8.2.25 - My First Blog Post Written On a Typewriter
I've had writer's block for some time, mainly because of the stress of my summer. But I'm back and feeling wilder than ever, and have a ton of things in my notes app and my heart that I will unload over time. I bought a typewriter and have decided that's how I'm going to try and write from now on to improve my focus and reduce screen time. I've learned that this is a wave in some areas and that I'm not unique, which makes me happy. Hope you enjoy. The scan may be more fun to read.
read the scan
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I am sitting outside in the sun, looking out at a beautiful field with sun on my skin, shirtless, with a cup of hot coffee next to me, I am trying to get the hang of this typewriter but the machine is not really cooperating which is a disappointment. I cannot figure out what exactly is the reason that characters refuse to print nice and dark unless : literally assault the keys, which will take some getting used to. But nevertheless, I press onward! It is odd to feel so limited by such a physical mechanism, it's a feeling that I think is t fundamentally alien to most members of Gen Z. But I suspect it’s one we could use more of. I have a germ vi a theory that the greatest threat to ordered liberty today is frictionlessness itself. Frictionlessness that dulls our faculties and erodes our discipline. Cognizant of or this, I neverthelessness do not have the patience for this machine, which I suspect needs a cleaning or something to improve how it is printing characters, because this just cannot be right.
testing the typewriter again to see if my cleaning worked. And, by god, it seems to have done ‘the trick. Certainly feels much smoother, and the printing of the letters seems much more consistent with fare less force. The main issue now seems to be my own skill. But I will get better. All I did was brush some gunk out of the spools that keep the typewriter ribbon, which was creating friction, in the overall mechanism, because everything is connected. The next step is to figure out how to create a more consistent right margin.
When I upload this online, I think it may be amusing to upload a scan of the original paper document. Currently, my plan is to-simply have OCR or a CHAT GPT transcription of the scan create the text I will paste into the html. Anywho, why am I doing this one may ask? Isn't this all just a bit much? Yes it is. Is the author some kind of hipster? Not really, not if you associate hipsterism, as I do, with a specific brand of performative consumption, No, how I use old technology is still a very private affair, : However, I will concede that I ama luddite. I am skeptical that new technologies invariably improve the human condition, or even productivity. I am deeply doubtful that the digital revolution has done much with respect to the latter, and economists like Paul Krugman and others agree with me. I don’t think that electronic word processing, for instance, has improved the quality or volume of written works worth reading. And I am equally, no, more doubtful that Generative AI will either. No. If anything, these technologies have reduced the chance of worthwhile things being created. It is for this reason among others, that I believe that technological development is the greatest threat to ordered liberty today. And it felt right to explore this idea on a deliberately older technology. For one thing, I think that the inherent value of writing, at base, is derived from the fact that it came from a human consciousness. We may be indifferent, for the most part, as to whether a shoe is factory or hand made. Give me two identical pairs of shoes, and I would only differentiate based on quality and price. There is some charm in knowing something is hand made, and some people will pay a premium for that charm alone. But that is tire exception for purely instrumental goods. This is why the automation of production for food and appliances has been a net positive. The problem is that many many goods are relational, not instrumental in nature. Many of us intuitively understand this. It is why we feel repulsed when we hear our tech over lords suggest that we should be excited at the prospect of AI generated movies, or AI artwork, or AI friends. The value of these things are relational in nature, not instrumental. The value of a good song is not derived from the fact that I just enjoy its melody or even its lyrics, but from the fact that an intelligence not unlike my own, with limitations analogous in kind if net degree was able to produce something as amazing as a song. Automation of these kinds of goods &#- shifts them to an instrumental category, which disgusts all but those rho are fully subjugated to the most crude and hedonistic instincts, a8- If you are truly indifferent to whether a song is made by a human or an Al, you are not all that different from someone who is indifferent to whether they're having sex with a person or a lifelike sex doll. You have revealed yourself as less than human, barely conscious. The pleasure in sex isn't mere friction, but the knowledge, the feeling, that another consciousness that is actually here feels you and enjoys you too. When I see those right wing twitter tweets joking about how women will be made "obsolete" or whatever by advancements in robotics, I understand that I am dealing with people wo are barely human.
Today, technology is trying to make us all like that. Consuming, rather than relational animals. It is winning. It is succeeding. Now, not only are finished goods subjugated to market logic, our entire social universe is. We need to resist this by any means possible, and we cannot be afraid of being a little corny as we do it.
