So we're talking about the internet again
How analog tools can enrich our experience of our lives, just like in the old days
This Ezra Klein interview with New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka has been popping up in a bunch of newsletters I read. It’s been getting buzz because of the discussion about personal taste, and how Scandi-minimalist coffee shops around the world exemplify social media’s bleed into our physical environments.
While the interview feels, at times, like being a sewer rat eavesdropping on a conversation between two white dudes trapped in the New York media bubble (a critique here), there were some bits I wanted to think about more deeply.
Like many people with online lives, I’ve been considering these ideas — what’s authentic discovery, what’s been determined by algorithms to be within my interests, and how I can tell the difference — for a while. It’s important to me that I feel a sense of agency (and by default, freedom to change) over things I consider part of my identity, like my music taste, my fashion, and my other attractions.
So Chayka’s commentary adds to my long list of questions, and a growing feeling in my gut. As I’ve started the year, I feel more inclined than ever to refocus myself by stripping back the distractions, the noise, and the non-human determinants of my life: formulas telling me where to go, what to do, read, listen to, or like.
It’s a deep urge to simplify, and to look for embodied experiences as an antidote to technological malaise.
Like my plotting for a long-desired landline, I’ve been leaning hard into the analog: Using a crisp paper planner, writing work notes by hand instead of typing them, scheduling fewer Zooms and more phone calls, reading books as part of my reporting instead of relying solely on Google search results and online databases.
In the rest of my life, I’m being drawn to the stuff that demands presence. In the Klein interview, Chayka and the host talk about the movie theater as a hallowed place where total attention is required. It’s where seeing things through to the end — like it or not — is the norm. I felt that sacredness during a matinee showing of the disturbing and brilliant “Zone of Interest” last weekend.
When the screen went dark for the first two minutes of the movie, only a haunting sound filling the theater, I thought the projector had stopped working (it went on for so long). I readjusted myself in my seat, and looked around to see if anyone else was concerned or if the light overhead had gone out. If I’d been watching at home, I could’ve moved my mouse or paused it to see what was happening. But in the theater, I was forced to be still, wondering, feeling unsettled. Now, I think of the blackout as one of the notable parts of the experience — a disquieting, eerie opener that importantly set the mood for the whole movie.
I’ve been collecting other embodied practices, too. Shooting pictures on a little Pentax film camera I got for Christmas, a ritual that continues until I get the prints back and can revisit all of the memories I captured. Doing physical crossword puzzles with a pencil, which feels strenuous and time-consuming and satisfying, the base of my skull buzzing for half an hour after I finish. Putting records on at dinnertime instead of a pre-made playlist, which makes me feel more connected to moment (both because of Main Character Syndrome and because, at some point, I’ll have to get up and flip the record).
Last weekend, before the movie, I found Evelyn “Champagne” King’s first record, Smooth Talk, in perfect condition for $1.99 at a music shop that was half CDs. Smooth Talk didn’t contain any songs that I knew, but I loved the idea of listening through without knowing what was coming. It turned out to be a jaunty if precocious album I couldn’t keep myself from dancing to.
One idea in the Klein-Chayka interview that felt novel to me was how curators, and the definition of curation, has changed over time. Now, a lot of the curation regular people encounter is online, and semi-human, if that. But there are rich, untapped sources of curation all around us. It’s one of the reasons I love peering into apartment windows, looking at the tchotchkes around someone’s house, or knowing what’s in their purse. I want to know why they named their dog that, what they snack on at 3:30 pm, and the exact specifications of their favorite chair.
All of the small deliberations about lipstick shade, throw pillow and water bottle tell me something. We’re all curating all the time in the real world.
I want to make it a point to ask more friends and strangers what they’re enjoying, and to document the stuff I find in the wild. That’s part of this newsletter’s purpose (although the recommendation lists started off as a secondary practice, people have been drawn to them, and I get it). But I’m constantly asking myself how much of what I share is an echo of the tastes of other newsletters and “curators” I follow, and not actually a discovery of something that is, as the Brits say, a bit of me.
It feels worthwhile as as challenge to look at our surroundings more deeply, to consider it all a creative playground, even in its normalcy.
Recently, I was thrilled to come across a magazine stand — an old-school, physical, sprawling display of covers. I hadn’t seen one like it in years, and was flooded with visceral memories of flipping through sticky tabloid mags with the perfume fold-outs that always sort of smelled like…paper. And being careful not to rip or get cuts on my fingers from the dense, luxurious paper of a chunky high-end mags.
Magazines lived in dust-accumulating stacks in my room, where I’d cut out images for collages, revisit articles, and rip out pages to tape to the wall above my desk.
The last time I made a collage with my hands was in 2021, mid-pandemic, when I created a mood board for the year. It makes me emotional to look at it now, knowing what a trying year that was, and how I needed a vision for myself. I needed pinks and purples and bursting bouquets of vibrancy. So many of the themes I pasted onto paper came to define that time of my life.
By using my hands to create a wish for the future, I sunk into the dream. I started the process of building the kind of life I wanted.
Recommendations
Perfectly Imperfect’s new app for recommendations. It feels like the old internet.
Eavesdropping at a café near you. I heard, “If it’s full, that’s good. But not too full that I can’t hold it.” (About his bladder)
Taking a trip to see friends in the dead of winter.
That’s all for now. Have a great week,
Isa
Evelyn “Champagne” King! “Shame” was a huge hit in the disco era, and a great one.