Why Are People Reaching for Typewriters and Vinyl?
The analog revival isn’t a revolt. It’s a reckoning. And the bill is coming due for leaders.
“The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.”
— J.B. Priestley, 1957
Once upon a time in my career, I was responsible for digital communication and social media strategy, which meant I was leading a team that constantly tested the boundaries of new platforms and methods of communication. Cutting edge stuff.
Yet my office belies that identity; my fountain pens and personalized stationery are on my desk, my small collection of typewriters is underneath it, a converted student lamp is on my desk, Victorian illustrations hang on the walls, and hundreds of books pack the shelves. There’s great comfort in these surroundings.
Record Success
In the 1890s, Edison’s phonograph cylinders were the most sophisticated recording technology available — hard wax tubes that captured sound with a fidelity that no flat disc could yet match. When Emile Berliner’s gramophone arrived with its cheaper, easier-to-store disc records, Edison refused to follow. He kept refining the cylinder, convinced that superior sound would win.
It didn’t.
Disc records swept the market — not because they were better, but because they were more convenient. Edison’s cylinders limped along until 1929, when the company finally discontinued them.
History has a habit of running this play. Just when a highly refined and superior technology seems to have sealed the argument, people quietly reach for something simpler. Not necessarily out of nostalgia, but out of need.
Same Old Song, New Verse
We’re watching it happen again. Consider:
A Cornell professor is handing out typewriters to combat AI-generated essays — and discovering that students are writing better, thinking harder, and remembering more.1 Sturgill Simpson released a new album on pressed vinyl and debuted high on the charts, bypassing streaming entirely.2 People are digging out iPods so their music can’t be interrupted with pings, alerts, or ads.3 Entire communities are converging around pen-testing videos4, old-school hobbies5, and anything that keeps their hands busy and their screens dark.
Some have called this a revival. It isn’t. It’s a retreat.
People aren’t fixing the systems that have made them feel surveilled, optimized, and disposable. They are escaping those systems on their lunch breaks. The typewriter and the vinyl record are not acts of resistance. They are coping mechanisms — small, private refuges carved out of a working day that has grown increasingly indifferent to the humans inside it.
Which raises a question most leaders would prefer not to answer:
Are we focused on fixing the system or supporting our people?
Control Is an Illusion
In 213 BC, the emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the burning of books — a project born from anxiety rather than ignorance. He understood, with the clarity despots often possess, that writing was trust made permanent. Destroy the record, and you could rewrite the relationship between ruler and ruled.
His chancellor Li Si argued, with impeccable logic, that old knowledge only confused the people and undermined the new order. They burned the books. The dynasty fell fifteen years later.
The emperor’s error was not cruelty. It was the assumption that systems could substitute for relationships — that if you controlled the information, you controlled the people.
Every organization that has replaced a manager with a dashboard, a conversation with a survey, or a human judgment with an algorithm has made a version of the same bet.
So far, the results are similarly instructive.
What the Best Companies Know
Fortune’s most recent list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For is, among other things, a quiet indictment of everyone not on it. The companies employees trust most share a common trait: their leaders are leading with humanity. They know names. They close the feedback loop.
At Synchrony Financial — this year’s top company and one that doubled earnings over last year — the CEO describes his operating principle plainly:
“That cycle of feedback and action is what keeps trust high.”
At Delta Air Lines, the world’s most profitable airline, CEO Ed Bastian has inverted the conventional customer-first model entirely.
“We’re not obsessing on customers at the leadership level, because we want to obsess over our own people, so that they can obsess over you as a customer.”
One unifying theme that emerged among top companies this year is a commitment to making employees feel supported, trusted, and trained as they stare down an AI-enabled future6.
These are not radical ideas. They are simply rare ones.
People First
Alan Mulally called it: people first — love ’em up. Not as a motivational slogan, but as a design principle. Our Working Together™ Leadership & Management System7 rests on the recognition that performance follows trust, and trust follows the accumulated evidence that a leader sees you, hears you, and will not discard you when the calculus changes.
Every week in the storied Business Plan Review at Ford, every leader in the room shared items in their plans with a red, yellow, or green status. No hiding. No hedging. The ritual itself was the message: we deal in reality here, and we deal in it together. And the vision was simple: profitable growth for all.
The analog resurgence is a signal, not a solution. When people choose friction — the stuck key, the skipped record, the pen that might run dry — over seamlessness, they are telling you something about what seamlessness has cost them.
They are not asking for a turntable in the break room. They are asking to be treated as though they matter more than their output.
That isn’t a technology problem; it never was. And it certainly doesn’t require more technology to fix it.
It requires a human being willing to be one.
There’s so much to learn,
A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons, Associated Press, March 31, 2026
Sturgill Simpsons pulls off an unusual chart feat, All Things Considered, March 26, 2026
A new generation is reviving the iPod for distraction-free listening, Associated Press, April 9, 2026
Favorite black pens, Favorite blue pens (Instagram)
Young people are turning to old-school hobbies to get off their phones, Associated Press March 9, 2026
A set of principles and processes I speak about and coach companies on. I’d be delighted to see how I might help your team.
Love the framing of retreat and I think you’re right on that!
The heady days of the Content Factory, promoted posts and testing social media strategies across platforms including the then brand-new TikTok! Geofencing anyone?
Today I have no social media accounts and enjoy the uncluttered quiet and the joy of curling up with a book.