Beyond the Machine: Analog Sea and Maintaining an Offline Collective – Broken Pencil

As I argue in my ‘Offline Manifesto,’ which introduces the new issue three of Analog Sea Review , good art rests upon the artist’s ability to think and feel separately from the crowd, to be alone, to maintain some semblance of interiority.

The question I’m really asking, I realize now, is how to be human. When I write, or read, or paint, I am more of a human than I am a gadget. The words you are reading I first put down in longhand using a sharpened pencil. While I was writing, I did not check my email. At such moments, I feel I’m myself rather than a body attached to a buzzing phone... See more

Many of us yearn for a way to be fully online without all of the mindlessness, passivity and addiction that often entraps us. Some of us oscillate between fully online and fully offline in a sort of mad dance to establish what feels right. Others have lost hope that it’s possible to engage in a way that feels true and alive, and have resigned to us... See more

I think that this whole smartphone scrolling, content consuming, ubiquitous posting, Extremely Online thing is going to go the way of the Fedora, or the Marlboro smoked at cruising altitude in economy class. In the end it is all going to fade. This may not happen for a good number of years, but I truly believe it will happen. I think we’ll look bac... See more

People can only reach us through the post, and we’ve gotten thousands of printed letters from people, who express a lot of appreciation for us, simply saying that things of value must exist offline.

If the prevailing sentiment is that everything should be mediated, not just by screens and apps, but by these massive corporations that are surveilling ... See more

The story of a human retreat from this world, either to the stars above or the virtual realm within, can mask a disregard for or resignation about what is done with the world we do have, both in terms of the structures of human societies and the non-human world within which they are rooted. Put another way, we might say that imagining the digital s... See more