The perfect escape from our online world

Earlier this year, Justin Murphy, the founder of the media and education company Other Life, wanted to offer a premium product to his newsletter subscribers. But for months, he’d been grappling with a problem familiar to anyone who writes online: an attention deficit.
“Words on the internet are undervalued,” he said. “There are too many of them, and it’s too easy to generate them.” Aware that many people who subscribe to his online newsletter don’t actually get around to reading it, Murphy decided to go retro: In June, he wrote up a newsletter, printed it out, and sent it to his subscribers’ mailboxes — their physical ones.
Sending out a physical newsletter forced Murphy to be more thoughtful with his work. “A print newsletter will differentiate the experience,” he said. “People will remember my ideas in a way that is separate from the oversupply of words online.” It has received an enthusiastic response from some of his readers, one of whom tweeted that Murphy is “officially part of the Analog Revolution.” Murphy believes that offering a print newsletter is a smart business decision, because capturing attention online is bound to get only more challenging.
This concern is especially pertinent with the introduction of generative AI which has lately been filling up the web with robot-produced content. As online content continues to be used as training fodder for AI models, offline mediums inaccessible to the greedy clutches of large language models may become not only more valuable, but a key component of a sustainable business.
“The whole internet social complex … and the way people use their computers to conduct life is doomed sooner than later,” Murphy said. “The smartest people, the people who are the most cutting-edge, will increasingly live their lives outside of computers.” He believes that in the future, people — especially those who are educated and rich — will reserve their phones exclusively for work. “[They’ll] read only on paper and interact in person,” he said. “There is going to be a mass defection away from screens.”
For anyone who can’t break their own phone addiction, a mass defection from screens may sound like wishful thinking. Technology still encroaches on virtually every aspect of our lives, with the digital world increasingly dictating not only how we work, but how we spend our attention and valuable leisure time. Scaling back even marginally can feel impossible. We are bound to the computers in our pockets — a product that’s begun to feel less like a helpful tool than a medium through which we live out most of our lives, whether we want to or not.
While society is nowhere close to abandoning computers writ large, there are signs that we are reaching peak digital saturation. This has felt especially true in the years following the screen-addled pandemic, in which there’s been a concerted push towards spending more time in person.
Today, the damage of social media is being scrutinized as never before, with the US Surgeon General introducing a campaign in June that would put warning labels on social media products, similar to what we’ve seen on tobacco and nicotine products for decades. But the most telling indicator may be a recent embrace of analog technologies like flip phones, vinyl records, and cassette players. The printed word, too, seems to be experiencing an unlikely resurgence, from old-fashioned magazines to broadsheet newspapers.
There are plenty of theories as to why people may be, if not exactly abandoning technology, at least flirting with the idea of a conscious separation. One is that the internet has become cluttered, predictable, and homogenous. In other words: It’s boring. In its early days, being online often felt like stumbling onto someone’s kooky basement party. Today, online spaces are governed by corporate-owned algorithms that churn the lowest common denominator content to the top. Now, being online often feels like entering an air-conditioned mall in which the exit signs have been carefully concealed.
There’s another theory, however, that runs counter to this: The online world, especially social media, is too addictive. And like all addictions, it makes us hate ourselves even as we can’t break free. “Maybe we’re reaching a point where we were kids in a candy store and now we’re sick and it’s making us nauseous,” said August Lamm, 28, a writer and artist who swapped out her smartphone for a Nokia flip phone in 2022 after spending too much time on Instagram.
Lamm frequently daydreams about what it might be like to live in a world freed from the grips of social media: “What would make social media feel dead?” she wondered. “What could make it feel that social media was gauche or even similar to crossing a picket line? I think it’s possible. How many of your friends would need to leave for it to feel irrelevant?”
Perhaps the simplest explanation for what many people are beginning to call a “return to analog” is the need for a reprieve, however brief, from the digital world’s all-pervasive reach. “People are fighting against the claustrophobia of abundance,” said Will Page, an economist and author of the book Tarzan Economics: Eight Principles for Pivoting Through Disruption. The online world is engineered to remove every last bit of friction, but Page added, people “want the friction back in their lives.”
