REVENGE OF THE MATERIAL WORLD

More than a trend, the clamour for analogue is a course correction, a survival instinct, a cultural shift toward equilibrium

- AA Patawaran

It is three in the morning, and the cold glare of my phone screen has me trapped. We have spent the better part of the last decade optimising ourselves into a state of total, clinical boredom. Every corner of modern life has been swept clean by developers, ironed out by user experience designers, and served to us on a plate of black glass. We buy our coffee through an app, validate our friendships with a double-tap and let algorithms tell us which song to listen to next, based on our data, at precisely four in the afternoon. It is too smooth, too easy and it drains the day’s pulse. We were born to be alive, not flattened for a screen.

The impulse to touch things that offer physical resistance is getting harder to ignore.

Go to the newer, highly curated spaces at Bonifacio Global City, and you will see people actively paying for a slower experience. At venues like Got Soul MNL at Burgos Circle or the hidden hi-fi lounges tucked away in the city’s residential enclaves, 20-somethings sit in front of vintage Altec Lansing speakers, watching a stylus trace the physical grooves of a vinyl record. They could stream the exact same track on their phones for a fraction of a centavo, without the pops, the crackles, or the need to flip a disc every 22 minutes. Yet, they sit there, mesmerised by the physical vulnerability of the music.

This is not a trend. A trend is a new shade of lip gloss or a ridiculous micro-aesthetic born on a Friday and dead by the following Tuesday. This is a structural course correction, a primal survival instinct kicking in to prevent the species from mutating into pure data, a collective attempt to throw an anchor from a speeding vehicle before we disappear entirely into the digital ether.

While Generation Z has recently become the loud, aesthetic vanguard of this movement, they did not start it. They inherited a foundation built by older generations, then supercharged it into a cultural phenomenon.