Reading, Analog, and the Physical World

A defense of physical media — film over infinite frames, e-ink over glowing feeds, the durable archive of negatives and books against the churn of the digital.

The highlights gathered here form a quiet argument: that some things are worth doing the slow, expensive, breakable way. They defend film against the infinite-frame digital blast, the tactile aperture ring against the touchscreen, the physical strip of negatives against the cloud, and the book in the park against the phone by the bed. The thread running through all of them is that friction is not a bug — it is the mechanism by which attention, craft, and memory are made to happen at all.

Artificial friction, and why humans need it

Craig Mod's clearest statement of the case is a defense of shooting film that admits, upfront, to being "dorky and technical (and excuse-laden)." What he likes is the pain: "I like the strange pain of the shots, that each one counts and costs and in that way causes me to look more closely."¹ A single frame on his Mamiya runs about ¥500 all-in. He could, in principle, be just as deliberate with a digital M11 — but he isn't, and he knows why: "humans are quirky and sometimes we need artificial friction to do The Thing."¹ The cost per frame is the whole point; it manufactures the care that abundance quietly dissolves.

The friction reshapes attention in a specific direction — toward light. "I think much much much more about the light in a scene when shooting film," he writes. "With digital, you sort of never really have to think about light, not with the same intimacy or concentration."¹ Where a modern sensor can shoot at 12,800 ISO and recover a botched exposure in post, 400-speed film forces you to "feel the difference between an F2 and F1.4 aperture mightily" — to remember "that these are machines with limitations, responding to the physical world, that light is a physical thing."¹ The constraint is what returns you to the physical.

The tool as craft object

If film restores attention through scarcity, the camera itself can restore it through design. Arun Venkatesan's affection for the Leica Q is entirely tactile: "Every interaction is delightfully tactile. The aperture ring and shutter speed dial are weighted just enough... The lack of superfluous features guarantees that I'll find the control I seek every time."² The absence of features is the feature — fewer things between hand and image.

Sigma's BF camera pushes this to a manufacturing philosophy. Each five-axis CNC machine takes seven hours to carve a single aluminum unibody; only nine cameras come off the line per day. Venkatesan reads this labor as "the Japanese tradition of kodawari, the uncompromising commitment to perfection,"³ and closes with Okakura Kakuzō from The Book of Tea: "A single masterpiece can teach us more than any number of the mediocre products of a given period or school."³ A well-made object is a teacher. That accounts for what he elsewhere calls Leica's "strong gravity pulling a certain set of people into its orbit" — a pull that is "multi-modal, coming from its history, attention to design, association with iconic photographers, and more."⁴

Photography as possession — the counter-current

The user did not only flag the romance of cameras; he flagged Susan Sontag's warning about what cameras do to experience. Sontag's On Photography is the skeptical voice in this collection. To photograph, she argues, is not neutral: "there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves... it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed."⁵ The very language betrays it — we "load," "aim," and "shoot," and "just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder — a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."⁵

Her sharpest point is about travel and the loss of presence, and it sits in direct tension with the loving photo-essays above. Photography "develops in tandem with... tourism," offering "indisputable evidence that the trip was made,"⁵ yet the camera becomes a screen between self and world: "Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on."⁵ Taken to its endpoint, "having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it."⁵ Where Mallarmé said everything exists to end in a book, "today everything exists to end in a photograph."⁵ The defense of analog, then, is not naïve tool-worship — it holds this critique in the same hand.

The permanence of the physical archive

The most "unassailable" reason Mod gives for film is not aesthetic but archival. "I love having a physical archive of all my photos. I love that I have these immutable, plastic strips that should last a good hundred years."¹ By contrast, the bulk of his digitally-shot work "exists without corporeal evidence," and that unsettles him: film is "durable evidence of life and work done."¹ Against the churn of formats and clouds, a negative is a thing you can hold in a hundred years — the physical world keeping its receipts.

