home delivered steak with cold, home delivered insect burgers. He is on a cocktail of booze, grass, antidepressants, amphetamines, and benzodiazepines (all home delivered and prescribed online).

Sitting on a small couch, he has goggles on his face and is pretending to be at the beach with his “friends”. The technology has gotten good enough to where he can actually feel the sun on his skin and smell the ocean. The people he is interacting with are computer generated AI avatars that have been specifically created to be compatible with the young man. Everyone is attractive. Everyone is happy. The sun always shines.

Then that young man pulls an analog gun out from between the cushions of the analog couch, and blows his analog brains all over the tiny analog apartment, because despite the digital paradise they tried to convince him he lived in, he knew he was alone, in a hermetically sealed box, drugged into impotence, and eating bugs… and there was nothing real left worth living for.

That’s the risk in allowing weirdo, spectrumy, coders control how we live. They see a pill that replaces food as an advancement, when in reality it is objectively inferior to the food it replaced. They think they can convince you that the digital imitation of the thing is better than the thing… and it’s not and never will be. We want to use technology to improve our lives and make them easier and more enjoyable, not to replace the things we love with soulless store brand digital versions of them. No offense meant to “completely human” Mark Zuckerberg, but we want babka, not “babka”.

Sax gives the perfect example of this in his book. The logical conclusion to all this digital with no analog push back isn’t the Jetsons. It’s Demolition Man, the 1993 dystopian action flick with Sly Stallone, Wesley Snipes, and Sandra Bullock.

In that future, all restaurants are Taco Bell, where you get a capsule instead of supper. Nobody hugs or shakes hands. Nobody has sex. No kisses. No scrapes or bruises. No cussing. No litter. No grime. Just clean, corrupt safety, and 3 seashells you don’t know how to use to wipe your ass with.

Well screw that. I’d rather die in the sewers from any disease with the rebels, politically incorrect and listening to rock & roll… eating BBQ rat on a stick with friends, than live up top with all those insufferable douchebags.

Sax’s point is that if we use technology correctly, we might have an analogue future that takes advantage of all the good digital can provide, and leaves the dystopian stuff out. I’m not sure I am as optimistic… but I hope he’s right.

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I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on The Future is Analog. David Sax goes into much more detail and gives a lot of great examples for his premise and cites many sources. The book is an easy read and an important topic. If you have young city dwellers in your life, do them a favor and send them a copy. It will do them some good.

God bless and happy Friday!! —Virgil