Do you want pristine mental health? Dolphin-soft clear skin? Your ex to finally call you? Your parents to finally give you the emotional thumbs-up emoji oft-craved but never quite received? Here's a neat trick, apparently: just buy more vinyl records. Like nicotine addicts tossing their apartment to find a vape, a certain neolithic cadre of the Too Online are in a feral scramble to find alternatives to the modern (modem?) condition. These grasping fingers occasionally latch around an idea down the back of the couch, lint-flecked and familiar, that they can never quite seem to just throw out: the internet has cooked everyone's brains so let's go back a few decades to before one jacked-in in the first place.

While appealing to a regression to traditional values should be self-evident as a conservative impulse, this idea is picking up traction at a rate proportionate to the construction of data centres. Digital technology has apparently sparked its red lightsaber, so analogue technology must be cast as our Obi-Wan Kenobi. "2026 Will Be The Return of the Analog," apparently, but besides being inane wish-fulfillment, that also seems like a horrible fucking idea.

According to Save The Planet Society in that Instagram post, this will not be "as an aesthetic, but as a response to subscription culture, digital disposability and invisible waste." Okay let's go: that stuff is gross. Over 20 slides, Save The Planet Society rolls out a pretty rap sheet of the sins of Online: rentier capitalism demands people access art and culture in monthly installments rather than owning something you're allowed to "lend, resell, archive"; the capriciousness of centralised platforms means "a licensing deal changes and entire catalogues vanish"; ecological waste mounts to support this cycle.

All those things are true and real issues. As Yanis Varoufakis argues in Technofeudalism, digital technology (specifically the internet) failed to realise his father's dream of a great Marxist enabling and instead enabled a mutant strain of late stage hypercapitalism. If you weren't already a dotcom millionaire in the 2000s, you now exist as a plump fruit to squeeze for the extractive class and nothing else. Except:

Let's keep it honest to the spirit of Save The Planet Society's post and talk about access to art and culture, rather than the broader problems of capitalism in its digital forms. Let's also try to take it in good faith. We don't need to labor, for example, how physical media doesn't prohibit rentier capitalism; Netflix was originally a subscription service for DVDs you could actually hold and the ostensible analogue-ness (you see where this quickly gets sticky, DVDs being anything but analogue) only limiting the scale of the renting, not its possibility.

Looking at the position here with anything but the most forgiving eye rapidly makes it incoherent. Are they advocating for tangibility? So, I guess buying vinyl records online is out. I guess a VHS played on a CRT TV isn't exactly digital, but all the "dumb" phones in their slides could play video games and let you download ringtones; most of the time to make a call you had to subscribe to a carrier service too. If the idea is to privilege Things You Can Hold In Your Home, I wonder if Hello Fresh is in play.

No, let's take it like this. Analogue technology: you know it when you see it and you can argue about the rest. Even without getting into the frayed threads so ready to be pulled to unravel the whole thing, there's enough to talk about.

A Return of the Analogue Will Not Solve These Problems

Broadly we've got three notions here:

One thousand years ago, if you wanted to listen to music, the norm was you went into a record store and bought it. Maybe you even listened to it first on the headphones in the listening booth and maybe the guy behind the counter got kinda mad that you just kept coming in to listen to albums without buying anything. Probably, sometimes, you bought something. You could then take it home and listen to it whenever you wanted. That seems pretty good, right?

How did that album get to your house? First, you had to find out about the artist. If you didn't have a cool older sibling or neighbourhood weirdo, you probably found out about it from the TV or the radio. When I was growing up in Australia, that meant hearing about it on one of the four commercial radio stations or seeing a music video on one of the two channels that regularly aired music videos. If you were really on top of it, you'd have the tape or VHS recorder ready to tape it for yourself to listen back, and after wearing that out, you were ready to go to the store.

If you were in luck, the store had already ordered the album to stock. There were a few of these stores where I grew up and they were all massive chains. They had all the hot new albums. There weren't that many hot new albums to get because there were only a few record labels, which also happened to be vertically integrated entertainment conglomerates with offices on every continent (okay, not that one).

