It’s 2026, and the internet feels... thin.
We were promised a global village. Instead, we got the "Dead Internet": a digital mall staffed by mannequins, where AI bots argue with other bots in an endless loop of engagement farming. The open web, once a wild frontier of human connection, is now mostly a hallucination.
And we are tired.
You can feel the shift. The "Year of Analog" isn't just a trend piece anymore; it’s a survival mechanism. People are trading smartphones for dumb phones. Independent bookstores are surging. We are craving friction. We are craving weight. We are craving things that exist in three dimensions and cannot be retroactively edited by an algorithm or deleted because a licensing deal expired.
But here is the nuance most people miss: We aren't Luddites. We don't actually want to go back to 1890. We don't want to give up the magic of the digital world—the connectivity, the layers of information, the sound, the immersion.
We just want that magic to shut up and stop screaming at us.
We want technology to be ambient. We want it to move to the background so we can focus on the material world.
Enter Paper-Fi.
Defining the Term
I’m coining a term here because every movement needs a name, and "phygital" is a linguistic crime I refuse to commit.
Paper-Fi (n): A category of media that merges the tactile permanence of paper with the dynamic capabilities of digital technology, typically without the use of visible screens.
Think of Paper-Fi as the bastard child of a vinyl record and a high-end app. It is the belief that paper is not a relic, but a platform—one that has been waiting for the right software to unlock its full potential.
The First Use Case: Radioposter
My contribution to this new category is a project called Radioposter.
It is a company that makes physical books with soundtracks. But to understand Paper-Fi, you have to understand what this is not:
- It is not an audiobook.
- It is not an ebook with sound effects.
- It is not "Augmented Reality" requiring you to wear $3,000 goggles that make you look like a sci-fi villain.
It is a book. Ink on matte paper. You hold it. You smell the bindery glue. You turn the pages.
But as you read, the book plays a synchronized soundtrack—score, dialogue, ambient noise—that matches exactly where you are on the page.
From a technology standpoint, this is "ambient computing." We use computer vision and your phone (which is already in your pocket) to track your location in the book and handle the audio invisibly. No buttons embedded in the spine. No wires. No tapping a QR code every three paragraphs. The technology gets out of the way so you can get lost in the story.
It’s a hybrid. It uses the digital cloud to fuel the creation of a new physical object, embedding invisible powers from the internet into the design of a printed page.
The Case for Finite Media
Why do we need Paper-Fi? Because we are drowning in the infinite.
The web gave us infinite content—infinite scroll, infinite feeds, infinite notifications. It optimized for addiction. Paper-Fi optimizes for attention.
There is a dignity to finite media. A book ends. A record has a last track. This limitation is a feature, not a bug. It allows for a complete, curated artistic experience that the infinite feed can never provide.
In an age of AI slop, "human-made" is becoming the ultimate luxury good. But "human-made" doesn't have to mean "low-tech." We are entering an era where the most advanced technology is the kind you can't see, used to elevate the oldest medium we have.
Radioposter is just the prototype. We have 30,000 copies of our first book available for pre-order, and we are betting that this is just the beginning of the Paper-Fi era. We are betting that there is a massive, underserved audience of people who love technology but hate what screens are doing to their brains.
We are building a new canvas for journalists, designers, musicians, and artists. A canvas that has the depth of a novel and the immersion of a film, but requires no batteries to hold.
The screen age was about capturing your attention. The Paper-Fi age is about respecting it.