One of Kim’s core points throughout the book is that aesthetic value doesn’t track forward with technology, but backwards. As tools become cheaper, faster, and more widely accessible, the images they produce tend to lose cultural weight. What gains value are the qualities those tools no longer reproduce.

A return to analogue could mean more gallery openings, more pen pals, more artist-run spaces teaching esoteric processes. More objects that move hand to hand, rather than feed to feed.

The Arts & Crafts movement, for instance, emerged alongside mass mechanisation and responded not with nostalgia, but with structural reorganisation. Designers and makers pushed back against the factory’s division of labour by reasserting continuity between thinking and making. Objects were produced slowly, often collaboratively, with an emphasis on... See more

Even when something is openly acknowledged as AI-made, there’s still a scramble to reintroduce analogue signals – artefacts of process, scraps of effort – as a way to borrow credibility through the performance of craft. Take Coca-Cola’s annual holiday ad, once again made with generative AI and seemingly designed in a lab to tank stock value. After... See more

As trivial as this sounds, the difference between an object and an image of an object isn’t minor (shout out to Magritte). It’s the difference between encounter and representation – something that exists once, and something that has no unit. A Polaroid on Instagram isn’t analogue in any meaningful sense. It’s only analogue when someone’s physically... See more

Once handmade becomes valuable, it becomes something to mimic. The aesthetic becomes a proxy for the labour and the signal gets mistaken for the thing itself.