If you weren't in luck, the store hadn't ordered the album. Or maybe you were late: your favourite artist was off-cycle, suddenly their albums weren't in stores any more. Or the label dropped them, leaving them financially destitute (they never did recoup that advance; you should've bought the album sooner) with no career recourse (Universal weren't picking up Warner's rejects) and suddenly your only hope of getting the record was scouring the classifieds in the back of one of two newspapers for second-hand records.

A couple of networks advertised a handful of record labels and their stable of artists to sell their records in a couple of shops owned by the same people who owned those shops in every other suburb. In these analogue times, was that decentralised? When things lined up, it was great, and most of the time it did because you only knew about a handful of artists at a time. You had a pretty fair bet, thanks to the closeness of the major labels with the distribution channels, to get what you were looking for. But step off this golden path and you had no other choice but to either not access your favourite art at all, or wait for it to come on TV or the radio. Was that better than what you've got now?

No, I reckon, but no twice: No, because unless you were either extremely patient and diligent, or simply chased the charts, you were locked out of access to the art you liked completely. No, because in many ways, what you've got now is barely different. The power dynamics have shifted slightly (the platforms for distribution are now more powerful than the labels) but the situation is familiar: a handful of companies control the terms by which you access what you love.

It Must Be Some Kind of Hellmouth Jacuzzi

Where the differences exist, it's better now than it used to be. As a byproduct of the zero-sum game of the attention economy, platforms needed to make more music available to a listener than they'd ever had before. For 14 bucks in 1999, I could buy Will Smith's canonical second album Willennium and listen to it whenever I wanted. For 14 bucks in 2025, I can freely explore the entire canon of house music whenever I want (for one month). This is obviously a facile argument, but yes, it is, isn't it?

The shift towards subscription streaming has had disastrous societal consequences, but the consequences to the personal experience are that music is available more widely and fluidly than ever. The problems with the former are numerous and seemingly indomitable, but appealing to the latter, that going through the analogue circus is somehow better as a listener, is a losing game.

You aren't healing the barest scratch on the world by contriving to be inconvenienced. You're just whipping yourself and calling it penance.

This fallacy arises because the societal consequences and the personal ones are inextricably linked. The major streaming platforms and their repugnant owners had to make you an offer you can't refuse. Where the Torment Nexus meme has come to life too many times in the past decade to count, let me offer a corollary: the Hellmouth Jacuzzi. Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, and Instagram aren't Torment Nexuses, they're precision engineered to be maximally pleasing to the end user. Obviously that's a hilarious joke given how painful they are to use in so many ways, but they're undeniably addictive to help you swallow what a catastrophe they are on a macro level. Pretend that's not true and log off forever.

But if one is inextricable from the other, reaching for the opposite sounds reasonable: if this state of personal ultra-convenience leads to societal destruction, cultivating personal inconvenience must also result in societal healing. But as you've just recalled with me, a "return of the analogue" amounts to putting everyone in a similar state of control by centralised giga-companies. You aren't healing the barest scratch on the world by contriving to be inconvenienced. You're just whipping yourself and calling it penance.

At least in the realm of the digital, when everything sucks, I can post through it.

There is an environmental cost to all this posting through it, an aspect only gestured at relative to what you might expect from an account with "Save The Planet" in the name. Data centres have captured the public imagination in 2025 for good reason: they are the earthly tether to the otherwise vaporous and unstrangleable architects of our misery. You probably can't get close enough to a tech CEO to tell them how you really feel, but a data centre is probably coming to your town real soon.

While the environmental impact of data centres has largely focused on AI, a largely unwanted nuisance that can barely make a decent pie chart, Save The Planet Society instead implicate the entire digital realm as the fingers on data centres' triggers. And, sure: data centres aren't just an AI thing. They're also the backbone of whatever company you work for, the reason you can send your friend money for beers, the holders of your government identity, your Depop account, and every photo you've ever taken.