This friction is best represented by the resurgence of some of the clunkiest, least efficient tech there is: flip phones.
Sales for flip phones or “dumb phones” without real access to the internet, have been on the rise for the past two years. In 2023, sales for Nokia’s basic mobile phones more than doubled, compared to 2022 sales. A group of flip phone-carrying teens who formed a “Luddite club” embodied the face of a new youth movement after they were covered by the New York Times. Earlier this year, New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill wrote extensively about the virtues of owning a flip phone and floated the idea that in the future, people may have a yearly smartphone detox, similar to Dry January.
Lately, the role of smartphones at schools has come increasingly into question, with some schools banning them entirely. This coming fall, Eton, the elite British boarding school, will require incoming students to swap out their smartphones for a school-issued “brick phone.” (“Eton routinely reviews our mobile phone and devices policy to balance the benefits and challenges that technology brings to schools,” an Eton spokesperson wrote in a statement.)
Ironically, the desire to ditch smartphones is proving especially popular among young people who have only ever known a world saturated by digital devices. According to Adam Thomas, a spokesperson at Punkt, a company that makes “minimalist” brick phones with increased privacy protections, the biggest demographic that visits the company’s website is young people “in the low to mid-20’s, and seemingly getting younger,” Thomas wrote in an email. One reason for this sudden popularity among young people? A “good old fashioned rebellion against the status quo,” writes Thomas.
Another increasingly popular product is one that may sound like an oxymoron: Bluetooth-enabled cassette players. When Romain Boudruche first launched his cassette player company We Are Rewind in 2022, he had thought that the product would mostly appeal to people in their 50s and 60s nostalgic for the Walkman era. But he discovered that the product is most popular among young people who may not have been able to identify a cassette player before they stumbled upon the company.
Boudruche believes that We Are Rewind, which has more than doubled sales each consecutive year since its launch, is taking off precisely because it’s an annoying product to use. The cassette players are clunky and inconvenient, too big to be slipped in a back pocket, and time-consuming to rewind and fast forward. In other words, they’re unapologetically tangible, the exact opposite of the smartphone’s frictionless, glossy surface. People are tired of digital music, says Boudruche. “They need to touch something.”
Other physical music formats, like CD and vinyl, are having a similar resurgence. Revenues for these products in 2023 were up 11 percent from the year prior, earning nearly $2 billion worldwide, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. (Vinyl sales in particular saw 10 percent growth in 2023, outpacing CD sales.) While this renewed interest in vinyl may be artificially buoyed, like everything else in the music industry, by Taylor Swift, who sold 7 percent of all US vinyl last year, vinyl seems to be taking off mostly among listeners who crave a more lasting connection with artists in addition to richer audio quality.
Page, the Tarzan Economics author who formerly worked as an economist at Spotify, said that he’s noted a phenomenon in which people are buying vinyl records even without owning a record player. These are buyers who are purchasing alternative music formats not for the sake of listening to them, but for the opportunity to buy “a sense of intimacy that comes from belonging to an artist and their tribe,” he said. “The internet can scale just about everything but it can’t scale intimacy.”
Print, too, is on the rise, from books to magazines to newspapers. Print book sales had a pop with the pandemic in 2020, and have continued to maintain sales of more than 750 million units sold each year. Meanwhile, even though they’re cheaper, sales for ebooks are down slightly, which may be owed to the fact that younger readers, much like older generations, overwhelmingly prefer printed formats. For the first time in years, the book retailer Barnes & Noble is expanding with plans to open 50 more new stores in 2024. And publishers who have long focused on digital formats are now doubling down on print products.
One such publisher is the Atlantic, which saw a 44 percent increase in newsstand sales between 2024 and 2023. When so much of our time is spent reading digital text that’s hemmed in by distracting ads, sitting down with a print magazine or book often feels leisurely by comparison. A word that comes up again and again with people who favor physical products over their digital alternatives, is “luxury:” a signal that people now regard the draining, congested thoroughfare of the internet as a new status quo that spare money and time can allow them to escape.
