I agree wholeheartedly with your points around the commercialisation of third spaces. But what if an analogue revival is happening and we're just not seeing it because the people who are engaging it meaningfully aren't sharing any of it online? And what if social media bans for young people are exactly one of the ways we start to "attack the conditions that make performance necessary in the first place"?
Fully agree with this. And related are the people who are “online” but not sharing or building a personal brand online through social media. There are so many ways to engage with the internet that are more compatible with an authentic “analog lifestyle” (if that’s what we want to call it?). We need not reduce this issue to a binary view of online vs offline.
Fully agree. This is survivorship bias. You will never see the offline people on social media, except through journalism about them. Those that you do see online are necessarily those who haven't fully gone offline yet, or never truly intended to. It's also a slow process of leaving. Facebook is a ghost town, but in 2017 it was bustling. Instagram will die sooner than we expect, and I feel like nothing as monocultural will replace it this time.
the analog revival has indeed taken place, but not in the way you might think... people are not necessarily seeking pure analog technology, they are seeking the ritual (or, the word of the year, "friction") of creation and consumption. they want to feel the process. for example, the act of shooting with a film camera and waiting for the results offers a deeper meaning that taking ten instant smartphone photos simply cannot match. this isn't about going offline, it’s about blurring the lines to create something new in this in-between spaces marketing created
I don't disagree with you (myself, I penned a friction piece come out mid-last year).
And I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage any of these attitudes or behaviours but let’s be real here: none of them are new to 2026. We have always had people talking about dumbphones and journalling and outdoor picnics. In the pandemic we were all painting and making sourdough and rediscovering various arts and craft. We had ‘digital detoxing’ before then.
If people are discovering these things now, fantastic, but the point of this piece is to say we are not suddenly at the cusp of some ‘mass awakening’ as long as we lack the social infrastructure that makes community an embedded way of living.
Have you considered that the analog revival is taking place outside of your bubble of awareness? You are seeing the circulation of analog-as-aesthetic on social media, but you can't account for the activities and behaviors of all the people that aren't chronically online. People write each other letters, they compile photobooks, work in community gardens and go on a group bike rides without posting about it, and in that case, you wouldn't hear about it.
You seem especially keen on skewering influencers for turning community events and film photography into social-capital signaling, which is absolutely true but also not really that important to the people that don't consume their TikToks. I don't think influencers are capable of influencing anything beyond consumer decisions, and I definitely don't think they will be the ones to usher in an era of post-digital community building. You end this with a demand for better solutions, but you're looking for solutions in all the wrong places my man. Be the change you want to see in the world, no point in waiting for someone else to do it for you.
also "If you don’t have access to significant financial capital, your image is the only thing you can be sure you own." what?? It really doesn't take much to own a bicycle or a guitar or a surfboard or sketchbook or the occasional paperback. These are delightful things you can enjoy by yourself or with other people, and the shadowy hand of global capitalism or whatever Fisherian thing you're alluding to here can't take that from you. This 'economically rational imperative to maintain control over our image at any cost' is much less pervasive than you're making it out to be and maybe has an outsized value to an 'online creator' like yourself whose livelihood is tied to these platforms. you punched this ticket and now you gotta ride the ride.
Go lay some shingle if you want a break from screens so badly, and maybe you can drink a couple analog beers with the guys from the jobsite after
The girl leaving her negatives at the lab is the perfect image. But I’d push back slightly. The desire underneath the performance is real, even when the form it takes is contradictory. Gen Z posting their pottery on TikTok doesn’t make the pottery less embodied. The oxymoron of #analogue doesn’t cancel the hunger it’s trying to feed. The structural critique is correct. The desire is also real. Both things.
Agreed. As a Gen Xer who grew up having to get up and walk across the room to change the tv channel, or flip the record over, or load film cameras bc that's all there was...I find the #analogue performative false nostalgia hilarious (cassettes sound like garbage btw) BUT to your point-- I do think this is a reaction in part to the lack of materiality. The digital native kids want their music and their images literally in their hands-- actual physical objects-- not just in the cloud. As you say, the desire is real.