For sure, a lot of the internet is a massive waste of non-renewable resources. Some of it is also pretty useful. Data centres using "1-2% of global electricity" sounds like a lot. It's probably too much. But what's a more appropriate number? What would buying analogue products do to that number? The argument doesn't seem to be that digital society as a whole should be dismantled, so what amount of electricity is reasonable for supporting just the necessities (whatever they are; to be figured out later, suppose) in this return to the analogue?

Nitpicking is unbecoming, but without a tangible goal, the proposition seems to be: you should buy more vinyl records so that number (and other forms of waste) goes down some. Where other commentators may advocate for new research into building sustainable technologies to mitigate against particular increases in global temperature, say, or industrial descaling via massive public pressure, Save The Planet Society have the silver bullet: consumerism.

Maybe this is way off base. The problem with asserting economic and artistic reform in a series of Instagram slides, like so many ills of platform capitalism, is that it's optimised for shareability rather than clarity. Maybe Save The Planet Society is not advocating for a total turn back of the clock, in which case let's quickly assess how viable their proposal is by investigating what it takes to buy a vinyl record in 2025. "A record on your shelf doesn't require a server farm to exist," after all. But doesn't it?

The demos were recorded on a phone and sent to the producer as digital files. The software to mix it was downloaded from a web server. The order to the vinyl plant was put in via a website and any communications about when the artist or label could pick them up happened over email. If it was a label, they probably forwarded the email to the artist; if it was the artist themselves, they probably booked the van to go pick up the plates on a website as well. Any discussions with record stores to stock the record? Emails. Or maybe they just sell the record on Bandcamp, hosted on... a server farm.

A willful ignorance of supply chain logistics runs through the Instagram post, and while none of the aforementioned strictly requires a server farm, it currently does, and it requires a digital future - not an analogue one - to remedy if preserving everything else is the goal.

The Internet Is Good, Actually

Just Buy Different Stuff is a pretty wild take from a nominally climate-focused group given the history of that argument in the climate space specifically. The same thinking led to the proliferation of the massively fraudulent carbon offset industry, while emphasising personal consumer choices as an agent of change is why so many people diligently recycle, despite 95% of it ending up in landfill.You actually, demonstrably, cannot spend your way out of this.

The internet's present was not inevitable. Let's establish where we are first re: our access to art and culture on the internet. Books are "purchased" from a handful of retailers and come with DRM to stop you moving the files around. Those books can be remotely deleted from the device on which you read them. Music is highly accessible while paying a monthly fee, although access isn't granted to individual songs and albums but the platform itself. You don't control what's playable on that platform, when it will be added or removed, and both will happen seemingly arbitrarily. TV and movies are the same. Licensing for music, TV, and films on those platforms sometimes means you can't access everything you want from the same place, so you might have to maintain several monthly fees to access the things you want.

Yuck! What is actually missing here that was present in the analogue era one ought return to? At its crux, it's this: you know what you want, you know where to get it, and you're ostensibly paying the people who put it there. This is the economic imperative behind the vinyl resurgence: the transaction of platform capitalism is so diffuse and abstract that the consumer rarely feels like they're rewarding the artist they like. Handing over cash for a vinyl record feels more directly like an interaction between fan and artist. It isn't, but it's an appealing fantasy streaming platforms don't permit.

Maybe, while reading the last two paragraphs, you thought "But what about...?" one or more times. You can't more or less directly pay an artist you like for their album: but what about Bandcamp? You can't listen to music without paying a streaming service every month: but what about YouTube? You don't control what's playable: but what about my mp3 collection? Hey, I was just trying to more concretely sketch the strawman that would compel a "return of the analogue", but yeah, you make a good point, you smart little cookie, you.

Even in the present, options exist to undermine the notion that digital technology has trapped us inescapably in a Hellmouth Jacuzzi. Rather than discard digital technology entirely, it's worth looking at those options and the alternative futures once promised by the internet.