How does writing on a typewriter solve this? Well, it creates a record, that this document existed in physical space, at least increasing the probability for future interpreters that this was written by a human. In 2025, at least, it is highly difficult to get an AI or robot to do this. It is at least possible that this text was AI generated than transcribed on a typewriter, but the economics of that still don’t make sense for a blog that generates zero revenue and the incentives don't really exist. So in the future, if people are trying to discern what’s manmade and what's synthetic, to inform how they should relate to the texts of their past, the existence of handwritten or typewritten records may provide a clue. I don't believe there will be reliable way to distinguish AI and human content from the content alone, as AI gets better at writing like us and -- perhaps even more alarmingly -- human writing grows to resemble Al. This will certainly happen as we're simply exposed to more AI content and as our public schools inevitably teach writing conventions that ape AI prose. This inevitable convergence is the ultimate threat to human freedom, and to ordered liberty. Eventually, we will sleepwalk into a future where thought itself, which I see as isomorphic with written language, has been stolen from us from the market system, technology, and the incentive system they create. --
I was born in 1999. So I don't remember a world without computers, or where the device I am writing this on was commonplace, or really used at all, but I remember a world fundamentally alien to our own. I am old enough to know that something intrinsic to being human has been lost -- has been stolen from I am old enough to mourn this loss.
I remember shopping malls packed and alive, teeming not just with customers but with unattended tweens and other loiterers, I remember my first date at one of these malls, maybe with a girl I asked out in person in the school library My tapping her shoulder, I remember waking up in the middle of the night and seeing teenagers skateboarding on my driveway. I remember my neighborhood bussing with children, largely left to their own devices. I remember leaving home without a cellphone with the basic instructions to be home in an hour. I remember the neighborhood movie theater lit up and alive on most summer nights, I remember waiting in line for the box office before online booking ; and seat reservations became a thing. I remember when the computer was a place: a portal to a wider world. I remember neighbors coming for dinner and drinks and my parents taking walks on school nights with other adults. I remember house parties where little kids would play make believe, the teens would sit in a bedroom and gossip, and the adults would get hammered. I remember My parents going into an office most days a week. I remember a classroom where an overhead projector was the most sophisticated pedagogical tool. I remember going to the bank. Going with my mom to pick up her Jenny Craig program kits. I remember when having an outside cat was not that weird. 1 remember neighbors with outside dogs even, who would walk around unattended, and who everyone knew is just fine and who they belonged to. I remember when kids and animals being outside just wasn't that weird, and 1 remember how the world felt. I remember kids devouring Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books. I remember when Halloween was a spectacle.
And I've watched it all disappear, People will try and gaslight you. They'll tell you you're just being nostalgic, or that you just felt that way because you were a kid. i don't buy it. I was there, it WAS different, in a profound way. I never just became an adult in that world, that world disappeared entirely, And 1 can see the present through the eyes of younger family members, and see how much has been robbed from them, I have a 15 year old cousin who can tell me about the world she's growing up im, and across every single metric it is unequivocally worse, I can see it. I can see the emptiness on Halloween. I can hear the silence on memorial day weekend. I can see my cousins holed up in their rooms. I can watch my niece getting addicted to YouTube slop. My my friends tell me about siblings who have never read a book, who don't have the attention span for a movie, I've talked to adults in my workplaces who admit that they don't feel fully comfortable giving their children the relatively free range childhood I enjoyed. I've been in college parties with fraternity brothers just three years younger than me who have never asked a girl out in person, who may never know love that was not mediated My a for-profit dating app. And I know, I know that this is not just "different," I KNOW it's worse, I know it's nothing less than the greatest tragedy I have ever lived through. I know this because I am old enough to remember, but young enough to see. I don't have the fatalism/blind optimism of boomers with respect to this transformation. I know it's a catastrophe that has to be undone by any means possible.
It is time to stop kidding ourselves. We will not be able to build a healthy relationship with these new technologies -- namely algorithmic content feeds, short form video, and generative artificial intelligence without, at : the very least, a deliberate policy response. Here are some initial proposals to consider:
i. Ban Smartphones For Everyone Under Sixteen.
ii. Ban the use of algorithmic content feeds; only permit chronological feeds based on accounts users follow.
iii. Create a legal category for content that behaves like a narcotic and regulate as such; e.g. Tik Tok should be subject to some public health Regulations along with all short form video platforms.
iv. Ban the use of screens and computers as pedagogical tools until high school. Until the age of 14, kids should just use analog devices, No chromebooks, no online assignments, no video lectures.
v. Ban laptops from lecture halls,; digital typewriters can be provided for disability cases. Computers can of course be used in labs and for coding classes (fwiw, my dad learned to code with pen and pad before laptops)
vi. We need a new internet where all content goes through some blockchain verification process, e.g., photographs are "stamped" with some kind of hash at the source, like the camera hardware, in order to establish its authenticity and human origin. We need an internet that is completely free of bots and GenAI. This is an engineering/networking problem that is out of my depth, but I am sure there are solutions,
vii.Oral examinations and handwritten examinations must return. viii. Criminal sanctions must be established for failing to identify content as AI generated. Severe criminal sanctions UNREASONABLE penalties, The reason being that this will be difficult to enforce at all, so the penalty has to be crazy to effectively deter through making occasional examples. Just like how it is for pirating movies.
Anyways, I have more to say and even more to correct and qualify, but this is a good start for now, and some good practice for a new mode of writing, I can already poke holes in my own suggestions, but there is no more time for this today. Good evening. knxnts