I’m sorry chaps, but I just can’t do this anymore. My analogue fingers seize up, I have forgotten how important tasks were once accomplished, I now require football-stadium lighting in order to see, I often need to take a pee before the glue has set, and farting has become dangerous. Oh, and: What did you say? There is no glory in any of this. For a man who used his hands to build things for over forty years, and no longer can, the frustration is depressing.
Analogue man has thus been relieved of his duties via a combination of physical malfunction and his inability to be successfully digitised. The world he knew and understood has been transformed into a world he struggles to relate to. Creativity cannot occur without empathy, without the sense of belonging, and it was the creative drive that kept him going. They admire his creations still, but have no appetite for more; technology has rendered analogue man ‘a thing of the past’.
In his place has become the digital man/woman, the technologically-dependent, now-automated biological entity. And whilst he understands the principles of digital audio, he cannot relate to it. Somehow, he feels his innate biology is being cheated. Thus, analogue man is out-dated and unwanted; he doesn’t fit in anymore, doesn’t tick all the necessary boxes, questions things, doubts official narratives and is inclined to be stroppy.
Stroppy man made some interesting machines – machines which delighted the minds of other men, got them dancing, weeping or archiving – which he would not have achieved had he followed the diktats of his ‘superiors’ and the servile unquestioning they demanded. Many of those machines are still at work, still enriching the souls of those open to enrichment, still transcribing discs from ancient times. And, one day, a small boy will watch this record-playing process with awe and wonder, and be beguiled forever. He be blessed.
Analogue man is troubled by the children of the digital world. The young females, in particular, who now seem incapable of being, without a hand-held gadget to guide them. They live in a land of pixelated, narcissistic make-believe which has robbed them of their original selves. Pre-programmed and, as Menken observed, “ready to gulp down ready-made ideas”, they are lost to humanity. Also, their music is crap.
Analogue man thus expires.