During the late 90s and early 2000s, the alleged halcyon era of art and culture, some people were really pissed off with how hard it was to listen to music. Not only was distribution arbitrated by conglomerates who, these people felt, had no genuine interest in music, but the increasing prices people paid for that music didn't seem to go to the artists anyway. Through peer-to-peer platforms like Napster, KaZaA, and later BitTorrent clients, those people just started exchanging music with each other. This was a massive moral ("these people aren't paying my record label, therefore they're bad") and economic ("these people aren't paying") crisis and it took years for the music industry to rally enough technologists to mitigate it. From Napster's debut in 1999 until 2014, the music industry lost revenue year on year. The success of Spotify and other streaming platforms turned that around.

Rather than discard digital technology entirely, it's worth looking at the alternative futures once promised by the internet.

But in those years, the effective lawlessness resulted in an incredible flourishing of culture. Web developers and content creators not yet married to the music industry dollar, but delighted by the free sharing of art, initially catered to listeners, not industry. That got us a song on every MySpace profile. Music blogs like Stereogum and Pitchfork sprung up to share obscure new music, while messageboards like I Love Music and other social spaces like Rate Your Music and Last.fm brought readers and listeners together, cultivating a new stream of taste-making. Sites like Hype Machine sprung up to aggregate and track the movement of this nascent digital music industry that was evolving free from the restraints of the RIAA. One of my favourites was Muxtape, a site that let you upload a bunch of mp3s into a playlist. Unfortunately by the time of its launch in 2008, the music industry was already flexing its litigious muscle against platforms. It didn't live long.

This is not an argument to steal all your music, or your books, television, or movies. But there seems evident to me something in a cultural space free from the domineering control of rights-holders. While digital technology never truly democratised art, it enabled an explosion of indie cultures in music, writing, visual arts, film making, and video games. Thousands of communities flourished in that time, as did thousands of artists, fans, critics, publicists, bookers, managers, directors, engineers, et al. et al. et al. If we're exploring alternatives to the stranglehold of digital cultural landlords, I'd rather model something on that than garroting access to art altogether.

Music is not the only avenue that thrived during this time, although it is a useful proxy for the culture at large. In the visual space, auteur film makers bloomed a new independent cinema movement. Meanwhile, short form video was invented thanks to new viewing habits as well as upload limits on video content. There is a direct line between 2007's Flagpole Sitta lip dub and Catherine McCafferty's Pretty Gay, and if you wanna argue we should rewrite history so that doesn't exist, you might be a dumb motherfucker. Visual and narrative artists for some of the greatest video games in history cut their teeth drawing and writing fanfic back then too, while free access to software like Photoshop, RPG Maker, 3D modelling suites , and SDKs and level editors like Source and Hammer raised a new generation of video game developers.

If we're to leapfrog back to before that time, I might consent only for the inherent frustrations to stoke a second round. Instead, if given the choice for where to go next, it might be more useful to take the lessons from that time - that the fluid access to art enabled by digital technologies resulted in a generational artistic revolution - and what we've learned since, and do something new.

How to Save the Planet

If the internet is largely dominated by platforms that are...

...is a better internet possible? Yes. Parts of it have existed before, parts of it exist now. Here is a technological and legislative agenda to address all of Save The Planet Society's issues, except one.

First, decentralisation is important. Buying a vinyl record does not make music access any more decentralised than buying a salad from the Coles deli threatens the supermarket duopoly. Just because nobody can tell you what to do with something once you've bought it (decentralised consumption), that says nothing about its freedom and availability to exist and be distributed in the first place (decentralised production).

Instead, the new vision should be familiar: streaming platforms that allow people to upload and share art, what they're listening to, watching, and reading, and talk about it with each other. But where current platforms more or less rely on a theistic model, with users praying the developers and shareholders align with what they want, these new platforms will prioritise three core pillars:

They All Speak to Each Other

In dork talk, this means they're interoperable. Part of the shibari of platform capitalism is its zero-sum nature: everyone will use only our platform, we set the rules, we define the content, you don't have a choice, but we'll make it worth your while. All this bullshit is bypassable once you relinquish the need to control the user experience. If you only want to provide a way for people to access things they like, rather than needing to monopolise their lives to sell on to advertisers, you can get on with the business of making something people enjoy.

