Jogging wasn't a thing until, by force of commitment and fortitude, Bill Bowerman writes a book explaining it to a widespread audience.
The Fosbury Flop was a dramatic rethinking of the high jump that was so obvious in hindsight, but not at the time. Perhaps it was even scandalous, or I like to imagine it was. ‘Dude..don't do it!’
I often bring this logic to the studies, experiments, and futures wonderings that I do here at Near Future Laboratory. Trying to find a kernel of something by going to the near future that responds to what notion we are missing in the present. Like with A.I. doing the work for us — some of it is great to have it do. But focussing for a moment on writing, I was wondering about the value of writing as a craft, as a thing that is not just about getting words on a page, but about the care and attention to the craft of writing itself.
This is a reflection on Tom Renner's inevitabilism post and the value of imagining alternatives to the present. How does one describe those things that will become obvious in hindsight, but do not make sense in the present? The value of imagining alternatives to the present is that it helps us see the value in things that are so obvious that we don't see them.
This motivates the soft gooey center of the speculative design fiction project Vibewriter, which anticipates a future where the value of writing is not in speed, but in the care and attention to the craft of writing.
What did it take to imagine that something called Jogging would become a trillion dollar industry?
Why did it take so long to put wheels on luggage?
Why do we want to imagine alternatives to the present?
Because doing so helps us see the value in things that are so obvious that we don’t see them.
While A.I. might endure for its current perceived value — eliminating the drudgery of something — what is harder to see is that there is a future in which that once-perceived drudgery is no longer a drudgery, but a kind of joy.
Film cameras were once a burden. Wet photography. Delays in seeing the results. The 2 hour Fotomat was a magical business innovation.
Then the digital camera came along and eliminated that wait — making photography instant.
But of course, it became a deprivation for many who appreciated the rituals of image making, and the kind of anticipation that went along with it. The anticipation of seeing the results, recalling the moment and experience rendered on a piece of paper — the photograph.
There was a Longing for Less..less than instantaneous, less than overwhelming streams of content.
Not everyone. But this was a thing. A niche — but a large one.
Gen Z now trawls flea markets and thrift stores for old film cameras. They seek out the tangible, the imperfect, the process of making images that takes time and care.
More than anticipating a future against the currents of inevitabilism, one must imagine that the world can become — and it can become otherwise. This is perhaps the most important thing creative and curious people can do — imagine otherwise. And then translate that imagining into something concrete, grounded, and tangible.
Imagine into the unexpected, the unanticipated, the unimagined.
And then create a concrete, grounded, and tangible artifact that helps ground that unimagined thing.
So, then.
Vibewriter.
An artifact anticipating a future in which the value of writing is not in the speed of production, but in the care and attention to the craft of writing.
Anticipating — or consider that it is a speculative design fiction that has come back from a future in which there is a turn back towards this thing that was once called “writing”.
Vibewriter is like the exercise that gets one back to the basics of composing ideas into prose. It is not a substitute for writing. Rather it is the exercise of (relearning) how to write.
I’ve said in the past that the approach I take — to make/code/build artifacts that feel like they’ve come from an adjacent now or a possible near future — is a way I work because I love to make ‘things’ — the old fashioned kind of physical product design.
I’ve also said that, if I was good at writing, I would write stories about these adjacent nows or possible near futures. I’ll leave that writing to Cory, Bruce, Cormac, Ursula, J.G., Octavia, and others who are much better at writing stories than I am.
But, with that caveat out of the way, while I was contemplating this post, a story did start to unfurl alongside of me trying to think of how I wanted to respond to the inevitabilism post that got shared in the Discord.
So. 👉🏽 An incomplete speculative fictional conceit for Vibewriter
There is a plausible future in which writing was given over to A.I. and the art of writing was lost.
It is rediscovered by some kind of generational cohort (Generation Alpha, perhaps? these things move quick) and in their present, they find that this thing that was once called “writing” is kind of cool. Kind of fun.
Only, they stumble in the act of it, as one might after not running for a long time, or after a long recovery from an injury. Their compositions seem stuck, stilted, awkward, and they find themselves unable to express their thoughts in the way that they want to.
