The Newest Way to Go Analog - The Atlantic
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When the iPod Nano was first released, in 2005, it cost $199 and was sold on the promise of limitlessness. This year, Celeste Stange bought her magenta 8-gigabyte model on eBay for $69 and the exact opposite reason. Every time she’d pick a song on Spotify to stream, she’d think about the millions of other songs she could listen to instead and get paralyzed by musical FOMO, she told me. “Now I only have what’s on here.”
Stange, who is 29, is part of a recent “analog” movement in which people—usually those in Gen Z—opt for less distracting alternatives to their “everything” device. Those alternatives are not always, in fact, analog, but are in many cases older digital devices: an iPod, a digital Canon PowerShot, a DVD player. Tiffany Ng, the 25-year-old author of the newsletter Cyber Celibate, now has a first-generation iPhone, an 11-year-old iPod, two CD players, a Walkman radio, and a 1986 Macintosh Plus that takes 45 seconds to load the “Welcome to Macintosh” screen.
Ng lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where 20 years ago, the word analog would’ve conjured hipsters getting into vinyl. The argument then was that a record player produced real, textured music in a way an iPod’s digital files could not. But today, people are “going analog,” as they call it, to escape devices that offer endless options, in favor of those that offer a modicum of constraint.
The iPod’s original tagline—“1,000 songs in your pocket”—suggested that you could dance like the carefree silhouettes in the ads because you didn’t have to lug around CDs. This was the era when technology was “convenient, but not connected,” Tony Fadell, a former senior vice president at Apple who is known as the “father of the iPod,” told me; then the iPod became the iPhone, which soon had an app store, and convenience and connectivity became inextricably linked. People had their library of songs, but now they also had app notifications and Angry Birds and Instagram posts from that girl they went to middle school with. Eventually, streamable Apple Music replaced iTunes, and tens of thousands of songs became 100 million songs. “I can’t go through all of it,” Stange said.
Stange could still carve out her own corner of Spotify through playlists, but on her Nano, she truly has only music she chooses, with artist photos she uploads manually. For many people, that little bit of added friction is part of the appeal. Jess Fisher, a 29-year-old actor in Los Angeles, now buys new CDs each month, which she puts on her Innioasis Y1, an iPod-esque MP3 player that the company started making in 2023, after users complained that their touch-screen MP3 devices were too distracting. “I am more excited about music because I am restricting myself from it,” she told me. When we spoke, she’d just gotten a new CD. “I’m going to sit down and listen to it and relish it, because I’ve been waiting a week to get it.” She also looks forward to the five free weekly MP3 downloads she gets with her library card, through a music site called Freegal. She has an alert set to repeat every Monday: “It’s Freegal Time!”
I spoke with nearly a dozen people trying out similar technology. Isaac Mosna, who creates YouTube videos about tech under the handle Canoopsy, started taking photographs on a first-generation iPhone because he was nostalgic for a time when “everything was a little more physical and real.” (The older camera also makes the pictures look warmer, he said.) Others told me about their Nintendo DSes and emulators they’d filled with vintage games, so they could play without distractions. These choices have become popular enough that they’re juicing secondhand markets for older tech. On eBay, people searched iPod 1,300 times an hour on average last year, and prices of certain models are up by more than 50 percent, according to data provided by the site. Back Market, a refurbished-technology company, started carrying iPods, Game Boys, and other retro tech after a limited run of Nokia 3310 phones (which can basically be used only to call, text, and play Snake) sold out much faster than expected, Thibaud Hug de Larauze, the company’s CEO, told me.
For at least some people buying into this trend, the logic goes something like: I get a DVD player, therefore I learn how to exist comfortably in the present moment. Ng has been replacing a different modern piece of technology with its older counterpart every month, an experiment she began after her iPhone broke. For the five or so hours that the Genius Bar was repairing it, she “felt so, so stupid.” She didn’t have a way to tell time. She didn’t know how to get around Manhattan without Google Maps. She decided then that she wanted to know she could live without modern technology. When she posted a newsletter titled “I chained my phone to a wall for a week,” people DMed her to ask where she’d bought the chain. (It was an old belt.)
Going “analog” is also one of the few...