If you want to sign up to VeryGoodMusic.com, you should be able to listen to music on VeryGoodMusic.com, but you should also be able to listen to music uploaded to ReallyExcellentMusic.com. Why wouldn't you just sign up to ReallyExcellentMusic.com? Maybe you like the UI on VeryGoodMusic.com better, maybe you just prefer their ethos, maybe ReallyExcellentMusic.com has a lot of good songs but has a weird amount of Nazis on the platform despite all the really excellent music and you just... don't wanna be around that.

Either way, you should have the choice of where you wanna live online without sacrificing what stuff you want to access. This, at its heart, is what ActivityPub is all about. Imagine if you have a Netflix subscription but wanted to watch something in Prime's catalogue. This is not some ludicrous fever dream, it's a technological reality that is already in practice, begging for the social and political will to apply to art.

They're Open-Source

Spotify's algorithms, to say nothing of how the rest of the business and the platform operates, is a trade secret. This is completely hostile to users as well as artists and the music industry. The good news is: it's optional. If Spotify went down tomorrow, everyone on Spotify would try to find something as close to it as possible, hoping it's as good. Fortunately, there are a couple of options, but what if there were thousands? What if you could start your own?

This is the goal of open source platforms. Even if a platform you were on didn't go down, but made decisions you don't like, or you just wanted to have more control over your own data, if it was open source, you could fork it. Spin up your own as it is, or modify it if you're handy with code, or knew someone who was. Whether with your own real life friends or with a diffuse online community, you and the people you like would not be held to the ransom of a CEO's genocidal investment impulses because you could literally start your own.

Content is Licensed So You Can Actually Use It

The "content" (artistic products of people's lives and experiences) must be permissively licensed. I like Creative Commons but I'm not opposed to other ideas. The goal should be promoting the creation of art that can be remixed, commented on, developed, or even wholesale republished in a way that preserves the credits of the original artist. Do you watch video essays on YouTube? You've probably seen very thoughtful people spruik very dubious brands because using music or film clips is liable to get all the other revenue from their video claimed by an entity like Warner. Artists should have the ability to define granular conditions for their art to interact with its audience. They should also be able to use others' art in a way that respects that artist's wishes.

You could start making that platform tomorrow. That is a physical reality. What takes more time is the institutional and legislative change required to enable it to succeed. Rights-holders, occasionally the artists themselves, are very keen to hold onto copyright and other intellectual property vestiges because of some idea that that's the only way to get paid, and that nobody would make art if their intellectual property wasn't guarded like a diamond in a trap-laden cave. Permissive licensing doesn't seem to have prevented millions of web servers from existing, and in fact some of the Hellmouth Jacuzzis like Netflix rely on permissively licensed software that's still in active development. Copyright does not seem like a prerequisite for creativity. But on the part of artists getting paid:

But On the Part of Artists Getting Paid...

"Get paid" is a complicated phrase, so let's be clear. The goal is that artists should be able to afford the conditions required for them to make art. Support mounts for some degree of a redistribution of wealth: hopefully you don't need convincing that some people, whether tech CEOs or military-industrial contractors (what's the difference), have Too Much Money, and ought to have some of it channeled to people making things that actually delight.

Artists, craftspeople, any type of cultural contributor nourish us as much as the healthcare industry and the people who tend the plants at public parks. They should be commercially awarded as such through state funding, at a minimum, and otherwise derive their income from economics like profit-sharing from platforms and patronage models from fans. Absolutely not through the commodification of "listens" or "views". Good grief.

