GTG, we used to write. BRB. AFK. Got to go, be right back, away from keyboard.
Away from keyboard. We don’t say that anymore. Partly that’s because we have stopped using use these cryptic abbreviations, and partly it’s because we are never away from a keyboard anymore.
I have counted, and from where I currently sit at my desk, without getting out of my seat, I could type on at least 9 keyboards. Some are physical, separate, meaty clickerty-clackerty devices, because (of course) I am the sort of person who has opinions on key switches. Some keyboards are built into devices. Lift the lid, and there it is, waiting to be typed upon. Some are on-screen rows of letters that slide up from the bottom of the screen. If we count virtual keyboards, seemingly everything has a keyboard now. Games consoles have keyboards. Cars have keyboards. My TV has a keyboard.
I accept that I am unusually rich in keyboards. But we are all surrounded by keyboards. My retired parents, no longer use a PC, but they are surrounded by more keyboards than ever. iPhones and iPads and set-top boxes, all with a qwerty line waiting for them. Even when we go for a walk, along desolate sea walls vainly attempting to hold back the waves, where the sea stretches in one direction and the dunes in the other until they both meet the empty sky, where there is no one for miles, no habitation, no buildings, no phone signal, even then there are still keyboards. One on each of our phones, sitting in our pockets ready to be typed on. If I have taken my Kindle, keyboards outnumber humans.
Forget never being more than a few feet away from a rat, I’m never more than a few inches away from a keyboard.
As Jeff Atwood has remarked, although typist is no longer a dedicated job, we have all become typists. We are all unpaid, full-time keyboard users. The story of computers is the victory of the keyboard.
When you stop and look at keyboards, really look at them, you notice how weird they are. Our on-screen keyboards have dropped the more unusual keys: pause/break, the row of mysterious F keys, alt gr, scroll lock, the ` ¬¦ key. But even on simplified layouts, the letters themselves are in a nonsense, absurd order that we have internalised. I remember as a child, first seeing a keyboard and being fascinated by these esoteric keys. They seemed to hint at secrets and wonders. They suggested strange, arcane knowledge and mysterious features. I understood that the keyboard was there to input alphanumeric information into the computer, but these other commands were mysteries. It was the same with the TV remote. I understood it could change the channel and the volume, but there were so many other buttons. Exit and Return and TX and MX and Info and red and green and yellow and blue. These buttons hinted at capabilities beyond my comprehension.
Part of this fascination, I think, was linked to the fact that before the 90s, computers in films and TV were inherently mysterious. The weird ticker-tape devices that I saw on TV in the background of Dr No or Thunderbirds had rows of buttons and keys and levers and switches. There was no sense of what they did. They were, I suppose, quite literally, unknowable. The sets were built to look impressive, not to have a purpose. When making the props, no one stopped to allocate a function to each switch. The futuristic world drawn in the 1960s and 1970s was filled with devices doing things that no one understood. I guess, in a way, that turned out to be an accurate prediction of the modern world. Only our world is dominated by unknowable software, not hardware.
Even now, it was only as I was writing this (well, typing it) that I discovered what alt gr does. It lets you access the third alternative option on keys that have three possibilities. It stands for alternative graphic. Not as exciting as I hoped, perhaps, but still, it’s nice to know a device I spend up to twelve hours a day touching with my fingers still contains surprises. Maybe one day I’ll find out what the broken bar (¦) is all about. Now that I can finally type it.
Elsewhere
By Weikie Wang in the New Yorker, Notes on Work:
The first time I found myself truly overworked was when I chose to do a fiction M.F.A. at Boston University concurrently with a doctorate in epidemiology at Harvard. The reasons for the dual degree were practical. First, I still cared quite a bit about what my parents thought of me, and they wouldn’t let me bow out of the doctorate. Second, as opposed to the M.F.A., the doctorate paid a small stipend. Because completing two programs at two different schools simultaneously was technically not allowed, I told no one, and no one checked.
I first came across Wang’s work in the book Chemistry, which is a funny, quirky novel told in pseudo-fragments, and filled with verbal playfulness.
Here she talks about her work-a-holic tendencies (among other things). It is both knowing and naive at the same time (a tough trick to pull off).
In Wired, by KC Cole, The End of Grading
We do our best to brush off the annoying swarm of asks that shadow every restaurant meal, plumber visit, plane ride, pleading for points, stars, likes, thumbs-up (or middle fingers), if only because they’re nibbling away at our sanity.
The true cost, however, is more than irritation. Misunderstanding measurement misunderstands understanding itself. The ubiquitous, incessant surveying smothers knowledge with noise, drowns out the information we actually need for finding out how things work, what’s going on, what we’re doing, what actually matters.
A surprisingly philosophical piece on the nature of grading and rating.
(Incidentally, I don’t often really think about ledes or hooks, but there’s a nice hook at the beginning of this that pivots into the topic at hand.)
The Year Millennials Aged Out of the Internet by Max Read in the New York Times:
Recently I find the task of wasting time online increasingly onerous. The websites I used to depend on have gotten worse, and it seems as if there’s nowhere else to look. Twitter has been transformed under new management into an increasingly untenable social experiment called X. Instagram is evolving into a somehow-even-lower-rent TikTok, while TikTok itself continues to baffle and alienate me. Even Reddit, a stalwart last resort of time wasting, briefly went dark in June during a sitewide revolt over new policies.
Something is changing about the internet, and I am not the only person to have noticed. Everywhere I turned online this year, someone was mourning: Amazon is “making itself worse” (as New York magazine moaned); Google Search is a “bloated and overmonetized” tragedy (as The Atlantic lamented); “social media is doomed to die,” (as the tech news website The Verge proclaimed); even TikTok is becoming enjunkified (to bowdlerize an inventive coinage of the sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, republished in Wired). But the main complaint I have heard was put best, and most bluntly, in The New Yorker: “The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore.”
It was always going to happen that we would start looking at the internet with rose-tinted spectacles. “It’s not as good as it was in the old days,” we aging Millennials say over our avocados and diamond-less rings (or whatever it is we’re supposed to like and not like). Clearly, in many ways, everything is better now, both socially and technically. I would not want to go back to dial-up internet and old blue-screen of death computers and floppy disks that could barely store one low-resolution image. And clip art. Clip art was a big thing in the 90s and early 2000s. I’m glad that’s over.
But, there is a point here too. That something has happened to the internet. Something about money and investment and scale has changed it. Perhaps it has been gentrified. Perhaps it has been commodified. I still love the internet, and I do think there is still good stuff out there. It’s just becoming harder and harder to find.
That’s all for today,
Simon