I couldn’t agree more. I love Carissa’s work.
Too bad fewer and fewer people are going to be enlightened like this as time passes. Perhaps there will be a breaking point and people will change. I’m waiting for the the Butlerian Jihad myself.
This is another great TEDx Talk by Véliz in which she highlights the shortcomings of digital technology and warns us that in the digital age it’s easy to forget why analogue matters, by using the examples of very recent real life crises.
Digital only is extremely dangerous:
In 2023, the British library was hacked via a ransomware attack. Two years later, they still have not recovered. Although all the physical books are there, and all the readers available to read them, it is not possible because the only map to locate the books was digital, and they lost it.
Cash is King:
Another example she gives is how during the major Iberian Peninsula blackout in Spain and Portugal this year, the only people who were able to go to restaurants were those who had cash.
Analogue is not only safer and more robust, it’s also much more private. If you want to buy something that nobody can track, use cash. And if you stop using cash, the day that you want to use cash it will be gone.
Paperless ticketing
Where I live, movie theaters have gone paperless. The only way to buy a ticket, even if you physically go to the theater, is by using your bank card, and providing your email address or phone number to receive the ticket.
Food order through screen
Similarly, a lot of fast foods no longer take orders via a real person when you physically go there. You place your order through a machine, and they often don’t accept cash.
Constant surveillance
Reading a paper book is one of the most rebellious acts. When you’re reading a paper book, the digital cannot touch you. It’s not surveilling you. It doesn’t know what you’re reading or how fast you’re reading, or what you’re highlighting, what you’re thinking, what you’re sharing. It doesn’t scream at you with notifications. It doesn’t distract you. It asks nothing of you. A paper book is a friend, a true friend, in a way that an e-book can only be a false friend.
She is 100% right. Carissa is not against digital technology, but she argues that good tech is more respectful of and closest to the analogue. Hence, why she calls upon us to demand better technology because the surveillance model is bad design, and we deserve better.
Fight for privacy and better consumer rights
This is why we must fight DRM and better consumer rights, like the right to own the digital media that we purchase. As much as I enjoy printed books, e-books, and especially DRM free e-books, allow access and the spread of knowledge. If I am from Germany and live in Japan, it would be too expensive for me to have access to German books in print. They are not locally available in Japan, and I would have to order them from Germany. Same with other types of German media.
The analogue is the best backup because it ties us to reality. We forget that when we neglect the analogue world, we might lose it.
Everything that truly matters is analogue. Water, food, housing, personal relationships. Everything that we depend on, everything that matters most to our sustenance, is analogue.
In the last couple of days, there have has been a lot of discussions on this forum on the dangers of locked digital ecosystems. Whether it be Proton’s or Apple’s, or any other company, arbitrarily losing access to all our accounts, and as a result our life, is a huge risk we all run.
I end with these powerful words from Carissa:
Cherish the analogue. Appreciate and take care of it. We need an analogue backup to stay safe. That means that we need to cherish the places, our coffee shops, our libraries, our theaters, our schools, our streets, our personal relationships. Your friends are made out of flesh and blood. They’re not chat bots. It means we should also savor the analogue.
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Excellent write-up and I agree 100%.
I’ve been spending a lot of time this last year focusing on critical infrastructure and it’s lack of resilience. In many cases, we’ve removed analog and manual backups - and we’ve added attack surfaces by connecting controls to the internet, largely to provide remote admin access. (This accelerated during covid.)
The personal and societal aspects of Carissa’s talk are very important, I just wanted to highlight this specific aspect.
(Edited to add some context to that opening statement.)
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Thanks, I look forward to listening to the podcast.
After I watched Carissa’s TEDx Talk, I was suggested the one below by Jeff Edmunds. He highlights the limits of e-Books for libraries. It also points to the problems of locked digital infrastructures.
Good talk! And yeah, ebooks are such a scam. How the hell can you charge more for an ebook than for a physical book - particularly when that book requires shipping. And then when you start talking about textbooks, which have been a scam for decades, it just gets worse.
But I just hate that we don’t truly own digital media. That’s just wrong - and needs to be rectified somehow.
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Agreed. And the answer as with a lot of things in the privacy, tech policy, anti trust, and right to repair - legislation.
But unless corporate money is out of politics, nothing is going to change.
So, we have the solution but there is a severe lack of will. And that’s the reality.