These are not simple solutions. They raise other questions. Should a bedroom guitarist who only needs an amp and Logic Pro get the same stipend as a film crew? If you don't run your own version of The Platform but you use your friend's instance, should you pay them? What delineates "artist" and "audience" in a profit-sharing model if someone uploads a show they made and you make a video critiquing it? Or if you remix someone's song? Ideally, the interoperable and open source nature of these imaginary platforms would resolve some of these queries over time, but there aren't easy answers.

The ethereality of the digital is how it can free you. The only thing that has been restrained is your imagination.

The point is that they could be answered by you, your friends, the artists you like, and whoever runs the platforms, in direct conversation. The point is, very few people are currently bothering with these questions, preferring to either run to other monopolistic platforms in a competition for lesser evils, or propose abandoning the project of the digital society altogether for an even more centralised and restricted past. But where "the analogue" only returns us to a past that failed due to its material constraints, the digital can offer solutions only possible because of its (partial) dematerialisation. The ethereality of the digital is how it can free you. The only thing that has been restrained is your imagination.

The one issue of Save The Planet Society's thesis this doesn't address is that it doesn't give people something to hold. Object fetishisation attends "return to analogue"-alike critiques like static on a turntable. While the post protests that the vinyl resurgence and "Gen Z buying secondhand iPods, Walkmans, dumb phones isn't about aesthetics, it's about opting out," is that believable? Aesthetics are a completely reasonable pursuit. Christ, one cannot beg hard enough for a proper leftist aestheticism, and lord knows Millennials lived through interminable academicising of affect, but call it what it is. As much as thrifted plaid shirts in the mid aughts could be either a deliberate or indirect statement about the economic millieu of a generation of young people, it was also a badge of belonging. The former doesn't erase the latter, but pretending it does is pretty silly.

But if your remaining concern regarding the digitalisation of culture is you don't get to have a toy, you might not have a serious critique. Instead, digital technology can enable a real decentralisation of access to art, as it has before and does now, albeit outside the mainstream.

How to Save the Planet (Remix)

What this does address, however, is some of the climate impact. Modern computers are pretty incredibly fast. Whatever device you're reading this on could almost certainly run any of the software needed to realise the vision above. You've probably upgraded your phone or laptop in the past five years. That old phone or laptop could be the server for your friends, or collective of internet weirdoes, to share and talk about art. You could probably run it off a Raspberry Pi and some external hard drives.

Modern platforms require massive server farms because the computational power to host a service for absolutely everyone - to say nothing of the cycles required to harvest your data - is massive. But a decentralised platform could exist in your palm right now. "If we do analog right this time, most of the waste should already exist," Save The Planet Society say. As long as you have a phone or a computer, this can be true for digital technology too.

Where it isn't true, however, is in a hypothetical return to the analogue. Half of the people who buy vinyl records don't even own a record player. How many people willing to return to buying cassettes, VHS tapes, DVDs, and other physical media have the devices to play those either? While those physical artefacts can mitigate their climate impact by their resale longevity, a digital file can last as long as there are people to share it. And if you share a digital file with a friend, now two people get to enjoy it for the climate cost required for one person. Half the price, twice the fun.

This is to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of vinyl records printed as victims of the vinyl resurgence that never got bought, but instead sit in sharehouse sheds all over Australia. At least the energy required to stream a song to someone is accountable; if you pressed 1000 records and only 349 got sold, you still spent 1000 records worth of energy.

What's inevitable, with laser-guided certainty, is that as long as artists and audiences ignore the potential of digital technology, they are doomed to repeat the cycle of disempowerment that followed Spotify's debut. This is not an appeal to play nice with the tech industry. Christ, even as a tech bro, is there a species more loathsome? But in the dichotomy of analogue vs digital, one was so mediated by concentrated wealth and influence that people turned to literal crime en masse to escape, while the other spawned a million unrealised promises before it was reined in.

A tenuous "return of the analogue" locks us into the infinite groove of centralisation and control, ostensibly what we're trying to escape. But the digital ether presents unlimited possibilities for anyone with the courage to try to wrest control of it back. Something better is possible. You just won't find it in a store.