The video is forty-seven seconds long. In it, a young woman empties her bag onto a marble countertop. Out comes a planner, its cover already worn at the corners from what the caption assures us is “heavy daily use.” A traveler’s notebook, its pages populated not with writing but with a careful arrangement of unused stickers, there to be, in her words, “cute.” A disposable film camera. A portable CD player and a small wallet of discs. A small pouch of colored fineliners. An adult coloring book, pristine. A ball of yarn and two knitting needles, also pristine. A paperback, spine uncracked. She mentions she has pen pals. She then clarifies that she wants pen pals. She would love to use all of this to write to them someday.

Then, from a zippered interior pocket: a Nintendo Switch, for cozy games. And an iPad, for a digital coloring book.

The bag is canvas, a natural fiber, purchased from a small independent Etsy seller — the link is in the bio — currently sold out.

The caption reads: disconnecting to reconnect 🌿.

The video has four hundred thousand likes.

Search “analog bag” on any given platform, and you will find hundreds of variations on the same forty-seven seconds. The specific contents shift, sometimes it’s a typewriter, a genuine one, hauled to a coffee shop and never opened; sometimes it’s a set of watercolors; sometimes it’s a Frasier-era Filofax, ironically reclaimed, but the structure is invariant. The unpacking. The arrangement. The caption gestures toward presence, toward slowness, toward a life less mediated. The product links, etc.

What you are watching, though it will not be described this way in the caption, is a consumer haul.

This would be merely annoying; the internet is, after all, a vast and generously populated museum of the merely annoying, except that some of these videos are being made in earnest. The young woman with the pristine yarn genuinely believes she is doing something different. Something resistant. She has located, in a canvas bag sourced from a small independent Etsy seller, a way out of the machine. She is, in the vocabulary currently circulating in these corners of the internet, opting out.

She filmed it on her phone. It is currently being watched on yours.

Here is the thing about counter-movements: they always make this mistake. Because the logic of the machine is harder to quarantine than conservatives in 2020. You can swap the device. You can’t so easily swap the compulsion.

This is not a new problem. It is, in fact, a very old one.

Every major technological revolution in the last three centuries has produced, with the reliability of a natural law, its own counter-movement.

The first was the Industrial Revolution, steam engines, factories, and the systematic replacement of skilled craftwork with mechanized production. Efficiency went up. Profits went up. The humans operating inside the system were quietly reclassified as inputs. Against this backdrop arose Romanticism. Blake raging against the “dark Satanic Mills,” Wordsworth walking to Tintern Abbey, and Shelley writing a novel about a scientist who builds something he cannot control and is destroyed by it. The Romantics were not wrong about what was happening. They were right about almost all of it. Industrialization did corrupt the landscape. It did flatten the soul. It did reduce human beings to functionaries inside a system that had no particular interest in their interior lives.

It also won. Completely.

The second revolution was electrical: widespread access to electricity, the telephone, the camera, and the ability to keep workers productive through the night because now the lights worked. The third was digital: computers, networks, the internet, the slow migration of almost every human activity onto a rectangle of glass. Each revolution rewrote the terms of daily life. Each produced its anxieties. Each produced its resistance. And each resistance, without exception, was eventually absorbed, commodified, and sold back to the people who’d mounted it.

The Romantic countryside became a tourist destination. Thoreau’s Walden became a brand. Handmade goods became a premium market segment. The pattern is not complicated: the machine does not fear your rejection of it. Your rejection comes complete with a checkout screen.

We are now, by most reasonable accounts, at the threshold of a fourth revolution: the age of artificial intelligence, of algorithms that mediate creativity and decision-making, of systems that can perform cognitive labor the way steam engines once performed physical labor. And right on schedule, the counter-movement has arrived, canvas bag in hand, Nintendo Switch zipped into the interior pocket, link in bio.

This reaction is understandable. It is. It always has been. The question is whether it has learned anything from the three times it has already failed.

The answer, so far, appears to be no.

The 1890s were not simply a period of aesthetic rebellion. They were a period of concentrated power, political instability, and the particular kind of chaos that follows when a small number of people accumulate wealth faster than any society has previously conceived of. The Andrew Carnegies and John D. Rockefellers of that era did not merely profit from the Industrial Revolution; they became it, bending legislation, crushing labor movements, and rewriting the social contract in the language of efficiency and inevitability. Meanwhile, figures like Oscar Wilde and William Morris mounted their resistance: art for art’s sake, handmade goods, the dignity of craft against the indignity of the assembly line. They were not wrong either. They too lost.

The parallel to our present moment is uncomfortable enough to be worth sitting with. Instead of Carnegie, we have a rotating cast of tech oligarchs who have successfully positioned themselves as populist revolutionaries, a rhetorical trick so audacious it would have impressed the original Robber Barons considerably. The aesthetic counter-movement has arrived in the form of cottagecore and analog bags and artisanal everything. And the political instability that accompanied the Gilded Age, the rise of the Populist Party, the anti-establishment fury of William Jennings Bryan, has reasserted itself in forms that feel like direct replays, right down to the demagogues and the desperate sincerity of the people following them.

Meanwhile, as I write this, the Middle East is once again on fire, a conflict of competing interests, imperial calculus, and genuine human catastrophe playing out over the same oil infrastructure that powers the servers that host the TikTok videos about disconnecting from civilization. The machine doesn’t pause for your analog bag. The geopolitical order that keeps the lights on, the internet running, and the Etsy shipping lanes open doesn’t restructure itself around the aesthetics of presence. The Gilded Age had its crises too: labor wars, imperial adventures, the grinding pressure of a system consuming its own people. The Romantics and the Aesthetes responded with beauty, feeling, and a principled rejection of utilitarianism.

History does not record that it helped.

So here is the grand old question that none of this, not the analog bag, not the dumb phone, not the cottagecore kitchen, not the zine, not the artisanal candle can actually answer: what exactly are you returning to?

The Romantics had a genuine answer to that question. Nature. The sublime. A world that predated the machine and would outlast it. Wordsworth walked to Tintern Abbey — there was no audience, no caption, no algorithm rewarding his engagement with the countryside. Blake’s rejection of industrial England cost him. The Romantics were wrong about a lot of things, and romanticism as a movement had its own blind spots and contradictions, but the rejection was real.

What the current moment offers instead is the aesthetic of rejection, the feeling of opting out, commodified, available for next-day delivery, filmed in natural light on a phone with a very good camera. The confusion here is between appearance and practice, between performing presence and actually achieving it. That confusion didn’t originate with social media, or smartphones, or algorithms. Those things were already found there, and they built a business model on top of it.

Every technological revolution produces its Romantics. And every generation of Romantics makes the same mistake, treating the machine as the disease, when the machine is really just the most recent and most efficient delivery system for something much older. The terror of a moment that isn’t for anything. The discomfort of existing without an audience, without a purpose, without a story being told about who you are and why it matters.

The canvas bag is a story. So is the yarn. So is the pristine adult coloring book, carried everywhere and opened nowhere.

I don’t say any of this from a position of exemption. I have a minimal phone launcher designed to put friction between me and my worst habits. I have a Substack, which is to say I am parading my thinking for an audience — and this very essay is, among other things, a piece of content. The recursive absurdity of writing a critique of performed authenticity for public consumption is not lost on me.

But I think there is a difference between acknowledging that the machine’s logic is inside you and simply giving in to it. Between using a tool and being used by one. What that difference actually looks like in practice, what it costs, what it requires, and whether it’s achievable by someone with a Google Pixel and a Substack… is what Part Two is for.

We’ll get there.