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Hi, I'm Peter Creighton, host of The Rockology. For the past few decades, we've been told that the future is digital, that computers and the internet, they're going to make our lives easier. But if the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it's that digital is really not the savior it's all cracked up to be. In fact, I think an argument can and should be made that we need more analog activities in our lives.
David Sachs, a Canadian-based journalist, has a new book entitled The Future is Analog, How to Create a More Human World. In my interview with Sachs, we discuss his new book, how analog and human interactions can help us solve some of our most crucial problems, and why we, at the societal level at least, keep turning to digital futurists to answer our questions. Here now, my interview with David Sachs. The new book is fantastic.
It's called The Future is Analog, How to Create a More Human World. And you really go the entire gamut in this book. And it's all based on the pandemic, which is pretty obvious and everything. How soon into the pandemic did you kind of decide, you know what, I need to tackle the world of analog again?
It was interesting. I had another book that came out right then, things at the same, like early April 2020. So I was preparing to go on book tour, preparing to do interviews about this other book, which was about entrepreneurship. And suddenly, you know, all of a sudden, I'm home, the book was canceled.
I set up this, you know, blanket fort in the basement. But I'm getting more requests to talk about analog from media, and people are saying, you know, what does this mean for the future of analog? And not just the record stores and bookstores and film cameras that I chronicled in the previous book, but, you know, everyone was all of a sudden working from home, and all schools were going remote. And, you know, you're hearing pronunciations on news and online that this is the new normal, that we would be shopping online, go to school online, socializing online, you know, doing our weekly mahjong with our friend.
And all of this was going, this is the future of the future. Particularly, there was no going back. And then people were saying, what do you think about this? What does this mean for analog?
And it really forced me to confront the, not just reality of the current situation, but what it meant about the future. So it was very, very ironic. I just thought, there's something here that I'm getting asked about. So I'm not going to be media from all over the world.
I remember doing it. There was a Spanish newspaper and a radio station in Germany. And there was, you know, everyone was just focusing on the newness of the sort of totality of digital now that had become our entire lives. And there was very real thought for the future of the sort of analog spaces and places and relationships and objects that we kind of jettisoned as we went home and started sanitizing our hands.
And I really wondered what the future of that was. And so the book was kind of an exploration of that and what we learned in the subsequent, oh my gosh, two years plus, I can't remember. Yeah, two, two and a half years of sort of grappling with that. And actually road testing the digital future that was kind of promised to us and seeing the value of analog laid out before us as we were deprived of it and as we had to kind of substitute it for its digital equivalent, which in many cases, you know, fell far, far short of our expectations.
It was funny, as I was reading your book and everything, like some of it gave me PTSD, especially about the school and everything, because you just, you really nailed it and you really explore something in the book. And I want to really talk to you about it for a little bit. You really go to Silicon Valley and all these great text people, the Steve Jobs, the Mark Zuckerbergs, all these people that have promised, you know, digital and online is the future and meta is the future and it's going to be great. It's going to be wonderful.
And once we get into COVID, it was great for about 10 days and then we all hated it. Yet, if you still watch the news, read newspapers, all that, we're still going to these people and like looking for them for these like futuristic answers, like where are we going as a society and everything? Why are we so obsessed with going to these people from Silicon Valley to get these big questions answered where, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean, I think in your research, you kind of come out and say, you're wrong. The future isn't all on the computer.
The future is, it's analog. You know, I did a number of interviews early on when doing research in the book about the future. People whose job is to think about the future in all sorts of different ways. One of those companies or global organizations like the United Nations and, you know, I think that that means a lot of those in the book.
They kind of inform my thinking back. But, you know, the interesting thing about a lot of those conversations was that these people whose job is to think about climate change and global security and the things that are going to challenge organizations and individuals and states and societies in the future because, you know, there is this fascination and in a way kind of laziness around thinking about the future that's really pervasive in the United States specifically, more so than in the world. And it's tremendously focused on consumer technology. And let's go back to like, you know, GE, electric oven, the future of flying cars in the 1950s.
It is very much focused on the budget. It's Star Trek. It's fused with popular culture. And we tend to take an invention and extrapolate our future based on that invention.
And so the iPhone is this, you know, the rubric that we use for everything. This is going to change everything and it's changed many things in many ways. And so now we're looking for the next thing. So everything that comes out, it's wearables, it's AI, it's big data, it's voice recognition.
How is this going to change, you know, pivot, banking, you know, fishing, the kid's school, whatever. There's this laziness that it's this thing, it's a shiny gadget, it's fun, we can sell it, it's sexy, there's an element of capitalism, there's marketing involved. And it's a lot harder to think about non-technological approaches to the future. Like, you know, you think about the debate about working from home in the office in the future work.
It's like, is it the office working from home? How many days in the office? What does the office look like? Like, that's not the question.
