David Sax

How to Create a More Human World

Future Is Analog

elizabeth

Thank you to NetGalley and Public Affairs for the ARC!

Before reading, I was very sympathetic to the future Sax wants to build: it eschews needless and isolating digitization in favor of systems and tools that prioritize humanity in their analog nature. I’m not anti-digital; I’ve owned an iPhone for more than a decade, order my groceries (and most other things) through an app, and enthusiastically work remotely. But if it came down to it, I’d rather be an off-grid homesteader than upload my soul to be the god of my own digital universe. I was curious about Sax’s take on the direction we’re heading, why we should head elsewhere, and how we can.

After reading, I’m still sympathetic to that future. Perhaps most notably, I’m more convinced that problematic digitization is stoppable and avoidable. From the epigraph to the final chapter, Sax underlines the concept that the future is something we innovate, create, and choose, not an inevitable path to ubiquitous (and harmful) digitization. This isn’t a concept I’d dwelled on before, and Sax is right to make a point of it if his argument is to have any impact on the behavior of individuals, institutions, corporations, and tech billionaires alike.

However, I had one hangup with this book, and it’s unfortunately a big one: Sax uses the days of COVID-19 lockdown as the proxy for a more heavily digitized future, but I don’t think it’s an appropriate proxy . Taking, for example, the chapter on education, Sax laments the [try to] learn-from-home days and deems edtech a failure because of them. But it’s hard to separate the poor outcomes of edtech from all the variables of the pandemic. Teachers, admins, and districts had very little time to set up a remote learning system that had a chance at success. It can take years for a teacher, school, or district to select the right edtech tools and train their users to mastery (and that’s with students still in classrooms!). Of course edtech was a poor replacement for in-person learning; there was no infrastructure to support this fast, unwanted transition. The increased digitization in the early days of the pandemic was jarring and unpleasant because we didn't choose it. And, it’s difficult to use the lonely days of the pandemic to argue that digitization isolates us and deprives us of “real” human connection when it was a deadly virus, not our screens, that incited fear of in-person interaction.

Sax uses interviews and personal experience more than studies and data (though he does use some of the latter), and many chapters boil down to the simple (but powerful) notion that there’s simply no replacement for in-person interaction. While I agree with this bottom line, the emphasis on personal experience/anecdotal evidence and the use of the pandemic lockdown as a sample of a digitized future were a bit too weak for me to settle into anything more than mild agreement with Sax’s main point, which I was already primed to be on board with.

Future Is Analog How to Create a More Human World

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