This connects to a durability logic the user flags elsewhere. Steph Ango's "cost per use" heuristic argues that "durable and repairable things may cost more upfront, but over time they cost less than things that break and need to be replaced,"⁶ and that "the best things to splurge on are the things you use the most."⁶ The ideal cost per use trends to zero, since "the most cost-effective choice is to not buy something you don't need."⁶ It rhymes with Derek Sivers's WEALTH = HAVE ÷ NEED — "the easiest way to increase your wealth is to decrease your needs... It's an inner game."⁷ A few durable, well-loved analog objects beat a churning pile of disposable ones.

The glowing feed and "too much movement"

The physical-world defense extends past cameras to the device that ate them. Mod frames creative work as endangered above all by the smartphone: "it is the smartphone against which you need to protect yourself the most."⁸ He calls it "the terrible Stone of Terrenon" and refuses to let it into the bedroom — "the sacred space of minimal movement maximal sleep. (Bringing a phone into a bedroom feels like wearing shoes inside a house: gross and very wrong.)"⁸ To touch it in the morning is "to butter bread at a volume that will burst ear drums... so much movement, and yet it's so seductive, that movement."⁸ The alternative he wants is stubbornly analog: "Sitting in Fort Greene Park with a book will, I hope, be the shape of many a morning."⁸

The infinite-frame logic he distrusts in photography now spills into moving images. One flagged tweet shows a creator re-editing the Fellowship of the Ring trailer "as if Studio Ghibli directed it" for $250 of Kling AI credits⁹; another finds an iPhone 14 Pro "surprisingly good and matched well with the professional camera."¹⁰ The frames get cheaper, more numerous, more synthetic — which is precisely the abundance that makes the deliberate, costly, physical frame feel worth defending.

Reading, presence, and being there before the thing arrives

Underneath the gear is a stance toward attention. Mod invokes Wim Wenders's Perfect Days and its hero Hirayama as the model: "Those earlier movies are about searchers... Hirayama is not searching,"¹¹ a "perfect example of how to live." The payoff of all that slow, unglamorous practice is presence — "Being there before a thing's arrival... In knowing where things may appear, and being there in time to witness their emergence. Solitude not only helps, but is essential."¹¹ The true work, he insists after a burnout, "is on the road, doing the hard thing again and again... regardless of if anyone is watching."¹² The same conviction runs through his walking memoir: "the only true walk is the re-walk. You cannot know a place without returning."¹⁵ Knowledge, like a negative, accrues only through repeated, physical contact — "concerted, present effort, controlled attention, a gentle and steady gaze upon it all."¹⁵

Reading is that practice's oldest form. In Norwegian Wood, Nagasawa reads the un-trendy classics on principle: "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That's the world of hicks and slobs."¹³ And Murakami's narrator names why one writes things down at all: "I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."¹³ The book — like the negative, like the CNC'd camera body, like the phone kept out of sight — is a physical anchor for a mind that would otherwise be swept along by "a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor."⁵ The user even flags a memory-technique thread with a note that practicing it "made a big difference in memory"¹⁴: attention, deliberately cultivated, against the churn.

mindmap
  root((A defense of<br/>physical media))
    Friction as feature
      "each one counts and costs"
      artificial friction to do The Thing
      attention to light
    The tool as craft
      tactile aperture ring
      kodawari / single masterpiece
      Leica's gravity
    Permanence
      immutable plastic strips ~100 yrs
      cost per use / durability
      decrease your needs
    Against the feed
      phone never in the bedroom
      too much movement
      infinite AI frames
    Presence
      being there before arrival
      read to think for yourself
      write to comprehend

Related

• The Attention Economy and Dopamine Culture
• Books, Reading, and Narrative Craft
• Writing and Note-Taking as Thinking
• Design as Craft and Simplicity
• Walking as Practice
• Desire, Status, and the Psychology of Enough
• Craig Mod
• Haruki Murakami
• Japan
• Overview