There are bigger, more difficult questions about how we value and measure work and what we mean by productivity and how we avoid that that are much trickier to unpack. So maybe it's easier to just think about Zoom or it's sexy to think about how wearables will change education versus the trickier question about, you know, how you tax school districts and fund public schools in the United States going forward. So that education is equal and actually provides greater benefits. But this idea of like, oh, well, someone asked, yeah, yeah, I completely agree with you.
You actually kind of, I think, answered what my next question was because as I was reading this book, I mean, this is almost like a philosophy book and I love that. I mean that in like the best possible way because, you know, the concepts you're digging into are really deep and they're really important. And again, I think you kind of really hit a really good nerve and you mentioned it earlier with how, you know, we in the United States, we really look for digital to like solve everything. But you come out and say, no, digital is a tool.
It can help us, but it's not the be all and end all. Why do you think Western culture, Western civilization, why do you think we're almost afraid of confronting the hard questions of climate change, of racism, of things like that? Why do we always see the tool as the salvation for us and not the tool that can help us do it ourselves? Interesting.
Very interesting question. One which you could spend an entire lifetime. I think, you know, there's a lot of elements that have there. One is that we, you know, we are, and I'm in Canada, it's not that different states in terms of culture, but we are a culture of builders and we're a culture that has been very future-based, not as tied to the past as other cultures are because of the relative newness of our nation-state, because of the relative fluidity of our cultures that are constantly changing more so that culture that people are established over a longer period of time, you know, the nation of immigrants, so the culture is very clearly and that makes it fun.
Newness, novelty, is the core of the American experience, right? That reinvention and, you know, Edison and Ford and, you know, the creation of computers and the internet and the space race and leading up to the circular area of the digital firm and it is very much there. The progress built through the railroad, progress built through highways, progress built through television, computers, and technology and all these sorts of things is the way, in many ways, we measured the coming of the future and the growth of the future and so it's deeply ingrained in the way we look at everything, you know, education, culture, business and economics, for example, and I think it takes a greater amount of time and sort of a deeper reckoning with technology and its limitation to sort of stuff to think more broadly about the human experience as something that's truly analog and we're not there and we're not even getting there but we're beginning, you know, we're at the beginning of the beginning of the year which is that the experience of the pandemic and the sort of overeating, overconsumption of digital technology of everyone which is like, oh, God, enough of this. Along with, you know, the various crises of confidence in, you know, social media and Silicon Valley over the past number of years in terms of data breaches, privacy breaches, you know, the version of democracy that is playing the tearing of the social fabric of social media and the shine is coming off of it and, you know, I won't be a rush out today because I have an iPhone which is the day that it's come out but it's not, it's just like, it's not the magical solution anymore, I think.
And so, we're at an inflection point in our history as human beings where we actually have to think about the future in a much more broad way and I think, the technology is not going to save us. No great electric car is going to solve the climate crisis and no great AI technology is going to, you know, create global security. We have to approach those deeply fundamental human problems and challenges like education or even community and repairing that social fabric in a way that's in many ways how much. So what is the future that we want?
That's kind of the big question that I'm hinting at in the book that I'm not prescribing anything. The pandemic forced us to look into it as we had to sort of evaluate our circumstances in the present, right? Okay, now I'm doing school with my children online. Is this the future I want?
The vast majority of people in the world said, whoa, no, never, never, never, never. My daughter had her second day of school, fourth grade yesterday. She went, I don't like school, I don't want to do it, you know, so-and-so doesn't do school. And I said, well, don't go to school online because they have a health issue.
Do you want to do school online? Oh, no, no, no, no. It's a threat now. Virtual school is a threat I've used for my children.
You want to go to virtual school or do your homework? That's right. Do your homework or do your homework or do your homework or do your homework? There's a little part of me that when I requested the interview, I was going to demand that it be on Zoom, but I'm like, no, I can't do that to them.
I can't do that to myself either because Zoom is just, it's exhausting. Again, there's nothing wrong with it per se. No. It provides a great advantage over when you're talking to people on the deaf and deaf.
Zoom is interchangeable with Skype, Microsoft Teams, whatever, whatever. I remember doing the interviews for the book and we're all done remotely. All in my house and my kids were home for homeschooling. I met our neighbor at a basement apartment and it was empty at the time.
So we had this desk out there. My wife and I would go out and trade calls and trade school money duties. And I just remember after one or two Zoom calls, the dread of it, the sheer energy stuff that was there was just so visceral. And I think it just became very apparent.
This is not a future that I want anymore. I want less of it. This is not something that I aspire to grow into. It's not getting better.