This gave me a knee jerk reaction because picking up film photography has really turned things around for me this year. And I am very lucky that my area has a little community around it, and a film lab/community space for us all to go and look at pictures and ask questions about cameras and swap, trade etc. When I went in to drop off my second roll of film there, the owner offered me my negatives and I had to admit to her that I didnt understand why I would need them or what I should do with them. She explained it, and now I have a binder full. I realize I am privileged to have this because I live in a "college town" with a lot of aging millennial hipsters (I am one, said with love). But I really fear that declaring this dead will negatively affect the little communities that have been built around it. Film labs and camera repair shops are rare but theyre out there fighting the good fight to keep it alive. In that sense you are kind of right. Without the community, it cannot live on. I just hope it does.
Can't speak for anyone else but I thought I was repatriating my vinyl to sell it. I ended up falling back in love with it, am now buying more and making my first. Music feels three dimensional for the first time in decades. I'm throwing an event in 3 days that could be considered a 3rd space (wether anyone shows up is a different matter). I've never felt more convinced this is the way forward.
All true. Also this is giving accessible/ less problematic slajov zizek 🙌
I totally agree with your points here. There are other problems to fix and its getting harder and harder to believe in a system where you have to sell to survive.
I have a friend that has gone all off on social ( way before the analog trend) and created a zine she sends with her life news to friends monthly. 100 free subscribers there so analog life can happen. She operates on a 10 spoons theory. I can only have 10 spoons to give to help others in a meaningful way. They should be close enough for me to give them that spoon. And thus she doesn't worry abiut the world and what she can do for it as much. Just her 10 spoons. She is not an old lady, just never bought into social's promise. Which I think is the next step. Uncoupling survival with social media/ online.
In Taiwan, bookshops and libraries are massively crowded, and it's thanks to the youth
In France, the government - and more importantly the teachers and parents' reps - are massively investing in the early years of education on offline infrastructures
I would say that we should be careful with retropia (in Zygmunt Bauman's meanings) and be happy that a renewed interest for old social functions / affordances are now brought back. You're right though: it has to be transformed into something way more powerful than just transactional consumerism. I'm highly optimistic: it's up to us to make social...more social: https://aliveinsocialmedia.substack.com/p/more-social-than-ever
"This sister spends a small fortune on film for her analog camera, but when she gets it developed, she leaves the negatives at the lab and only asks for the digital files to be emailed to her."
I hate to break to you, but Henry's the camera store automatically emails copies of your film photos.
Also, there are older generations who are digitizing their analog memories. I feel like your hook to your article collapses on itself and makes no sense.
I came here to say this… I take pictures on a film camera and I don’t pay extra for prints, i have them sent to my e-mail instead. When taking pictures on film, nearly always some pictures WILL come out blurry or overexposed, so it’s useless to pay for printing them all when film is already today incredibly expensive. I usually later choose and pick which pictures to print for the photo album. So yeah, im not really sure what is wrong with that.
This is easily one of the best things I’ve read this year. While I think (and some commenters here note) there are offline and analog balms that people are employing — the rise of knitting and knitting circles, for example — that’s not a powerful enough force to counter the bigger structural issues at play. And your point about digital versions of photos from a dark room reminded me of the staggering stats about how many people (esp Gen Z) collect vinyl… and don’t own a record player.
I applaud the ways people are carving out more space to be offline, in the ways they can. But the gravitational pull of the digital world is too strong, for a lot of very legitimate reasons (including that, as you note, third spaces are largely either collapsed or overly monetized).
I’ve been feeling recently that a lot of the offline and analog discourse has become a bit moralizing… that there’s something wrong with the people who choose to participate in online brand-building and engagement, even though we’re all doing it. This piece does a good job anchoring in the realities of why we stay tethered — and want to stay tethered — to the digital world.
