Why Writing On A Typewriter Feels So Strangely Modern

Years of voice dictation trained me to think before I write

Clive Thompson
8 min readMar 29, 2023

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This image, and all the images that follow, are scanned copies of the essay I typed out. The text in these images is precisely the same as the HTML text at the bottom of this essay, for screen-reader purposes.

(That’s the first scanned page of this blog post! If you’d rather read the HTML text — with a picture of my Olivetti portable typewriter — skip to the bottom.)

Okay, here’s a copy of the exact text I typed out, in those pages you see above:

I wrote this blog post on a typewriter.

Why?

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Clive Thompson

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net