People often give me a funny look when my typewriter collection comes up. I’ve got 7 of these things — 1 QWERTY, 5 QWERZ, and 1 AZERTY — and I think I’m about topped out; I wouldn’t want this to get out of hand. I try to use them as much as I’m able, writing letters and postcards; I even have one that’s small enough I can take it on vacation with me, typing up postcards from exotic locales. They’re just a joy to use in a way that writing on laptops or computers isn’t; there’s a tactile feedback mechanism of the noise as the character strikes the page and a letter is printed into existence. Letter follows letter and word follows word until you have a text: a text that can not be easily undone: a physical piece of paper, a physicality really missing today. And then, when you send this physical letter, and it travels through space to arrive at its destination — a message with an audience of one — unlike Facebook, Google or any of the other giant platforms who can do whatever they want with the trust of your texts — or “content”, if you want to call it that — it is actually illegal for anyone to open this letter aside from the recipient. The Postal stamp on your letter is a symbol of sacred trust between the sender and the postal service — or chain of services — who deliver it. The contents can’t be used for some advertising end; it can’t be feed into a Large Language Model (LLM); it can’t be used for some other profiling; it can’t be profited from, manipulated, or used in anyway by a third party. But now, as seductive as the physicality and total privacy are, we have a whole new use case for these machines: defense against AI slop.
I’ve heard a lot of hand wringing about the kids today with their generative AI and how it’s becoming an AI arms race between kids cheating with AI and teachers using AI to sniff out the AI cheating. All this alongside the other voices in the wasteland, claiming that Google is making us dumber — that’s an oldey but a goodey now — or that social media is ruining our ability to relate to each other, or that the supposed “elite” college kids can’t read books anymore. As we are being dragged — often against our will — into a tech world that is increasingly incomprehensible for the uninitiated, the cries from the wilderness turn into a howling polyphony.
Well, here’s an idea. Get yourself a type writer, and learn how to use it. When you receive a type written text, you can be pretty certain that it’s not AI slop. Sure, you could have AI generate a text for you, and then type it out, but at least you will have read it once. Nothing says, “I’m totally out of fucks to give”, like handing in a paper where the first sentence is a robot apology!
Hopefully, if you went to the trouble to prompt an AI and then type out its answer on your typewriter, you would avoid the obvious self-incrimination.
So, handing someone a typewritten document today has turned into a seal of, “a real life, human being with fingers, made this. It might still be plagiarized, but at least the human who made it had to read the text and then hit the keys to commit it to paper.” Thus teachers can be sure that their students are doing at least something outside “copy”, “paste”. Students can also be sure that lazy — or rather very over-worked and under-paid — teachers won’t lift a “j’accuse” finger at them for cheating. It’s win-win people!
All of this stuff about cheating and incompetent students has a much deeper root in how ugly our educational system has become. We have really lost our way here; and the whole thing has turned into form over function. Just like “Bullshit Jobs” (see David Graber) have taken over the work place, “bullshit credentials” are causing a crisis in schools. This is simply an unthought out, left-over from an earlier time when the school system was there to create factory workers, or low-level office workers. Dictatorships around the world have always struggled with how to approach education: you need to have workers who can function in society; they HAVE to be able to read, write, and do some basic math; but, and very importantly, they can’t have the tools to think about or synthesis the world around them into something coherent. These drones might just start asking some unwanted questions, foment, and maybe even…plot. This is exactly why everyone has such a hard-on for STEM, while laughing their heads off at the humanities. And, in America, this attitude isn’t entirely wrong. When an undergrad credentials will put you in soul crushing debt, only a few really wealthy people can commit to humanities: people who won’t have to worry too much about supporting themselves afterward. You know? Kind of like how things used to work in the bad old times?! The school systems don’t really know what to do about any of these; so they keep going through the motions. They keep hauling out the old standards, but the goals — spoken or unspoken — become spongier. We’re writing essays about this or that, because that’s how we’ve performed “learning”. And we need to go through these old forms so that we get the credential and then move on. When NOBODY gives a wet shit about any of this, why should the kids care? Kids are pretty smart, and they have a keen nose for hypocrisy. If you keep talking about how important it is to read and do well in school, but they never see you pick up a book or write anything longer than a grocery list, they start to catch on. Why shouldn’t they use an AI to check the box, get the stamp, and pass go? We need to have bigger and deeper conversations about what we’re doing in education, instead of clutching our pearls about the kids today.
Ok. This is spinning out of control and I’m going on another of my side tirades. To return to the topic, buy a typewriter — you can get one for about 200$ or so from a reseller that can guarantee its condition — and learn how to use it. Each one is unique and has its quirks. Play with it, write some letters, whip up some postcards, and don’t be afraid of mistakes; mistakes are all the more proof that a human wrote this and not a cryptic, AI blackbox. You’ll find it’s pretty amazing to have a machine that does one thing — prints text onto a page — and isn’t tracking you, distracting you, fighting for your attention, or profiling you; you can really focus on something in a way that the tech world doesn’t want you to anymore. And, when you have a text ready, the person who receives it can reasonable believe that you wrote it: you, a free-range human and not a robot; an out-of-band text that can not be harvested, scrutinized, or profited from. The typewriter could well be the symbol of the new AI resistance.