Of course they're not – the structural forces at play are there because most (capital M-most, not just the rich and powerful) prefer and use social media, or whatever you think the problem is. Collecting vinyl records and not owning a record player is not a problem. If anything, it means people care about music and literally are doing the things you and the writer are complaining about them not doing. The digital world is convenient and benefits everyone. It is a solution, but every solution comes with new problems to solve.
If people wanted those spaces, they'd create them. There are more tools than ever to make it happen. For some reason, they aren't doing it the way you want them to. Of course we simulate analog things within digital systems – how else would we do it?
Yep. The question is to what degree we build the spaces we want because of what we prefer, or to what degree we actually are prevented from building those spaces. I think it's good we live in a world where we are never bored. But clearly that comes with externalities.
The analog revival did happen. But only as an aesthetic in the sea of different aesthetics that have come and went on the internet throughout the years.
Its only purpose was to signal an identity shift of the brand, not the actual person. You can see it even on Substack where people make cute head pictures for their essays that look like analog journals.
Yes. In the early 70s there was 50s nostalgia and, just like today, it was criticized for only being an aesthetic and not understanding the ethos. These things always go in ways, digitization doesn't change that.
Reading some of the comments made me feel like I was reading a totally separate article — my understanding here is that he’s not saying that analog is bad, he’s attacking a system and environment that has designed the world to think that performance and your “proof of human” lives online and is imperative for survival, while systematically dismantling spaces and rituals where we can just be a human being without the commodification or extraction of resource (money, attention); thus analog in its current mass market consumption and how it is perceived online, and by extension how it is perceived for a generation that grew up as a digital native, is indeed playing into a capitalist tool.
So the real “enemy” here isn’t “is analog here or not here” or “is analog bad or good” but rather — what are the conditions that we should demand for ourselves, from institutions and platforms that are governing those conditions to get to a place in which we can reimagine a life to just be human again.
I agree with this critique only when it’s aimed at brands, trend reports, and marketing campaigns that appropriate “analog” as a relevance strategy. But disagree with the implication that analog practices themselves are pretending to substitute for structural change
I don’t think anyone engaging in analog habits are under the illusion that film cameras, journals, knitting, or physical books etc will solve housing, precarity, loneliness, or the insidious nature of late-stage capitalism. I think many are simply trying to reclaim small forms of agency inside systems that make them feel constantly optimised, exploited, and surveilled
to me, analog revival can be understood less as an effective “solution” to a structural issue, and more as a stubborn practice of hope i.e., a way of preserving attention, privacy, slowness, and a lived-in life in a society that often conditions people into hopelessness so they can remain efficient workers and agents of capital
so yes, “aesthetic resistance” should never be mistaken for structural change. but small rituals of refusal also shouldn’t be dismissed just because they are not the sole solution for structural change
the problem is not analog practice itself but it’s when brands, media, and markets flatten that longing into another consumable aesthetic
It’s wayyyy too early to write it off as something that ‘didn’t happen’. The thing with building analogue is that it takes ages and is hard - I know, because I’m doing it right now.
We all know there’s a bubble about to burst. Gen Z hates AI with a passion.
Give it five years, maybe longer, and check again.
Gen Z performatively hates AI with a passion while also integrating it into their lives because… they like it and it's helpful. The rise of AI was the bubble bursting, and there is no going back. And using AI does not exclude using, appreciating, or investing in analog. It's just that analog is niche now, just like literature is, and feature films are becoming.
I agree wholeheartedly with your points around the commercialisation of third spaces. But what if an analogue revival is happening and we're just not seeing it because the people who are engaging it meaningfully aren't sharing any of it online? And what if social media bans for young people are exactly one of the ways we start to "attack the conditions that make performance necessary in the first place"?
