Tools for Writing and Thinking

A friend of mine is sick. Seriously sick. Recently, we messaged about it, and all of a sudden iMessage butted in and proposed an AI-generated response to their quite-serious message. Uneasy, I moved to one of my older Macs to continue the exchange—one too old for Apple’s new “intelligence.”

Relatedly, I have also over time grown increasingly frustrated with a wide range of other attempts to push AI into my communication. In my e-mail apps, and in what has gradually and with great hesitation become my primary tool for work: Microsoft Word.

But why such unease and hesitation, you ask? For me, the reasons are personal and professional, and they are the foundation for an experiment I want to share.

First, my communication with friends about deeply personal matters is off-limits to AI; even locally run smaller models. My friends deserve a response crafted by me. I thoroughly hate that the diffusion of LLMs in various apps and services now sows doubt and distrust between senders and recipients of text.

Second, I find myself increasingly concerned about how AI interference atrophies our skills related to reading, analyzing, composing, and communicating messages. Personally, and professionally. The former should concern everyone, and the latter is particularly worrying for someone like me, whose perhaps deepest sense of a professional identity is tied to being a producer of text and, more importantly, someone who thinks through writing. Because when I write an article, it is almost always because I am curious about something, and writing about it is my way of processing. Reading, distilling, constructing, and attacking various arguments. I don’t care who reads these articles, and many are never finished or published. Still, they have profound value for me.

My feeling these days is that my writing—and thus my thinking—is under attack by the creeping and ubiquitous implementation of various LLMs into all the tools I use. So, what do I do? My response is somewhat like a phenomenon described in the initial episode of Battlestar Galactica (2003):

“… it was all designed to operate against an enemy who could infiltrate and disrupt even the most basic computer systems. Galactica is a reminder of a time when we were so frightened by our enemies that we literally looked backward for protection.”

More concretely, I’m in the middle of a research project where I return to older writing technologies to explore what has been lost in—and can be salvaged from—history’s scrap heap of technological treasures. BLOG@CACM has already run a brilliant series on historical technology (“Technical Marvels”), but little attention was paid to technology connected to human language and writing. And that technology needs some attention. First, because the new AI products that flow over us infest our written and spoken language. Second, because we humans are perhaps an interesting mix of Homo Faber and Homo Ratiocinator, a species that actively uses tools both for computing and language-based reasoning. Computing history is rich with stories of numbers and mathematics, but most people are today mesmerized by how computers also mimic our ability to manipulate and be creative with language—words, concepts, and symbols. And as we’ve heard so many times: First, we shape our tools, then they shape us.

The project, then, entails systematically restricting myself to older technology as I write parts of a new textbook called “Digital Technology and Society.” I here rely on writing by hand, with typewriters, and I use ancient (to today’s youth) computers. While I’m not yet finished with the project, I wanted to share some tentative insights, and perhaps encourage some others to join me in the experiment.

Initial impressions
First, pen and paper. This is something we all know to a certain degree—or at least so we think. I thought so, but once I set out to write actual text by hand, I was surprised at how strange it now feels. Most shocking, perhaps, is how naked it feels. My stroke, my haste, my level—or lack of—care. It all shows so clearly. And not least, my lack of practice. Legibility was at first hopeless, but gradually improved. I soon turned back to the script (cursive) I once learnt in school. And by God that was hard—and slow and ugly. But as I stuck to it, it was also surprisingly rewarding. The technical part of writing itself becomes part of the art. It feels as if I’m in times long gone with my fountain pen, writing important things worthy of the time, ink, and paper spent. My free writing reflects this and takes me into philosophical and quite bohemian directions. Another wonderful aspect is the near-complete freedom. I need a pen and something paper-like, and I’m all set to produce my (imagined) masterpieces. No power needed, no desk, and not even civilization, it feels. However, one quite shocking thing for me when starting to write by hand is that it drastically slowed and changed my thinking. I’m used to thinking just about as fast as I type on a computer, and with modern computer’s radical freedom to edit and correct, there is little need to think ahead. With pen and paper, there is both a need to and a great benefit of doing so. I was caught by surprise as I found myself, mid-sentence, planning the rest of the sentence. I had to figure out what the sentence, and maybe even the following sentence, would look like. Both because my mind could finally outpace my scribblings, but also because it was just more serious-feeling. There is a certain finality and completeness to old-school writing, and it is disciplining. For better and worse.

