Everyone is finally starting to wake up with a massive, throbbing digital hangover.
PDF this, Course that or “Wanna jump on a zoom call to see if you qualify?”
We’ve spent the last decade gleefully uploading our entire conscious experience into invisible server farms, and the result is that we all feel like translucent, floating ghosts. But the pendulum is swinging back, and it is swinging hard.
Have you noticed how people are going absolutely feral for physical products again? I’m talking printed paper newsletters that actually show up in your rusty metal mailbox.
I’m talking thick, heavy books that smell like dust and binding glue and actual human effort. People are literally digging ancient MP3 players out of their closets just so they can actually own a file again, instead of renting their music from a carefully curated SpotiApplefied-algorithm that treats their earholes like shit.
And yes, I am fully aware of the blistering irony that I am sending you this realisation via email, but shut up, you know exactly what I mean…
The world is craving the analog because we are wet, heavy, carbon based monstrosities, and our monkey brains require friction.
We need to hold a thing in our hands to know it’s real. If Amazon Web Services catches fire tomorrow, your entire digital life evaporates like a wet fart in a hurricane.
(Which in its current shape and form sounds pretty fucking awesome cause I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks the whole online space is ass right now.)
But a book? A printed zine? A piece of vinyl? A hand made poster or stickers or anything really? You can crack a skull with some of these things or you can burn them for warmth if we do so happen to head into the hell hole of dystopian bullshit.
Cool thing is, Physical things occupy physical space in a universe that is rapidly trying to turn us all into frictionless, floating data points and things that outrage us.
Look at what Scott Scheper is doing with that Penpreneur book of his. The guy is basically becoming a cult leader for the offline revolution. He’s showing people how to make absolute bank just by writing offline, physical newsletters. He’s mailing it out to people who are so profoundly starved for something they can actually touch that they’ll gladly bleed money for the sheer, visceral privilege of tearing open a paper envelope.
I do the same thing with my boy Ben Settle and his Email Players newsletter. (I believe Scott is also heavily influenced by what Ben writes about.)
We don’t want more content. We are choking on content. We want an artifact. We want something that proves we exist in the actual real world.
Check out Scott’s book here
Stephen Walker.