Richard Polt typecasting about why we need typewriters in our age of AI and authoritarianism:
When you choose to write with a typewriter, you are quixotically, nobly flying in the face of the assumption that good = fast, efficient, perfect, and productive. Type your gloriously imperfect, expending ineffiencient time and energy — and declare that you still care about human work, and that the process of creation and understanding still matters more to you than the slick products of the machines. …
As for authoritarianism, it is happy to use digital technology to watch us, punish us, and entice us. A soft totalitarianism, with hard pain for those who aren’t pacified by easy consumption and pointless posturing, is becoming the new model of political control. …
Again, typewriters offer one humble but real form of resistance. As in the days of samizdat behind the Iron Curtain, even in “the land of the free” there is a need to find words without compromising with the digital systems that are increasingly under tyrannical control.
Tyrannies have always failed to contain lovers and writers. We must love to write, and write what we love — with the writing tools that we love.
Read his whole piece, read the Typewriter Manifesto, then get typing.
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