In 2005, I helped co-found a home automation and home theater company called Acoustic Designs.

Part of our business, we built rooms for our customers. The good ones were reference-grade: acoustically treated, precision-calibrated, designed to reproduce sound the way the engineer intended when they mixed the record. (You should check out the Acoustic Designs Showroom if you find yourself in Scottsdale, AZ).

When you spend a lot of time in those rooms. You learn what music actually sounds like when fidelity is the goal.

It was peak iPod. CDs were losing ground. People were moving to digital downloads and earbuds. I watched the trade happen in real time: convenience for fidelity. It seemed reasonable.

It kept going.

Spotify launched in 2008. Apple Music in 2015. Streaming became the default. Most people have never heard their favorite album at anything approaching reference quality. The listening room became a relic.

But here's the progression I keep coming back to.

Hi-Fi entered the language in the 1950s as a promise: high fidelity, faithful reproduction of sound. Lo-Fi came later, defined in direct opposition to it. An acknowledgment of what was being left behind. Then Wi-Fi arrived in 1999, coined by a brand consultancy specifically to echo Hi-Fi's credibility.

Except Wi-Fi doesn't actually stand for anything. "Wireless Fidelity" was a backronym added after the fact, then quietly abandoned. The name borrowed the sound of a standard without meaning it.

We didn't just lower fidelity. We stopped expecting it to be a thing.

Then came social media. The attention economy didn't degrade signal quality. It turned attention itself into inventory.

Infinite scroll. Notification design engineered for compulsion. The average person picks up their phone dozens of times a day. Each context switch costs cognitive minutes. Concentration became something you had to actively protect instead of a state that arrived naturally when conditions allowed.

Now AI is entering the picture. It's not competing for your attention anymore. It's offering to take over the work that your attention produces. Not what you read. What you think. The cognition itself.

What are we left with?

Doom scrolling. Short attention spans treated as personality traits instead of design outcomes. Long-form work losing ground to short-form interruption. The listening room replaced by background audio from the same device that manages your calendar, tracks your steps, and interrupts you before you’ve fully woken up.

A low-fidelity signal, everywhere.

Here's what I can't stop thinking about.

While all of this was accelerating, vinyl outsold CDs for the first time since the 1980s. Vinyl listening bars, which started in Tokyo, have spread through most every major city and became actual destinations (C’mon Phoenix, you can do this). People are choosing physical media with audible limitations, a format that punishes skipping, that requires a certain quality of stillness.

The Lofi Girl YouTube channel has thirteen million subscribers. People stream intentionally degraded audio to focus. Not because it sounds better. Because the imprecision creates a texture the nervous system can rest inside.

These people were never alive when vinyl was the default. They didn't grow up in the reference-grade listening rooms I spent time building. They're not nostalgic for something they never had.

They're recovering a signal.

The human nervous system developed in a lo-fi world. Bounded attention. Analog input. Natural gaps between stimuli. It was not built to receive what we've normalized. Wi-Fi culture doesn't just carry information at high volume. It carries it at machine speed, addressed directly at you, designed to prevent you from stopping.

Analog objects don't fix this by removing technology. They fix it by restoring a signal-to-noise ratio the nervous system can actually work with. The resistance of a page. The weight of a pen. The 21-jewel sweep of a mechanical watch hand that doesn't notify, doesn't track, just measures.

Not inferior technology. A different relationship with attention.

The listening bar in Tokyo isn't a museum exhibit. It's a signal recovery environment.

The same question applies to how you use AI.

Most people use it the way they use Wi-Fi: take the convenience, don't ask what fidelity looks like. Output arrives. The thinking that would have happened in the gap quietly doesn't.

The goal isn't to stop using it. It's to design a relationship where AI amplifies your cognition instead of replacing it. Where deep work is protected. Where you're building something different than a better search engine.

The next advantage won’t belong to the people who generate the most output. It will belong to the people who can preserve the highest-quality thinking while using machines that make output effortless.

That's what the next cohort of Beyond the Prompt is designed for. Better thinking as we orchestrate into an agentic workflow. Cohort 2 opens in June.

Praxis

Choose one analog object you already own and assign it a single cognitive task this week.

A notebook for thinking through a problem. A pen for first drafts. A record for focus. A book read for thirty minutes before the phone comes off the charger.

Use only that object for that task. No digital alternative. Five days.

You're not going backward. You're asking a question the listening room already answered: what does the output look like when fidelity is the goal?

Hi-Fi was a promise. Lo-Fi acknowledged what we were losing. Wi-Fi borrowed the language and let the concept go.

What signal are you trying to recover?

– Michael
Founder, The Drop In
& Author of 'Human Traits — a novel exploring humanity's relationship with AI'