The Analog Revival Did Not Take Place
Or, what happens when offline aesthetics come without offline infrastructure
I was speaking to a friend the other day, 40-something with a 27-year old sister. She told me 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.
That, to me, pretty much sums up why the whole analog narrative is a romantic delusion, and why we’re all still going to be on social media in 2026 and beyond, no matter which trend report you read at the beginning of the year.
Fast forward to May and the conversation is already evaporating. The analog revival did not take place. It was a simulation all along.
Being Offline vs. Being Analog
Ever since we started emotionally recovering from the pandemic, we’ve been talking about going off the grid. Back in 2023, smart people like Agus Panzoni from the visual insights platform Death to Stock was already posting about IRL escapism. By 2025, pieces like the Financial Times arguing that social media has peaked started circulating. There were takes on how having no followers is cool and how - meta ironically - an unpolished feed now reads as more professional. Pieces talking about “going offline as a status symbol“ which I also covered in part 1 of my post-luxury status symbols series.
From all this you might conclude: “Hey! We’re all finally starting to log off social media.”
Except, none of this ever actually happened.
It’s important to remember something: things are status symbols because they are inaccessible for the majority of the population.
Right now, the problem is that, for most people in this economy, a “personal brand” is increasingly seen a survival strategy. In a world where you’re told your uni degree is worthless, where most junior jobs don’t even need to exist due to AI, where you’re told “just learn to code” and two years later told “coding is pointless champ, go learn plumbing.”, your image becomes your sole remaining investable asset.
And that’s just in the context of work. If you extend this idea of “offlineness” to other areas of life, the questions get even more uncomfortable. Does your dating life depend on apps, or do you have the social capital to meet people without those tech intermediaries? Do you have the economic stability to pay for in-person therapy instead of using ChatGPT as a substitute?
Let’s zoom out for a second and look at this from a much wider angle: how the fuck are we supposed to talk about disconnecting, or doing a social media detox, when for some people the only way to know whether their families in Caracas haven’t been bombed is by staying glued to their phones? For some, logging off isn’t an option in 2026. It’s a form of suicide.
Even myself, living in the safety blanket-SSRI state of Australia, I wake up each morning frantically checking news headlines to figure out what once-in-a-generation fuckstorm happened while I was asleep.
The Performance of Analog
Once we accept that being offline is off the table for most, this is where “analog” quietly steps in as a substitute, the dupe we can actually afford. And just like all dupes, it is only the appearance of the real thing, stripped of its substance.
It is striking to see how quickly ‘analog’ emerged as an aesthetic layer, personally and professionally. Handwritten journal spreads, sun-drenched afternoons on vintage picnic rugs, digital cameras, puzzle books, knitting, snail mail, etc etc.
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For brands, it’s the same move: raw BTS footage, messy processes, the conspicuous display of friction and human touch. The very aesthetic of “unmediated” has become a carefully mediated choice.
Welcome to the next contradiction. Analog is supposed to represent a refuge from the performance of digital life. And yet even here it is still subordinated to the individual’s personal brand. The camera is present as an entity, as a gaze, even when it is not a physical object. We’ve internalised the panoptic surveillance system so deeply that we perform even in its physical absence. It’s in our fucking heads.
I am currently forming a thesis that modern social media platforms do the structural work of a God: omnipresent, omniscient, totalising (think of how well you are known by your algorithm, how it seems to surface content/ads exactly in line with conversations/thoughts/anxieties you’ve been having).
Side note, this thesis is going to be delivered at a talk in June at Sonar+D in Barcelona, more info on that here.
The Infrastructure Underneath
If you don’t have access to significant financial capital, your image is the only thing you can be sure you own. So what we have is an economically rational imperative to maintain control over our image at any cost, because we believe in our hearts that image defines our potential for economic, social, and romantic success.
And while it’s undeniable that the analog does function as a refuge—in the sense that it preserves a degree of privacy and resists the surveillance panopticon of the digital—what good is it if it’s ultimately a hybrid? If the endpoint is still the same digital validation, the same metrics, the same performance?
Social media is just a market platform that enables that transaction. Even if it were to disappear tomorrow, this culture of expectation - the need to constantly measure up digitally, because if you don’t, you effectively stop existing - along with the extraordinary financial pressures most people now face, will continue to exist.
As Jia Tolentino wrote: “As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act.”
There’s something crucial here: if we don’t break the underlying infrastructure - the necessity of self-optimisation, the economic conditions that make personal branding a survival strategy - forms of resistance are inevitably and quickly reincorporated into the dominant model.
Echoing the words of one of my favourite games of the past decade, Disco Elysium: “Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.”
This is exactly what’s happening with analog. What began as resistance to digital surveillance has been absorbed, repackaged, and sold back to us as another aesthetic to perform, another way to signal cultural capital.
Welcome to the hyperreal in action, performing a sim of what we imagine analog life was like, filtered through our digital consciousness. We have what we need, the negatives stay in the lab.
Where Is Everybody?
All of the above is why people aren’t hanging out anymore - not because the fantasy world of social media is more “interesting,” but because the real world is simply too great a risk. But bear with me here: even if we all took that risk, if we all went offline, where would we even go?
Western societies over the past 50 years have overseen the systematic destruction of third spaces through chronic defunding in community infrastructure. Honestly, it’s gotten so bad that people are winning Lions for trying to solve this. Many of the ones that have cropped up over the years are ridiculously monetised or branded, a sort of third-space-as-aesthetic, where the “community” is subordinated to an individual’s ability to brand oneself as belonging to that community.
Of course, we have the most egregious examples in dork-central-it’s-corny-even-to-call-it-corny SoHo House, but the same can be said of any number of the branded activations seen at Coachella or crowding the town squares of most major cities.
We bristle at the fact that these branded spaces tend to cater to those who already have the social media capital to sustain a presence there, even though that’s always been the case - now it’s just being waved in everyone’s face.
All of this while governments play pretend like they’re doing something courageous by enacting a social media ban. Give me a break.
We live under a gerontocracy in which young people are forced to exist under a state of constant contradiction. You should be seen but not heard, outside but not taking up any space, in areas that are increasingly privatised and thus monetised (when money is getting harder and harder to come by).
Get off your phone but don’t let me you provide you an alternative (because we shut them all down), and definitely don’t cause a shred of nuisance in MY public (see: confected Boomer outrage about teens on e-bikes).
You want young people to spend more time offline? Get these insane property markets under control so people don’t have to move an hour and a half away from their friends and family to a borderline unlivable shitbox in a heat desert. Put investment into live music and create planning laws that mean a few boomers complaining about noise in their new condos doesn’t shut down venues that have been there for decades. Create an economy that doesn’t steal from the young, the poor, and the working class to feed the old, the rich, and the owning class.
This is less a rant about ‘analog’ and more one about the fact we keep pretending aesthetic resistance can substitute for structural change.
If we’re serious about creating space for genuine human connection we need to attack the conditions that make performance necessary in the first place. It should not be hard to see that policies around economic security, affordable housing and universal health- or childcare are what’s really necessary, so we aren’t stuck in a society that doesn’t require you to be your own marketing department just to survive.
Until then, analog is just another filter. Give me a real solution, or shut the fuck up.
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"?
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