Analogious Joy
by Steve Xoh

I’ve had the stupid idea of offering an analogue version of this Substack and the accompanying podcast. For a small subscription, I will print out a copy for you on lovely coloured paper, do some doodles in the margins and send it to you via snail mail in a nice old-fashioned Air Mail envelope. For the podcast, I would do the same but with a C90 cassette.

I’ve been toying with this idea for some time and what has made me hesitate is that I cannot eloquently articulate what the point would be. Digital media is so much easier to create and consume. And it is immediate. And it is free. Why would somebody want to pay for something that takes time to arrive and then requires some sort of manual effort to consume? But I guess that is what attracts me to doing it: not knowing what will happen, whether anyone will want it or what it will be like for me to do it.

What I am clear on is that this isn’t a nostalgia thing for me. Like, “Remember the good old days of sending letters and listening to cassettes.” I have romanticised this before, only to realise on digging out a typewriter, procuring a cassette player or writing a letter that there was a very good reason why we embraced a more digital world. The gift of the digital revolution has been to remove some of the tedious friction and manual labour from these processes. But I am curious as to what has also been lost.

Analogue requires a much more active form of participation and engagement with this unavoidable friction. The letter needs to be transported across the landscape, then opened and read. The cassette needs to be taken to a special machine and play pressed (and it needs to be rewound afterwards). All of these tasks require physical movement, the use of motor skills and a certain amount of patience. (It reminds me of what psychologists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork called “desirable difficulties”: the counterintuitive idea that making something easier isn’t always better. Sometimes the difficulty itself is doing useful cognitive work.)

In his book The World Beyond Your Head, author Matthew Crawford explores human attention and suggests that it isn’t simply a thing that we possess, but something that is organised by our environment and the objects within it. These “ecologies of attention”, as Crawford calls them, provide a kind of choreography for our attention, influencing what we notice and how we engage with the world around us. He suggests that the objects within our field of attention “push back in their own intractable ways”. And, for me, this is where an interesting difference between digital and analogue consumption happens. A physical letter will push back in a totally different way to words on a screen. A physical audio tape will push back in a different way to audio streamed from a device. It is almost as though old analogue objects are more steadfast in refusing to adapt to our needs, demanding instead that we adapt ourselves to them. For me, that feels like an idea worthy of experimentation.

So, back to my stupid idea, which, having explored all of this, feels simultaneously less stupid and more stupid at the same time! If you would like to pay to engage with my work in a way that is far less flexible and efficient, and demands considerably more of you in order to consume it, you can sign up here.