Can Feminists Consciously Go Analogue?

Words: Nellianne Bateman

In the summer of 2025, I was “fun”-employed and depressed. I had spent much of the school year, my first in an MFA program in creative writing, scrolling through Instagram and Facebook Marketplace at my dead-end job at an art fabricator. I knew I wanted to write. I knew I didn’t have the makings of a writing life, something that my MFA promoted. I knew what it looked like, but not what it felt like.

I’d been following Megan Rhiannon and The Common Corner on YouTube for years, two creators who chronicle their experiments with journaling–their calm voices and simple aesthetics encouraged me to slow down. Besides, I had a stack of notebooks that archived my life in ways that my traumatised brain just couldn’t (and can’t!); keeping notebooks allowed me to remember and chronicle events, everything from my morning coffee to a fallout with a friend, that I was likely to forget. Maybe I was primed to fall down the analog rabbit hole long before analog bags–-the phenomenon sweeping TikTok of keeping analog activities to replace the desire to scroll— were a trend. 

It started with purchasing a second-hand analog watch. I got it off TimeEx Rewound. I’d noticed that one of the moments I was most likely to scroll was checking my phone for the time, and then suddenly, I had been on Instagram for an hour. Removing my dependency on my phone felt freeing, like I had unglued something from my eyes.

In response to this freedom, I wrote three essays about analog life in my newsletter. I knew that when I’d spent more than an hour scrolling digital vertical media, I spun with nausea, and my eyes wanted to fall out of my head. I knew when I wrote and read, listened to cassettes on my boombox, knitted and crocheted and drew, I could breathe a little easier. I thought I’d found a solution to my depression.
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Then I started working in content editing in the Fall. I loved — and still love — my job for many reasons. However, I wasn’t expecting to become more glued to my screen than I’d been in months again. Everyone on my team is an absolute marketing scientist; where my writer and academic friends feared the Algorithm — never mind that, as I was learning, each of these sites has a whole different set of them, plural — my colleagues were fascinated by the seemingly infinite number of ways attention could be captured. I got added to an Instagram chat and watched my co-workers pick apart posts, paid ads, and general content, analysing their shareability and why a given post stopped their scroll. I realised, stopping the scroll might be what powers the algorithm.

“The internet does so much good — and so much evil, too - but the beauty of a user-generated attention economy is that we get to decide the proportion of good and evil.”

When I first engaged with Cal Newport’s work, founder of the digital minimalist movement, I was surprised by how little he talked about politics. He hand-waves at billionaire tech CEOs making a profit off of your wasted time, but doesn’t go much further than that. His work, to my mind, would be much more compelling if he at least mentioned what the tech billionaire CEOs were doing with their profits from our attention. Besides, you know, lining their pockets with enough hoarded wealth to end global poverty. The tech billionaires arm Israel to annihilate Gaza. They market their technologies to children, knowing the risks they pose. They fund alt-right politicians. The list, honestly, could go on.

I could go so far as to say that, once I finished this list, the abuses of the algorithm, of its integration with AI technologies, go beyond the realm of politics. Something urgently human is at stake when we decide how we scroll because of how The Algorithm funds and supports the above. 

The truth of my scrolling habits is this: The “content” that recently stopped my scroll was coverage of the recent resistance in Minneapolis against ICE; student protests against the genocide in Gaza and the reciprocal targeting of international students; and a rare school shooting in my home country, Canada. My resistance, my (very limited) activism, is tied to my scrolling habits. 

My father, an ex-UN peacekeeper and navy veteran, made me download, read, and annotate the entire Twitter user agreement when I wanted my first account at 13. When I grumbled at the task, he said, “There are predators out there. They’ve stoked unrest on that site. You’ve got to be careful. I need you to know what you’re getting into.”

At the time, I rolled my eyes. But now, I think my father’s fear might have been warranted. There are predators out there. 

Social media, when viewed as a democratic third space that it was originally intended to be with the founding of Web 1.0, the original form of the internet that we know today, which functioned as a giant information repository,  is an incredibly powerful tool. We need underground mutual aid groups. We need community organising group WhatsApp and Signal chats. We need to spread information rapidly if we have any chance of fighting fascism—everything from Americans alerting their neighbours when there are ICE agents down the street to sharing how to support aid groups helping those impacted by the myriad of ongoing global conflicts. 

Leena Norms did some analog deprogramming earlier this month. At the end of her video, which started as vlogging an attempt to go more analog, she explains why she wants to return to a more moderated use of social media, citing Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos. Crucially, Carney contends that “nostalgia is not a strategy”; longing for the world order, the way we expected global politics to be run in the past, is not going to fight fascism, because the fascists in power are (very eagerly) flipping the script and using any new technology at their disposal 

She says that the big tech companies are waging a kind of war on social media. They are using what were supposed to be our international and democratic third spaces for agendas that quite literally want to wipe out the human race as we know it today. Absconding from these third spaces might constitute manufactured consent, how media can be manipulated to make an artificial public consensus. Maybe going analog, while framed by Newport et al as a way of getting back your humanity, can sometimes be another way to shut your brain off while the fascists have at it. 

Giving up the internet wholesale is just what these billionaires want us to do because it allows them free rein to wage their media war. I refuse to have my consent manufactured when I still see the possibility of the world imagined in Web 1.0. The internet does so much good — and so much evil, too - but the beauty of a user-generated attention economy is that we get to decide the proportion of good and evil. The twisted success of this new era of digital culture is that it has been so good at making us believe otherwise.