“Going offline is a form of luxury,” said Sean Thielen-Esparza, an entrepreneur who designs tech interfaces. “It’s this idea that you can signal luxury or status and be different from the masses by gatekeeping, by being in in-person networks, by quieting down.” For knowledge workers who spend most of their time on computers, spending time away from the internet is increasingly considered a privilege.
“With the exception of Elon Musk, you don’t see powerful people typically spending a ton of time online,” said David Samuels, the editor of County Highway, a publication which is sold as a printed broadsheet newspaper containing feature stories about the Western US. The online world is reserved “for the lower orders who have to spend time peddling their asses on these sites.”
Publishers like the Atlantic are eager to capitalize on this idea of offline luxury. “There is a significant shift in terms of what we think print can deliver for us in terms of brand elevations,” said the Atlantic’s chief growth officer Megha Garibaldi. “Our magazine is almost like a brand statement for us.”
Not only do print readers have a tendency to retain more of what they’ve read compared to reading online, but they often establish a deeper connection with printed work. The Atlantic has found that subscribers who buy its print bundle have higher retention rates than subscribers who purchase its digital package. There’s the reality, too, that articles that live online are interacted with differently than their print counterparts. Online stories have a tendency to serve only as “footnotes to tweets,” said Samuels, the editor of Country Highway.
Samuels himself decided to launch a print publication in 2023 out of a growing anxiety that in the future, reading would be wholly governed by “horrible machines and algorithms,” he said. “Obviously social media is here to stay, but the idea that that’s all that should exist feels very destructive.” Samuels believes that people who read printed products will always prefer them to the cluttered, distracting atmosphere of reading online. “Humans, when given a choice, do prefer a home-cooked meal to gross takeout that’s mushed together in a bag,” he said.
Alongside these older technologies which are making a comeback is a concerted revival around one of the oldest ways that humans have interacted since the beginning of time: spending time together in person. While society has never fundamentally rejected hanging out in person, the internet has significantly changed the way we interact. Today, it’s estimated that American adults spend 30 percent less time socializing in person than we did 20 years ago, with the most significant impact among teenagers, who spent about 45 percent less time hanging out with their friends in 2022 than in 2003.
Now, there’s a growing movement around cultivating in-person interaction in people’s daily lives, as seen through the resurgence in social clubs and members clubs which are slowly replacing the role that religious institutions formerly held. Susan MacTavish Best, the founder of Posthoc, a company that hosts intimate gatherings and salons centered on discussions with writers and entrepreneurs over home-cooked meals, has found that attendees relish the opportunity for in-person discussion. MacTavish Best believes that curated gatherings like social clubs and salons are growing in popularity because they provide the opportunity to socialize with people across a mix of different ages and backgrounds. Such social gatherings provide “a lot of what church has to offer — minus the God,” she said. “It makes [people] feel like they have a place in the world. The digital world does not make me feel like that.”
Some of this shift to the analog world could be a signal that society, as a whole, is not so much ready to return to older forms of technology as it is for a new kind of technology, one that would better suit our lives. “There is a dream and a passion for technologies that slow you down at first but in the end offer a lot of feeling and sensation that digital tech cannot give you,” said Florian Kaps, the founder of an analog manufacturing shop in Vienna called Supersense. The majority of the tech products we use today are distracting by design; using them tends to feel like hanging out in “an extremely cluttered mall” rather than what it should be: “a quiet home,” said Thielen-Esparza.
Thielen-Esparza, who is currently working on a project that involves refurbishing Sony mini-discs, believes that a total return to analog is far from the answer to our oversaturated online lives. Nostalgia “is a cheap shot,” he said. He believes that future innovation lies in building better tech, specifically eyes-up interfaces that allow us to interact with the world around us. We need to “get away from that image of the subway where everyone is crouched over their iPhones in the worst possible posture,” he said.
If there’s one thing that the return to analog shows us, it’s the fact that new forms of technology — no matter how seemingly entrenched — tend to be in vogue for only a few short decades. The internet as we currently know it could “be a trend, like bell bottoms,” said Lamm, the artist and writer. “Maybe, a few years from now, we’ll say, ‘Remember when we were all addicted to that website?’”