The Last Days of Analog

The Long Eighties marked the end of our analog form of existence and the birth of a thoroughly digital culture. While our kids wonder what it was like, even those who were there can't remember.

Everything is different, but the same... things are more moderner than before... bigger, and yet smaller... it's computers... San Dimas High School football rules.

- Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

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IT IS AN AGE OF WIDESPREAD MORAL PANIC and conspiracy mongering; of an always-on, globally networked 24/7 news dominated by shallow spectacle and a general indifference to facts and truth; a superficial and self-referential pop culture aimed at a technology-obsessed generation raised from birth to have zero attention span; a growing concern over sex and violence in a youth culture marked by the disintegration of the family and growing social isolation; the obliteration of the distinction between home and office and between work and leisure; all of this driven by massive and rapid technological change that has disrupted the economy, the culture, and home life, while making computing personal, portable, and connected. 

What we are talking about, of course, is the period from 1979 to 1993, which I think we should call The Long Eighties.

Popular appreciation of “the eighties” has gone through a number of predictable cycles of nostalgia, cultural re-thinking, and academic appreciation, starting well over a decade ago with the light-hearted mockery of films like Adam Sandler’s The Wedding Singer and others of its ilk, such American Psycho and Hot Tub Time Machine. The thing about these movies, as one critic pointed out, is that they aren’t set sometime in the 1980s so much as they are set in “The ‘80s” — an imaginary period where the entire decade is distilled into a few stock tropes including aerobics, big hair and shoulder pads, coked up greed-is-good capitalism, and a frivolous pop culture set to a synth-pop soundtrack. 

More recently, there began a more thoughtful and nuanced examination of the culture and politics of the decade, through television shows like The Americans, Glow,  Stranger Things, and Black Monday, to name just a few. Over the last few years, there have been at least two books and a documentary about the crucial Cold War events of 1983, and three major books and a mini-series about the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.  As these suggest, when it comes to critical investigation into the 1980s, it is hard to escape the looming importance of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and most of all, Ronald Reagan. Indeed, the opening line of one academic book of essays about the decade opens with a joke about how all books about the eighties eventually become books about Reagan. 

But there is another 1980s that in many ways runs in parallel to the eighties of pop culture ironists and Cold War nostalgists, and which challenges Reaganism for the status of the most important development of the decade. Whatever else it was, the 1980s marked the last days of analog culture and heralded our decisive transition to a thoroughly digital form of existence. This period has become the subject of growing fascination by Gen Z (and even younger) types, who wonder just how people did anything – socialize, get where they were going, get anything done, find anything out – before the internet, email, smartphones, and social media.  

They are calling it the “pre-internet” age,  and it has spurred a cottage industry of think pieces and personal essays, as well as an obsession with television shows such as Seinfeld and, most notably, Friends. Indeed, Friends serves as the thematic focus for (and also motivates the bizarre conclusion to) the recent apocalyptic thriller Leave The World Behind, starring Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts, and Mahershala Ali. And that movie itself is largely just an extended meditation on how dependent we have become on technology, and how little Gen Xers can remember of how they managed to do anything before they got their phones.  

TIME PASSES IN WEIRD WAYS. There’s a little anniversary game you see people of a certain age playing on social media. It starts with someone noting how far in the past a significant event from our collective memory is from the current day, and then concludes by pointing how far the original event was from things in its past. 

So for example: Nirvana’s Nevermind was released almost just over 32 years ago, in the fall of 1991. Go back 32 years before that to 1959 and you realise that we are as far today from Nevermind as Nevermind was from the year “the music died,” that a teenaged Jimi Hendrix bought his first electric guitar, and Bobby Darin topped the charts with “Mack the Knife.” 

Or to take another example, 2023 marked the 25th anniversary of the airing of the last episode of Seinfeld. Twenty five years before Seinfeld went off the air, in 1973, the two big shows All in the Family and the Waltons. One that really rocked people’s brains was in early 2019 when someone pointed out that Will Wheaton (who played young Wesley Crusher) was at that point the same age as Patrick Stewart was in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. You want old?  Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam is now a decade older than Neil Young was when they recorded the album Mirrorball together in 1995. 

Your mileage will vary with these sorts of anecdotes, depending on your age, cultural awareness, propensity for nostalgia, and sensitivity to the inexorable march of time. But when they strike home, the effect of the anniversary game can go beyond mere nostalgia-mongering or its flip side, the fear of aging. It can underscore the way our culture doesn’t evolve in a linear fashion but follows what evolutionary biologists call a punctuated equilibrium, where long periods of stasis are followed by rapid shifts on a number of fronts. To steal a bit from Lenin, there are decades where nothing happens, and short years when decades seem to happen. 

That was the central conceit of Frederick Lewis Allen’s remarkable book Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. Published in 1931 only two years after the crash that brought the party to an end and signalled the onset of the Great Depression, reading it is like looking the wrong way through a telescope — events that were very recent chronologically now appeared impossibly distant culturally. The world seems to have simply shifted into a different gear, virtually overnight. 

A similar effort is Peter Carroll’s book about the seventies, tellingly entitled It Seemed Like Nothing Happened. Published in 1982, Carroll’s book was an attempt to tell an alternative version of the decade, to establish a counterpoint to the prevailing narrative which was that the entire decade was a moral, political, spiritual, and economic writeoff. The book succeeds to the extent that it shows how the growing sense of malaise that found its full expression in the failure of the Carter presidency helped set the stage for the Reagan revolution and the conservative backlash — a theme that was to recur in countless books about the period.

But what virtually every account of the seventies misses is the ferocious revolution in technology that was underway. Most of the key developments were burbling along largely unnoticed by the media and the popular culture, the precinct of hobbyists, academics, government contractors, and technophiles. But in 1979 there was a sudden explosion of innovation at all levels, including the birth of home computing, the arrival of the Sony Walkman, and the crucial installation of the TC/IP protocols for the Internet. 

This was the sound of the starter gun going off. It marked the beginning of an extended period of technological jockeying that lasted until January 1993 with the launch of the Mosaic browser for the internet and the publication of the first issue of Wired magazine. The period in between marked our culture’s decisive transition from a largely analog to a fully digital form of existence. 

What was it like? Even those of us who were there have trouble remembering, which is why over the next few dispatches for this newsletter, we’ll explore the contours of the Long Eighties – what happened, what it was like, and why it matters. It is too important a period, not just for Gen X but for humanity as a whole, to be left to the ironic whims of overstimulated teenaged nostalgia-mongers.

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Welcome new subscribers! Thanks to everyone who has been reading and sharing these dispatches. I took a longer break than I planned over the holidays, but I expect to be posting pretty much weekly for the next while. This “Long Eighties” thing began as a book project that I was never able to properly execute, but I think there’s a lot of rich material to explore here. As always, thanks for reading and please, if you like this, I’d appreciate you sharing it with anyone who might it enjoyable as well. — ap