The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value

This book is, by its nature, all about its examples. The book is filled with them, but I'll pick one. And rather than just give you the example, I'll tell you about it. Chapter 2, on the value of material, opens with an example of unboxing a board game. Board game unboxing videos are a surprisingly popular genre, but it's because they capture something about an activity that board game collectors treasure, myself included. When I've presented this as a talk, I've just shown a short unboxing video to the audience. (It would probably be weird, after all, to show up to a philosophy talk and the speaker spends the first 15 minutes unpacking a board game.) But, for the sake of the book, I wanted to engage with that process and try to put in words what I got out of it. So, I bought a new game (for research!) and dictated the experience. In the book, that description goes on for about 700 words, and I think I do a pretty good job of communicating the experience. But the activity itself—sitting down and performing that activity in such a deliberate and intentional way—was itself extremely rewarding, and that's something that I think captures the point of this book. Yes, the book is about analog and why I value it, but (I discovered in the process of writing it) it's really about what I value more generally. I'll bet that you value a lot of these things too, and for similar reasons. But if I want my reader to get anything out of this book, it's the inspiration to identify an activity that they love, and then to figure out what they love about it. That process offers its own reward.