Interesting, schrodinger's analog trend, as it pertains to our observable world filtered through the internet
Fully agree with this. And related are the people who are “online” but not sharing or building a personal brand online through social media. There are so many ways to engage with the internet that are more compatible with an authentic “analog lifestyle” (if that’s what we want to call it?). We need not reduce this issue to a binary view of online vs offline.
Fully agree. This is survivorship bias. You will never see the offline people on social media, except through journalism about them. Those that you do see online are necessarily those who haven't fully gone offline yet, or never truly intended to. It's also a slow process of leaving. Facebook is a ghost town, but in 2017 it was bustling. Instagram will die sooner than we expect, and I feel like nothing as monocultural will replace it this time.
Very underrated answer. The analogue project I’m building will be barely online.
Yes
the analog revival has indeed taken place, but not in the way you might think... people are not necessarily seeking pure analog technology, they are seeking the ritual (or, the word of the year, "friction") of creation and consumption. they want to feel the process. for example, the act of shooting with a film camera and waiting for the results offers a deeper meaning that taking ten instant smartphone photos simply cannot match. this isn't about going offline, it’s about blurring the lines to create something new in this in-between spaces marketing created
I don't disagree with you (myself, I penned a friction piece come out mid-last year).
And I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage any of these attitudes or behaviours but let’s be real here: none of them are new to 2026. We have always had people talking about dumbphones and journalling and outdoor picnics. In the pandemic we were all painting and making sourdough and rediscovering various arts and craft. We had ‘digital detoxing’ before then.
If people are discovering these things now, fantastic, but the point of this piece is to say we are not suddenly at the cusp of some ‘mass awakening’ as long as we lack the social infrastructure that makes community an embedded way of living.
Have you considered that the analog revival is taking place outside of your bubble of awareness? You are seeing the circulation of analog-as-aesthetic on social media, but you can't account for the activities and behaviors of all the people that aren't chronically online. People write each other letters, they compile photobooks, work in community gardens and go on a group bike rides without posting about it, and in that case, you wouldn't hear about it.
You seem especially keen on skewering influencers for turning community events and film photography into social-capital signaling, which is absolutely true but also not really that important to the people that don't consume their TikToks. I don't think influencers are capable of influencing anything beyond consumer decisions, and I definitely don't think they will be the ones to usher in an era of post-digital community building. You end this with a demand for better solutions, but you're looking for solutions in all the wrong places my man. Be the change you want to see in the world, no point in waiting for someone else to do it for you.
also "If you don’t have access to significant financial capital, your image is the only thing you can be sure you own." what?? It really doesn't take much to own a bicycle or a guitar or a surfboard or sketchbook or the occasional paperback. These are delightful things you can enjoy by yourself or with other people, and the shadowy hand of global capitalism or whatever Fisherian thing you're alluding to here can't take that from you. This 'economically rational imperative to maintain control over our image at any cost' is much less pervasive than you're making it out to be and maybe has an outsized value to an 'online creator' like yourself whose livelihood is tied to these platforms. you punched this ticket and now you gotta ride the ride.
Go lay some shingle if you want a break from screens so badly, and maybe you can drink a couple analog beers with the guys from the jobsite after
The girl leaving her negatives at the lab is the perfect image. But I’d push back slightly. The desire underneath the performance is real, even when the form it takes is contradictory. Gen Z posting their pottery on TikTok doesn’t make the pottery less embodied. The oxymoron of #analogue doesn’t cancel the hunger it’s trying to feed. The structural critique is correct. The desire is also real. Both things.
Agreed. As a Gen Xer who grew up having to get up and walk across the room to change the tv channel, or flip the record over, or load film cameras bc that's all there was...I find the #analogue performative false nostalgia hilarious (cassettes sound like garbage btw) BUT to your point-- I do think this is a reaction in part to the lack of materiality. The digital native kids want their music and their images literally in their hands-- actual physical objects-- not just in the cloud. As you say, the desire is real.