There's no technology that's going to solve this. This is a fundamental disconnect from the way I want to live as a human now and going forward. And I think that was true because there were so many of these aspects of our lives that we had predicted would become entirely digital going forward. Whether it was shopping, whether it was socializing, whether it was a way to build cities around technology, we actually thought the moments of greatest value or greatest joy or greatest connection or greatest productivity were the ones where we were in prison.
And we were interacting in an analog way with spaces and individuals and relationships, space to space, physical space, whether that was on the porch or your backyard or the park or the first meeting or the first concert we went to. The richness of that and the totality of that re-centered it as the core of the experience. You're like, oh yeah, why are we trying to move away from this thing? Why is there something that you're actually trying to disrupt?
This is perfect. You can't do better than a concert. You can tell that in someone at home can watch it. The live thing is feel the best thing.
Yeah, yeah. You got to feel that energy and everything. And I have to tell you, one of the chapters that really just stayed with me is the chapter on urban life, city living. And David, I got to say, you made me fall in love again with urban life and the urban lifestyle because you just really talk about the joys of the neighborhood and walkability and things like that.
What do you think cities can do? What do you think there are some creative options like Chicago accentuating the core things that make a city what a city should be, which is not getting in and out of it quickly to get to some power and it's not embedding it with the most seamless technology. It's like the core of the city is a bunch of people living together in one place and the magic happens from that. So how do you bring more people together and bring them together face-to-face in more places where they're going to see each other and look at each other?
And it's back to like Jane Jacobs 101 or even what they knew when they were building Rome and it's still true in Rome and Paris and all these ancient cities today which are still thriving in the tropical places. It's like public space, access to public space, the mixture of commerce and that just leads to all the things that make that city great which is ideas, business, entrepreneurship, conversation, culture, right? It's that rhythm and feeling of the city and so many cities have been trying to optimize it. do away with it in ways that in the 1950s and 60s it was, you know, we need to go a highway through the city and that's going to get us out to Highland Park and Skokie and all these places and that's the future of the city of the suburbs and the city will become just a place you go into like your Ferris Bueller driving in from the suburbs in 10 and 10, Ferrari and I know it's a lot of Ferris Bueller but now we realize that's wrong and what the cities are doing is disassembling a lot of the highways because they were detrimental to the life of the city they're rebuilding the very 19th century notion of what a city should be which is public square like my family's in Montreal I grew up in Toronto I was in the University of Montreal and I grew up in Montreal and Montreal is like New Orleans one of the unique places that's more European in many ways and the city especially it's core than it is North American and we were there to a couple days and it's like there's so many plazos there's so many cities that are just closed to traffic the entire summer for a festival or just because they want to there's so many bike lanes and all these things make the city more of a city more enjoyable because it brings people out into the open a city is not a place where you go from the inside of one building to the inside of another building as quickly as possible the city is a place that brings you out in the open with the smells and the characters and the feeling of it and if you don't like that then go move out of the city that's why people should live in the suburbs I have friends who live in the Highland Park my big house you know the drive there's a school to drive everywhere there's a walking out and that's fine but I also have friends who live in the core and that's what I love about it because it's a smaller place it's more expensive it's hard to get around you know there's there's some danger there's some there's characters there's noise and that's the thing I'm sitting in my son's bedroom here because the only room in the house I completely agree with you I completely agree with you so I got one more question for you and again thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk with me where do you see young people falling into this equation where do you see young people getting to learn analog and more so like embracing it I think we saw very early on that you know there was this this real disconnected expectation of reality of you know what younger people would want and there's a assumption like young people like to play on iPad young people are on phones so they're going to be really happy sitting at home and doing this and for the most part you know kids children rejected online school you know vastly yeah they made plays like Minecraft it wasn't like they were happy doing it what you saw with kids you know running to playgrounds obviously in Toronto in Australia they closed playgrounds with those two miles yellow police playground it was the stupidest thing and all the stupid things that happened in you know a couple years of really stupid stuff I remember my son like I said tearing toward the playground with an open screen that's not the one that happened I remember seeing packs of teenagers roaming around sitting on bikes you know just hanging out in the need of that social interaction so I don't think that analog is something that happened taught to the younger generation and you know it because analog fundamentally is like the default human experience the default human experience is not digital and no matter how much you might see a teenager you know sitting on their phone in their iPad all day their core experience is still the one that happens in the real world that's a physical experience that's what matters that's what the action that's awesome David thank you so much for taking time with me today this is terrific the new book is called The Futures Analog How to Create a More Human World and you should definitely go and pick it up but don't buy it on Kindle buy it as a physical book at a real book store amen and that was my interview with David Sachs The Futures Analog How to Create a More Human World is available on November 15th, 2022 you can follow David Sachs on Twitter at SachsDavid I'm Peter Creighton and thanks for listening thank you very much for listening to this WXAV 88.3 FM podcast be sure to visit our website WXAV.com for more information on your escape from Ordinary Radio