The Revenge of Analog

Revenge of the Analog chronicles an interesting phenomenon that has taken place over the last fifteen years. As the world was getting more and more digitised, a bunch of analog products and services have made rather a dramatic comeback. There was a time when people thought that bookshops and physical books were done, that streaming was the only future of music, film photography was dead, and that online shopping would take over retail entirely.

That, obviously, did not happen. The more digital people’s life and work became, the more they began to seek out analog products and experiences. While streaming is the way most people listen to music today, a significant chunk of them have turned to vinyl records. Record shops began to show up in every major city, and whole communities sprang up around people who wanted to listen to music in the old-fashioned way with them trading and swapping records and sharing and talking about the music.

A similar thing happened to notebooks and journals. With every digital means of organising their thoughts and tracking their days at hand, people began to find that they thought more clearly and came up with better ideas when they did their thinking with pen and paper. This is as true of designers and artists as it is of engineers and scientists.

One would think that with a camera in every phone, film photography would be non-existent today, but that is surprisingly, not true. There’s a sizeable chunk of people who buy film cameras and use them, insisting that they love the quirky, unpredictable nature of the photographs. And then of course, there’s the fact that physical books did not just disappear and independent bookshops are making something of a comeback.

The Revenge of Analog is full of stories about entrepreneurs, small business owners, and occasionally, big corporations who make and sell analog products and services. Some of them have taken over dying businesses and turned them around, others have built them from scratch, and they have all found a market for these products that were once written off.