Sax noticed—in 2016, the year I launched AJ in print—that vinyl, paper notebooks, film, board games, and independent bookstores were all growing while the industries around them digitized, and went to find out why. It isn’t nostalgia — the buyers are often young and have no memory of the originals. He reports from a record pressing plant running flat out, a Moleskine factory, Impossible Project buying Polaroid’s last machines, a Toronto board game café, and inside the tech companies whose employees send their kids to schools with no screens. His point is that analog things impose limits and friction, and that people are choosing that on purpose.
The Revenge of Analog