This gave me a knee jerk reaction because picking up film photography has really turned things around for me this year. And I am very lucky that my area has a little community around it, and a film lab/community space for us all to go and look at pictures and ask questions about cameras and swap, trade etc. When I went in to drop off my second roll of film there, the owner offered me my negatives and I had to admit to her that I didnt understand why I would need them or what I should do with them. She explained it, and now I have a binder full. I realize I am privileged to have this because I live in a "college town" with a lot of aging millennial hipsters (I am one, said with love). But I really fear that declaring this dead will negatively affect the little communities that have been built around it. Film labs and camera repair shops are rare but theyre out there fighting the good fight to keep it alive. In that sense you are kind of right. Without the community, it cannot live on. I just hope it does.
Can't speak for anyone else but I thought I was repatriating my vinyl to sell it. I ended up falling back in love with it, am now buying more and making my first. Music feels three dimensional for the first time in decades. I'm throwing an event in 3 days that could be considered a 3rd space (wether anyone shows up is a different matter). I've never felt more convinced this is the way forward.
All true. Also this is giving accessible/ less problematic slajov zizek 🙌
I totally agree with your points here. There are other problems to fix and its getting harder and harder to believe in a system where you have to sell to survive.
I have a friend that has gone all off on social ( way before the analog trend) and created a zine she sends with her life news to friends monthly. 100 free subscribers there so analog life can happen. She operates on a 10 spoons theory. I can only have 10 spoons to give to help others in a meaningful way. They should be close enough for me to give them that spoon. And thus she doesn't worry abiut the world and what she can do for it as much. Just her 10 spoons. She is not an old lady, just never bought into social's promise. Which I think is the next step. Uncoupling survival with social media/ online.
I would nuance depending on the countries.
In Taiwan, bookshops and libraries are massively crowded, and it's thanks to the youth
In France, the government - and more importantly the teachers and parents' reps - are massively investing in the early years of education on offline infrastructures
I would say that we should be careful with retropia (in Zygmunt Bauman's meanings) and be happy that a renewed interest for old social functions / affordances are now brought back. You're right though: it has to be transformed into something way more powerful than just transactional consumerism. I'm highly optimistic: it's up to us to make social...more social: https://aliveinsocialmedia.substack.com/p/more-social-than-ever
"This sister spends a small fortune on film for her analog camera, but when she gets it developed, she leaves the negatives at the lab and only asks for the digital files to be emailed to her."
I hate to break to you, but Henry's the camera store automatically emails copies of your film photos.
Also, there are older generations who are digitizing their analog memories. I feel like your hook to your article collapses on itself and makes no sense.
I came here to say this… I take pictures on a film camera and I don’t pay extra for prints, i have them sent to my e-mail instead. When taking pictures on film, nearly always some pictures WILL come out blurry or overexposed, so it’s useless to pay for printing them all when film is already today incredibly expensive. I usually later choose and pick which pictures to print for the photo album. So yeah, im not really sure what is wrong with that.
This is easily one of the best things I’ve read this year. While I think (and some commenters here note) there are offline and analog balms that people are employing — the rise of knitting and knitting circles, for example — that’s not a powerful enough force to counter the bigger structural issues at play. And your point about digital versions of photos from a dark room reminded me of the staggering stats about how many people (esp Gen Z) collect vinyl… and don’t own a record player.
I applaud the ways people are carving out more space to be offline, in the ways they can. But the gravitational pull of the digital world is too strong, for a lot of very legitimate reasons (including that, as you note, third spaces are largely either collapsed or overly monetized).
I’ve been feeling recently that a lot of the offline and analog discourse has become a bit moralizing… that there’s something wrong with the people who choose to participate in online brand-building and engagement, even though we’re all doing it. This piece does a good job anchoring in the realities of why we stay tethered — and want to stay tethered — to the digital world.