Second, I moved to the typewriters. Much of what I just described applies here as well. Try as you might to type as you do on a computer, and chaos and stuck mechanical parts follow. Even if it didn’t, however, the technique and force required to type effectively makes it slower. Slower, and more deliberate. And noisy. There is a hypnotic rhythm to it all, one that catches me and drags me along as I write. And there is structure. No fancy stuff here—radically unlike the freedom I have with the pen. Freedom to write however I like, up, down, in circles. To doodle, and play. Typewriters require and impose structure. And that brings me to the connotations. For a Luddite such as myself, it was truly fascinating to sit down with the Olympia SG-1 office typewriter and feel immediately transported back to the factory floor of early industrializing England. I felt compelled to critique and ponder the nature and implications of machines as I felt one so directly. One I could also intuitively understand and relate to—even fix. Not a mystery machine or some obscure ghost in a cloud. The typewriter is hard and cold steel (and some plastic) right at my fingertips, obeying (often) my commands. My fascination with them almost tricked me into thinking I had understood them early in the project. But the project required me to do variations within each setup, and with each new typewriter that arrived, a brand-new world emerged. The Olivetti Lettera 22, for example, took me not to the factory floor, but to a Parisian café where I was suddenly something of a playwright. Light and playful—the opposite of my Olympian behemoth. Other Olympias —such as the SM9 I got—also felt far lighter than the SG-1, though. Despite their glorious differences, however, each typewriter shares a devotion to structure, to the tactile, to rhythm, and to sound and feedback as part of the process. It feels good, and very different from the flowery poet the fountain pen tried to bring forth in me. The typewriters mean business.

Third, the world of early computing. This entailed getting some old Macintosh computers—like the ones from my early childhood memories. My mother, a typographer, had Macs at work quite early, and I suppose it comes as no surprise that playing with them when visiting her at the newspaper was great fun. HyperCard, for example, my foray into code, was mind-blowing. This is just to say that these machines also carry deep personal associations and bring back memories. Memories and connections to past experiences and feelings that will be different from person to person. Writing on my old Macs is enjoyable for me for several reasons. Nostalgia is just one. But also, the simplicity and distraction-free writing environments they provide—be that early Word versions, MacWrite, or Word Perfect. I have deliberately not connected them to a network, and just about the only tools I use on them when writing are the word processors, plus the Apple ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer for reading the texts. The Macs provide flexibility in many important ways, such as typefaces, font sizes, spacing, layout, and colors. Most important, though, is the ability to edit, save, transfer files, work with different versions, etc. No need to retype the entire sheet when something is wrong. No increasing tension as the typewriter page fills and I’m close to a “perfect” page. Freedom to err, to correct, to redo. But also, freedom from that seriousness that I quite enjoyed discovering with the pen. What I write on my Mac is generic text. Transportable, anonymous, without other traces of me in it than the way I write—the words I use and how I structure them. And that is important. Deeply important, despite advocates these days who argue that we’re witnessing the “death of the author” and that writing can now be done at a distance, that the writer is more of a designer or requester of text rather than its producer. Positions such as these are what makes it ever more important to seek out and explore what might be lost if we abandon writing and delegate it to computers and AI systems promising to free us from something immensely valuable.

And then what?
In sum, these experiments have been and continue to be highly enjoyable. There is increasingly little doubt in my mind that the tools we use shape us, which makes understanding just how extremely important. Doing some experiments like the one I’m doing is very easy, and I would love to hear more about others’ experiences and take-aways from similar tests. As I’ve noted, these will certainly be different from mine, as we’ll have different connotations, different skills, different preferences, and different goals for writing.

Still, knowing what AI is doing to your writing—and thinking—is most likely worthwhile. And who knows, maybe some others out there will also share my joy found in these protective technologies from the past.

In the spirit of the experiment, this post was of course drafted with primitive tools. A fountain pen (Lamy Studio), and a typewriter (Torpedo 30), and a Mac Classic. After the initial drafting, I typed it all into my 10+ year-old 2013-Mac Pro, with TextEdit and a thoroughly deprecated version of Mac OX X—both without much AI, aside from a simple spell check.

Henrik Skaug Sætra is a researcher in the field of the philosophy and ethics of technology. He focuses specifically on artificial intelligence, and much of his research entails interrogating the various linkages between technology and environmental, social, and economic sustainability.

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Tools for Writing and Thinking