I'd put this in the category of what increasingly seems like a growing wave of, for lack of a better term, the "F** Digital" movement.

I don't think it's purely digital, there's a lot of disgust with what we've done with consumer electronics as well (turning them into surveillance devices to collect behavioral surplus and then turn around and market to us), and a reaction to about 15 years of ever-increasing "Everything on your black mirror!" pushes from every corner of the modern world. Of course, every one of those apps is hoovering up absolutely as much data as it possibly can in the process.

To more and more people who were adults before this transition happened, there's a growing sense sense (certainly in my circles) of "Nah, the old ways were better." It is no business of anyone what I care to listen to in the evening. And with a record, tape, or CD (assuming no SmartTV spying on room audio), that's true. Streaming, hah. It's all being analyzed and prodded.

One can get into the usual pissing matches about records vs CDs vs streaming vs lossless streaming vs... whatever else is out there, but they rather miss the point as far as I'm concerned. The experience of listening to a record, with the processes involved, and typically sitting down to listen to it specifically vs just having it on as background music, is different. It's a very different way to experience music from the never-ending algorithmic playlists, though those are interesting for discovering new groups. You also don't (usually...) have the "analysis paralysis" problem of infinite options.

And we see this with the ever-increasing record (LP) sales. Vinyl now outsells CDs [0]. You can argue about why it shouldn't be, but clearly "the market has spoken," and vinyl is cool again. It doesn't seem to be a flash in the pan either, as the count has been going up since about 2012 every year, by large jumps.

Again, argue how you will about audio quality, but "curling up with a vinyl album in the evening in a kerosene lantern lit room" is a very, very different experience than listening to the same album on some streaming service on a modern digital platform.

I view the return to film as something similar - it encourages a very different way of engaging with photography. Shots aren't "free," which means you have different constraints, and history shows that a lot of art happens when given constraints.

I've also been seeing (and experimenting with...) a rejection of "all the LED lights" - especially in the evenings. The human body is independently sensitive to blues in light from how we perceive color, so one can have a fairly warm color temperature but still have a lot of blue in the spectrum, and we know that blue messes with human sleep. So there's at least a few people I know (myself included) messing with going back to incandescent light sources in the evening once the sun goes down. Lanterns, incandescent bulbs on dimmers, etc. The goal is to see how much a hard removal of "blue" before bed changes, and... I notice a difference. If I've been away from screens, with just incandescent sources, for a few hours before bed? I seem to sleep better and wake up better rested. I'm far from the only person to notice this, and I intend to continue the experiment through the winter.

But at this point, betting on the analog seems a good option. Digital, especially the consumer electronics side, has been weighed by many and found wanting.

[o]: https://vacationvinyl.com/how-many-vinyl-records-are-sold-ea...