Of course they're not – the structural forces at play are there because most (capital M-most, not just the rich and powerful) prefer and use social media, or whatever you think the problem is. Collecting vinyl records and not owning a record player is not a problem. If anything, it means people care about music and literally are doing the things you and the writer are complaining about them not doing. The digital world is convenient and benefits everyone. It is a solution, but every solution comes with new problems to solve.
This really resonated with me.
It feels like we didn’t actually return to the analog—we just learned how to simulate it within digital systems.
And the same seems to be happening in how we work and lead: we talk more about being human, but we’re still operating from a logic of optimization.
Maybe the challenge isn’t to go back to the analog…
but to create spaces where being human doesn’t need to be justified.
If people wanted those spaces, they'd create them. There are more tools than ever to make it happen. For some reason, they aren't doing it the way you want them to. Of course we simulate analog things within digital systems – how else would we do it?
Fair point. I was thinking less about the tools and more about the culture we build around them.
Yep. The question is to what degree we build the spaces we want because of what we prefer, or to what degree we actually are prevented from building those spaces. I think it's good we live in a world where we are never bored. But clearly that comes with externalities.
It’s still brewing. I love my flip phone.
I will say, though, that eventually people will be given a final choice: full integration, or off-grid.
Change doesnt come without ache.
The flip phone is coming.
The analog revival did happen. But only as an aesthetic in the sea of different aesthetics that have come and went on the internet throughout the years.
Its only purpose was to signal an identity shift of the brand, not the actual person. You can see it even on Substack where people make cute head pictures for their essays that look like analog journals.
Yes. In the early 70s there was 50s nostalgia and, just like today, it was criticized for only being an aesthetic and not understanding the ethos. These things always go in ways, digitization doesn't change that.
Reading some of the comments made me feel like I was reading a totally separate article — my understanding here is that he’s not saying that analog is bad, he’s attacking a system and environment that has designed the world to think that performance and your “proof of human” lives online and is imperative for survival, while systematically dismantling spaces and rituals where we can just be a human being without the commodification or extraction of resource (money, attention); thus analog in its current mass market consumption and how it is perceived online, and by extension how it is perceived for a generation that grew up as a digital native, is indeed playing into a capitalist tool.
So the real “enemy” here isn’t “is analog here or not here” or “is analog bad or good” but rather — what are the conditions that we should demand for ourselves, from institutions and platforms that are governing those conditions to get to a place in which we can reimagine a life to just be human again.
I agree with this critique only when it’s aimed at brands, trend reports, and marketing campaigns that appropriate “analog” as a relevance strategy. But disagree with the implication that analog practices themselves are pretending to substitute for structural change
I don’t think anyone engaging in analog habits are under the illusion that film cameras, journals, knitting, or physical books etc will solve housing, precarity, loneliness, or the insidious nature of late-stage capitalism. I think many are simply trying to reclaim small forms of agency inside systems that make them feel constantly optimised, exploited, and surveilled
to me, analog revival can be understood less as an effective “solution” to a structural issue, and more as a stubborn practice of hope i.e., a way of preserving attention, privacy, slowness, and a lived-in life in a society that often conditions people into hopelessness so they can remain efficient workers and agents of capital
so yes, “aesthetic resistance” should never be mistaken for structural change. but small rituals of refusal also shouldn’t be dismissed just because they are not the sole solution for structural change
the problem is not analog practice itself but it’s when brands, media, and markets flatten that longing into another consumable aesthetic
It’s wayyyy too early to write it off as something that ‘didn’t happen’. The thing with building analogue is that it takes ages and is hard - I know, because I’m doing it right now.
We all know there’s a bubble about to burst. Gen Z hates AI with a passion.
Give it five years, maybe longer, and check again.
Absolutely! The offline counterculture movement is still growing!
Gen Z performatively hates AI with a passion while also integrating it into their lives because… they like it and it's helpful. The rise of AI was the bubble bursting, and there is no going back. And using AI does not exclude using, appreciating, or investing in analog. It's just that analog is niche now, just like literature is, and feature films are becoming.