If the pandemic taught us anything, it was that we don’t want an all-digital world. All-digital is not paradise or heaven. It is not even a modestly desirable state of being. I can’t imagine anyone beyond Ray Kurzweil arguing against that. And yet, here is David Sax, once again hammering on this non-argument in The Future Is Analog.

The chapters of the book are all days of the week, which turns out be completely meaningless, as the topics are things like school, city life, entertainment, smart homes, social media, eating, commuting, office work – and little or nothing to do with the individual days of the week. Readers would be hardpressed to assign its topics to their respective chapters based on their titles.

Worse, every chapter is identical in structure. It begins with cutesy, even cartoonish slices of life, before, during and after the lockdown in Toronto, where Sax lives. There follows a dissection of the miseries imposed by doing whatever the chapter is about, but digitally, versus the massive relief of doing the same thing in real life, either before the pandemic when everyone considered it a miserable way to live, or after, when everyone was suddenly enraptured with a return to normal.

This formula is flat and monotonous. It never grows into anything: just more of the same, chapter after chapter. NDSS for those digitally inclined. In this case, literally.

In between there are all kinds of quotes from authors, friends, neighbors and acquaintances to the effect that everything was and is always better in person. It is better to learn with a teacher right there, to perform before a live audience, to meet in crowded restaurants, to have dinner at someone’s home, to visit the countryside but not have to live there, and on and on.

What is wrong with this “analysis” is that the medium is the message, as another famous Torontonian said to great effect. Zoom meetings are not perfect substitutes for plays or standup comedy or political town halls. So don’t complain that they don’t work as well as being there. Digital media have their place. And in an emergency, society co-opts whatever it needs to keep going. But Sax doesn’t distance himself to see that perspective on the human world. For him, humanity is up close and personal, and nothing else rates.

Sax moans about how people wilt working remotely, missing the complexity, the support, the friendships of the office and the joys of shopping and eating downtown. Offices are “hub(s) of interactions and positive relationships.” Yet in the next breath he acknowledges that at least half those jobs stifle people with pointless tasks, curtailment of creativity, boredom, stress, etc. So offices are not necessarily glorious ways to live and grow, either. But they’re better than remote work, he insists. This, even though he personally has worked remotely for 30 years, spending just six weeks as an employee early on.

He spends time adoring Jane Jacobs, lover of cities, and hating Robert Moses, bigoted lover of personal automobiles over all else. He finds a welcoming companion in the architect Richard Florida who says that after studying cities for 40 years, he has never found one that dealt with a pandemic or other biological disaster that “significantly slow(ed) their arc of growth.” He says that cities are not great because of the shops, restaurants and jobs available, but because of the “sheer physical proximity” – the “external economy of human capital.” In Sax’s terms, the analog attributes of humanity.

Who would disagree? Planned cities suck. They are dead on arrival and never come to life. Cities that grow by the force of the people who populate them are endlessly diverting. The cyclical exodus to the suburbs soon bores the participants. No news here. But Sax is after digital anything, and it is ripe for the picking after the pandemic lockdowns.

He points to contact tracing apps that were supposed to corral those exposed to COVID, which did “precisely nothing to actually slow the spread of the virus.” I don’t know if that’s quite true, and Sax provides no backup for it. But even so, there is a learning curve the whole world is going through. Some things work, some don’t. Some are worth adapting; others are total failures. It doesn’t mean it is wrong to try them, digital or not. Especially in a global emergency.

Sax claims to be a journalist, but that is nowhere to be seen in this book. A very high percentage of it is memoir. He writes of family and friends. He escapes the lockdown to his mother-in-law’s home on Georgian Bay. He surfs. He hikes. He takes acting and speaking classes. He loves religious ceremony even if he claims not to be very religious. His wife and kids provide lots of stories for him. He thrives on live entertainment, and likes to be entertaining among friends. None of this adds anything to his thesis other than David Sax likes life analog.

He loves padding paragraphs out with long, meaningless lists: “Social media helped some democratic reformers win elections and topple dictators, but it also let fascist populists, antidemocratic demagogues, authoritarians, absolute monarchs, Vladimir Putin, and other outright dictators warp truth, spread misinformation, modernize propaganda, repress their citizens, and steal elections at home and abroad with far greater ease than ever before.” I found it easy to just skip them, in search of new ideas.

Spoiler alert: there aren’t any.

Sax couldn’t watch Hamilton onscreen after seeing it live. He says he turned away in two minutes. That is typical of the level of complaint in The Future Is Analog. Sax just wants it all, always live and always in his presence so he can feel part of it. Otherwise he can’t take it.

Incredibly, this is the second such book from Sax, who really made his name with the first one, Revenge of the Analog. He said it all there, and he says it all again here, but with the pandemic behind him this time. It turns out after reading the whole thing, there is not a single original idea in the 2.0.

Sax’s big discovery is that digital life is less human. But he doesn’t point out that every technological advance suffers the same criticism. When typewriters started showing up in offices, customers complained that they were being treated like idiots: “I kin read writin’, y’know,” is the classic reply to receiving a typewritten letter. Telephones got the same treatment; they were subhuman, impersonal, and had bad quality sound. But phones don’t stop Sax from vastly increasing his reach for quotes from people all over the world. He gets to talk to them on the phone at length, and draw them out for the quote he wants. Phones are okay now, to the point where Sax doesn’t even notice them. Zoom hasn’t reached that stage yet.

As you have likely noticed, I was completely unable to find anything Sax said that is worth showcasing. There are no new thoughts here, just Sax’s clear preference for things analog. In the conclusion, he hopes for less emphasis on the digital and more on the analog, the natural way of life. He for one, intends to milk them for all they’re worth.

Ironically perhaps, reading The Future Is Analog on a computer screen as I must, is still not as bad as having David Sax read it to me in person. Some things can be better digitally.

David Wineberg ( )