The Future Is Analog
How to Create a More Human World
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Bestselling culture writer David Sax lays out the case against a false digital utopia—and for a more human future
In The Future Is Analog, David Sax points out that the onset of the pandemic instantly gave us the digital universe we’d spent so long anticipating. Instant communication, online shopping, virtual everything.
It didn’t take long to realize how awful it was to live in this promised future. We craved real experiences, relationships, and spaces and got back to real life as quickly and often as we could.
In chapters exploring work, school, religion, and more, this book asks pointed questions: Is our future inevitably digital? Can we reject the downsides of digital technology without rejecting change? Can we innovate not for the sake of productivity but for the good of our social and cultural lives? Can we build a future that serves us as humans, first and foremost?
This is a manifesto for a different kind of change. We can spend our creativity and money on building new gadgets—or we can spend them on new ways to be together and experience the world, to bake bread, and climb mountains. All we need is the clarity to choose which future we want.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Covid-19 pandemic revealed that there are limits to what an online world can and should provide, according to this provocative account from journalist Sax (The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter). Sax posits that virtual substitutes for work, school, and religious activities missed much of the point: Zoom learning, for instance, drastically limited the ability of teachers to interact with their students, and he cites studies that suggest remote work led to burnout. The online shift, Sax writes, came "at a tremendous cost to our humanity," but a digital world doesn't have to be the norm. Instead, Sax imagines an "analog future" that's less a Luddite's utopia than one that "incorporates all the hard lessons we learned from those difficult years when we lived through a screen" and consists of more outdoor dining, better libraries, accessible outdoor space, and no virtual school, which he calls one of "history's terrible ideas." With moving anecdotes (as when his daughter cried because online school offered " ‘just the work, but none of the fun' of regular school"), Sax presents a solid case that technology should keep the "real world front and center." This up-close look at the costs of digital convenience delivers.
