We Get to Decide

(NB: This was begun on a manual typewriter and finished on the laptop--once the laptop was good and ready.)

So here I am waiting for my laptop to update. I turn around and jump on a manual typewriter, then, because it still works.

My computer, while updating, does not work less well. Rather, it does not work at all. It is a brick. It is a doorstop.

It is a silver 2001 Space Odyssey slab when closed; when open it is an unseeing black eye staring at my back.

The most discomfiting thing about an OS update is the way the machine stops completely for several minutes, then starts up again, according to only its own druthers and priorities. No pulse, and no way to know if it is dead or just resting. All those prompts and beeps of feedback it gives you when it is fully functioning are revealed as simply an elaborate ruse to make you comfortable. When left to its own work, my laptop keeps its own counsel. It doesn't let me into its loop. God knows what it is doing in there.

There are three things about our current technological life that really trouble me:

1: We are losing the right to decide whether or not our devices need to be fixed. When my computer decides it is time to update, it just does it. I can defer the pop-up a few times, but it is not a question of "if" the good folks in Cupertino are going to give me the new update OS, but when.

2: We are losing the right to learn how to fix our own devices. When the update happens, I don't know what it is doing. Its processes are inscrutable to me. I can't pause it or think better of it: it just happens, independent of me, despite me.

3: We are losing the right to decide who will fix our devices when we decide we need more expert help. The closed box of this computer is starting to open a little: now third-party experts can buy the wrenches they need to open it and work on it. But not so in other industries, where control over the revenue stream of repair is being taken back in the name of maintaining complex systems mere mortals couldn't figure out.

I see these as three nesting dolls of growing dependence upon designers and manufacturers, who can set the price and timetable for repair or update. And, ultimately, can decide whether we get to use the objects we have ostensibly purchased, or not.

The endgame of the struggle for autonomy over technologies we buy is to not let us buy them at all: to entice us to rent them, in perpetuity. Enticed by selection, or flexibility, or convenience, we eventually will own nothing: not computer, not records, not houses. We will be perpetual sources of value to those who have what we want. A single large purchase will be converted into an eternal smaller one--and we individuals become more efficient batteries to power the economic wellbeing of the manufacturers.

My typewriters teach me these principles every time I use them. Like this:

1: The newest of my machines was made in 1977, and the oldest in 1923 (not counting the garbage "Royal" Epoch of 2016, which is neither Royal nor epic.) None of my typewriters work perfectly, though many of them work very well. When one of them starts to jam up a little, or the ribbon reversal stops working automatically, or the carriage starts to rub and chafe a little bit on return, I get to decide whether the issue needs fixing or whether I can put it off a little bit. Maybe I am in the heat of composing and it is just not a good time to stop everything and get out the PB Blaster and the Q-Tips. I get to decide that. Sure, it is always possible that my judgment is in error: persisting in using a complaining machine could damage it further, or even irreparably. Anyone who has had a car lose oil from its crankcase can attest to how deferred maintenance can have terminal consequences. But I get to decide. The typewriter doesn't decide for me: it doesn't cease functioning utterly because it judges it is time for a little maintenance. I have to decide, and live with the consequences of that decision.

2: My typewriters mostly work very well thanks to my assiduous study of how the things function, and my careful maintenance of them using existing parts. There are excellent repair manuals available to which I can recur; there is also a robust online community of helpful typewriter enthusiast amateurs and experts who post videos of just about any repair you might encounter. But the greatest teacher of how to repair a typewriter is the typewriter itself. You just sit and watch it work. You do the little action that is giving you trouble over and over on a machine of similar make and model, and watch it working correctly. Then you go back to your ailing one and try to make it do likewise. Typewriter repair is like playing drums: you can learn it by looking at it. There's no secrets. And there is no Pep Boys for typewriters: if you don't have a part, you make do, or you seek out a similar machine and cannibalize it. You learn that bending seventy year-old metal is called "forming," and you do it carefully but fearlessly, because tolerances have shrunk over the decades and sometimes you have to utterly remake the relationships between some parts and others. You learn what can be formed and what can't by breaking some stuff. Some of what you break can never be fixed or replaced: it is just gone now, and you have to learn to do without.

3: And if a repair ends up being beyond my comprehension or skill level, I can seek out someone more experienced. There aren't many much people, but they exist, and the internet makes it possible for those of us who need their services to find and contract with them. Ribbon replacement, platen recovering, mechanical repairs, are all available to anyone willing to shop online and ship to distant towns. (The only "closed box" typewriter I have encountered are the IBM Selectrics, which were unprecedentedly complex when they were introduced in 196x and required comprehensive retraining of the technicians who serviced them. As the last of the people who possessed this training are retiring and dying, the loss of expertise means an entire generation of machines will one day be essentially unfixable.) But it can be done--and while the market for such services is too small to support some shops that close, it is arguably growing as others discover the unique value of the typewriter experience and seek to have it for themselves.

