Typing

Typing at midnight, just for the sake of it.

I got a new keyboard recently. It’s something I don’t do often: buying stuff for
myself. I never spend money because I never had any, and I’m still terrible at
spending money. But a couple of weeks ago I was like “fuck it,” and I pulled the
trigger, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in recent months.

For the first time in what feels like forever I actually
have fun typing. Just typing. Not writing, not working, not trying to create
anything of substance, but just typing. Clickedy-clickedy-clack. It’s so
satisfying.

I always wanted to write more, and I always failed. I tried many things: voice
notes, taking my laptop with me, scheduling time to sit down and write, taking
notebooks with me (and taking lots of notes). Nothing ever resulted in as much
typing as this little keyboard that I got.¹

Why do I go on and on about typing? Because it’s one of the ways
I like to express myself, that’s why.

Human expression is what made the internet great, even wonderful. There are still
corners of the internet where this is the case, and we must cherish those
corners. Geohot’s blog is one such corner that I rediscovered recently. Oh,
what a joy to read something human from an actual human. His stuff makes me cry,
laugh, and everything in between. Sometimes I have to shake my head in
disbelief, sometimes it resonates so deeply I have to step outside and smoke a
cigarette.²

This one, for example:

Inside of every person there is the citizen and the serf. Ask yourself which
side of this you are on and what you are spending your days building towards.
Technology that makes people more sovereign, or technology that lures them
further into dependence?

—geohot

Yes. Fuck yes. It’s what Aaron used to say. It’s what orients my life, my work,
and my being. I still have his quote on my office wall:

Aaron was an idealist, and they killed him for it.³ An idealist like
Michael Enger, who wrote the following not too long ago:

The Internet, built by idealists on a foundation of openness and community,
has become a mire of dark patterns and gardens with ever thicker walls,
desperate to keep people within an ecosystem where their attention is the
prized commodity.

—Michael Enger

Yes. Time and attention. Terrible currencies, for reasons I’ve outlined in this
talk. “You wouldn’t zap a car crash” and all that.

I’ve also re-read A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace today.
It talks about “the global social space we are building to be naturally
independent of the tyrannies” imposed on us. It talks about culture, and ethics,
and transactions, and marketplaces. Unwritten codes. Thought itself.

A new world, a seamless whole.

A world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how
singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

—John Perry Barlow

A global conversation of bits.

Another tear. Another cigarette.

No LLM slop ever did anything close to this to me, nor will it any time soon. No matter how
“refined” it supposedly is. The late-stage industrial slop that is served to us
as “content” right now is an insult to our human nature; an insult to free
expression; to Truth, and Beauty, and Goodness. To being itself.

Give me human expression.
Serve it without a filter.
Give it to me raw.

I’m not sure what’s left of the internet, but I vow to focus my time and energy
on creating the new, opting out of the old. No algorithmic feeds. No doom
scrolling. No auto-play, endless ads, rage bait discussions, short-form video
brain rot, dark patterns, and walled gardens.

No accounts. No asking for permission. Just me and my keyboard, typing away,
pushing signed notes into cyberspace. Written by me, as imperfect as my writing
may be. But 100% organic.

Fuck the clankers. They might be able to produce some code, but they can’t bleed on the page
to express their soul.

Less prompting, more typing.

This article first appeared on dergigi.com.