They turn to their parents asking them if they remember what it was to write. They scour flea markets and thrift stores for old typewriters, keyboards, ancient software that some manage to get running on huge jerry-rigged ‘personal computers’ that take up a fair bit of the space under a desk.
They cobble together machines from parts and pieces they find in their parents’ attics and basements. Finding an operating IBM Selectric typewriter is like finding a holy grail. They find old keyboards, some with mechanical switches, and they try to make sense of the clackety-clack of the keys as they type out their thoughts.
A distributed network of writing punks share intel, mechanical drawings, schematics. There are meetups IRL. They collaboratively rent time on some industrial grade 3D titanium printers to make parts for their typewriters, keyboards, and other writing machines.
But the machines are not enough. Something isn’t right.
As more people aspire to scribe, it is discovered that their anterior paralimbicis gyrus has significantly diminshed in both volume, blood flow, and neuronical activity. There’s no signaling in there. Neurons fire only occasionally, like a dying star.
Messaging routes around this thimble-sized piece of vascularized meat, never quite reaching the particularly nuanced capacity to imagine, to think, to compose that was once so vital to the human experience of writing - and speculating.
Neuronical technicians postulate that the paralimbicis developed evolutionarily, and was responsible for the capacity to consider possibilities and hypotheticals, a basis for creative acts like writing. This was the part of the brain that allowed early humans to imagine their way out of tricky situations, to ponder what might happen if they went left instead of right when being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, or to envision the future of their tribe based on the seasons and the stars.
Eventually, its utility to ponder what to get at the grocery store was replaced by A.I. and other companion intellects that could do the work of imagining the ingredients that might be necessary for week’s meals, or what gift to buy for a friend’s birthday - or even what sentiment to write in a birthday card.
As A.I. and other companion intellects have taken on the tasks that once required a well-developed paralimbicis, this area of the brain diminished, like an appendix, forgotten and unused; later to be considered understood as unneceessary and leftover baggage from a time when humans had to do the work of creative thinking and imagining.
This was the struggle of these writing punks. They were trying to write, but their paralimbicis were not functioning as they should. They were unable to imagine the words they wanted to use, the sentences they wanted to compose, the stories they wanted to tell.
They need something more than just the machines, the same way a musician, trying to learn to play the guitar, needs more than just the instrument. They need a way to exercise their paralimbicis, to get it firing again, to get it working like it was supposed to.
Tonics and tinctures are concocted. Psychoactives were experimented with. Herbal infusions that blended tumeric, hydroxel-noemaic and well-pestled Modirexin were tried, the results analyzed and described empirically in active comms channels.
Gray market CRISPR-Cas9 printers were refurbished and set to the task of emanating various null status or illegal genetic therapies meant to stimulate the paralimbicis, to increase blood flow, to enhance neuronical activity. There were even some who experimented with a kind of ‘brain gym’ — a set of exercises that were meant to stimulate the paralimbicis, to get it firing again, to get it working like it was supposed to.
Convinced that the paralimbicis was best thought of like a muscle, they thought that if they exercised it enough, it would get stronger and more capable of imagining. They’d gather together IRL in small groups, standing abreast like a battalion of Tai Chi practitioners, and they would do these exercises that were like the old children’s game “Telephone” where one would utter a phrase and the other would try to build upon it.
It hurt to play. Frustrating at first. Like being asked to do 10 pull ups or a minute of burpies.
They concoct Vibewriter — with the help of some off-the-shelf commodity intelligence — to help them get back to this thing that was called “writing”. It’s like a training aid for writing — physical fitness for the brain, that part that diminished in the age when A.I. took over the drudgery of writing. That age when writing class, literary studies, and creative writing went the way of shop class, 5th period art, and history.
It nudges them to write, to compose, to think about the words they are using, to consider the meaning of what they are writing.
Simple exercises at first. Then gradually more complex.
And then writing is like a movement. Like when people didn’t jog — or it wasn’t even a word connected to this naescent idea of a sport yet to become. There are writing groups that meet on Saturday mornings, writing marathons, writing festivals. There are writing competitions, writing awards, and even writing Olympics.
🤷🏽♂️🫡
See Also