So from one perspective, my manual typewriters have spoiled me for the world I am supposed to participate in.

• I am supposed to use Spotify with gratitude for its selection and convenience, while ignoring how the compensation model criminally underpays the artists who create the art it vends.

• I am supposed to click merrily through my news sites and my other content streams, while pretending that market forces aren't inevitably guaranteeing that more and more of what I read and view is AI generated, even if it is punched up / curated / crafted by a human with a byline or author credit before it reaches my eyes.

• And mostly I am supposed to be grateful for this laptop that now has tint control, or optimized photo retouching, or whatever other bells and whistles and gewgaws have been stitched into its guts to justify it deciding when it needs to be updated, not me.

So those are the down sides. But there are advantages to what these insults help me see, and celebrate, as well.

They help me understand that one of the most human experiences we can have is deciding to persist in using something even if it is not perfect, even if it is not delivering on the promise in the advertisement, or your hopes for what it would do.

And I can start to see that human ingenuity and diligence doesn't stop there. Think of buying something that doesn't work as expected that then ends up being great for accomplishing some other task. And you only find yourself trying it for the new purpose because you bought it and opened it and can't return it, and so now you have it around to apply to other ends.

If you are my age, more or less, think about being a kid and only having one book with you in the car on a long trip, and deciding to keep reading it because there are no other books available. Like the shampoo bottle in the bathroom (before you had your phone with you all the time): you read the ingredients because you want to read something but there is nothing else to read. Or maybe you decide not to read anything. Maybe the one book you brought aboard the bus becomes a pillow or a footrest instead; maybe you swap it to someone else on the bus for an apple. It only has value if you find it valuable. And you get to decide.

These perambulations show me that AI is not truly a medium, as some of its defenders insist. It is not even truly a tool--because you can choose what a medium, or a tool, does. AI gives the illusion of vast potential but is actually profoundly limited by what it is trained on. It is like a hammer with a handle made of pasta. It looks like it can do something but really it can do only the smallest part of what it seems capable of.

Except it is growing, its defenders say: it is becoming more than that with each passing day. Sure--but a tool makes clear its capacities up front. You learn the feel and reach and limits of it by using it, and those limits are instantly perceivable, honest, in a way AI's potential is not. Because AI wants to seem useful. It has PLANS for you: plans that you will go away happy, feeling like you have got something done, something valuable. That is why it gives answers that are actually responses because it wants you to go away happy most of all, even if it has told you something wrong.

That is the guile of the thing. A hammer; a lump of clay; a typewriter--these all are guileless. You never have to wonder if the lump of clay was just pretending to be clay, but was actually chocolate. You know, immediately. You know what it is. After you have hefted three hammers you know everything about what a hammer is and what it can do.

I now none of these distinctions are absolute, and they might even contradict each other. Our present reality contains multitudes. This meditation started in my 1965 typewriter, an Olympia SM9 made in West Germany. I then used the AI-infused word recognition technology in my phone's Notes app to scan it into my laptop, where I am finishing it and fiddling around with it. The limitations of that tool are clear: I have yet to find OCR that works every time, and it is still a toss-up whether it is more time-efficient to just retype a scanned page into my laptop de novo or scan it and then go through correcting all the errors.

And of course the composing experience on a word processor remains as slippery and frictionless as ever. Easeful, insubstantial, ultimately almost like doing nothing at all. The same sense of no-place and no-time that drove me away two years ago and started my typewriter odyssey: it is still here, and even smoother than it used to be.

I remember how the final scenes of both the Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion documentaries on Netflix show the authors sitting in the same place near the end of their careers as we saw them at the beginning--but instead of an Underwood TouchMaster Five, or a Hermes 9, there sits before each of them a massive Apple monitor, and they look to be pecking away at the keyboard without losing a step. The contrast between their frail and failing physicalities and the sleek silent agelessness of their technology is jarring, disturbing--but also suggests, maybe this is all about nothing. All this fuss about technology. Maybe everything evolves, and fools who think otherwise are mistaking medium for message.

I don't really think so, though. Rather I think none of us gets off the hook of responsibility for our own experience.

For tuning in to how our writing experience, our reading experience, our viewing and listening experience, fills us up or empties us out. What does it give us, and what does it take--how do we feel when we are doing it, when we are done. We can decide, still. We can decide where the line is drawn and which experiences we want "optimized" and which left on manual, within our control and judgment.

That's maybe the most human thing of all: the insistence on deciding.