How Steve Jobs Got It Wrong

Digital creativity vs. analog creativity

Write in long-hand: when you scratch out a word, it still exists there on the page. On the computer, when you delete a word it disappears forever. This is important because usually your first instinct is the right one.

-Martin Amis, 16 Tips for Writers

Ernest Hemingway produced 70% of his creative catalog in Key West, Florida, over the course of eight years. The property can be visited for eighteen dollars in cold, hard cash, where you can wander with the 54 cats on the property to tour the home of one of the greatest American writers to have ever lived (if you’re a cat person, you’ll want to read more about his cats here).

In Key West, Hemingway had a catwalk that connected the balcony of the house’s second floor to his writing studio. He would wake up, cross the bridge, and write from 6am and to 12pm every day, determined to write 500 words. His studio is still intact and barred by a no-nonsense DNA helix of a cage to prevent entry.

Five hundred words on a computer is next to nothing. On our phones, we probably send twice that number of words in texts alone, not to mention email. No matter how often we might read the writers of previous eras, it’s hard to remember how different the writing process was. Hemingway wrote by typewriter. If he made a mistake, he would have to rewrite the entire thing again. Vonnegut, living well into the modern age, refused to ever use a computer. You might even say he hated technology. Writing drafts that must be rewritten from scratch almost seems like the process of sharpening a blade. If that’s true, our digital blades must be comparatively dull. But it’s definitely easier to write 500 words on a computer in a six-hour timeframe. Mistakes are ephemeral and our dreams are ever-changing clouds summoned by keyboard to the same window where we work, sleep, socialize, laugh, cry, and fantasize.

Are computers a tool to create more or a trough to consume more?

That comes down to the creative process. Let’s look at the evidence for longhand writing versus digital writing to understand the difference in physical tools with digital tools.

Technical Totalities

In 1981, Apple founder Steve Jobs, age 26, was interviewed about his perspective on computers. With the same addictive and endearing optimism of the doomed prophets of Web3 and the overseers of the AI apocalypse, Jobs explains that computers should be compared to bicycles: they are tools that accelerate the processes of the mind, explaining:

A human on a bicycle is...off the top of the charts [in terms of efficiency of locomotion]. What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

Unfortunately, Steve Jobs - and technology - lied to us. Technology is a tool that is more commonly used as a trench, a trough, and a tunnel. Granted a library of infinite knowledge and a worldwide workshop resplendent with revolution, the cave-dwelling primitives living in our bones are predisposed to gorge rather than forge. As my friend Erik Hoel put it at The Instrinc Perspective: we should expect a new Englightenment from this on-tap infinity but instead it looks like we’ve simply stopped making Einsteins, losing some unknown element in our progress.

We spend most of our time prioritizing how technology can maximize gratification and not enough time inventing new paradigms. Steve Jobs ignored one singular truth: the tactile is where we touch truth. Screens are tools in same the way mirrors are windows and the creations are reflections, not revolutions or revelations.

As Kuniyoshi L. Sakai, a neuroscientist at the University of Tokyo, says:

Paper is more advanced and useful compared to electronic documents because paper contains more one-of-a-kind information for stronger memory recall.

Writing on paper triggers more brain activity and memory recall in general. Paper is even more efficient: note-taking is 25% faster on paper than on tablets or smartphones.

This study emphasizes that the most important inspiration is found IRL. In our data determinism, the creative process suffers because it is unrecognizable as output and can not be measured by the metrics that have become our meaning. In compulsively chasing finish lines that run from us, it is hard to take a breath when speculation is sloth and rambling is ruinous.

Lest we forget, even defecation is degenerative delay in our dance with digital destinies.

I’ve bought a word processor and we’re slowly coming to an understanding. It’s quick as the devil, but has very little imagination, and no small talk.

-John Updike

Unable to measure inspiration, we must believe that efficiency is meaning and process is unprofitable. This helps explain the death of notebooks as a medium where we keep our knowledge: inscriptions of ink interfere with the integration of process and product. Future scholars arrive to seminars with laptops, unrelated tabs already open for the first opportunity for distraction in the belief that learning and experience can somehow be absorbed like sunlight. Typing what we know is superior, the thinking goes, even as we click between realities, is how we gain wisdom because retrieval is better than remembrance, because efficiency is effect.

The problem is that we forget the stuff we throw into the ocean of our digital documents. Writing something down makes it easier to remember and, therefore, learn things better. Putting a pen to paper is an act of inscribing lessons and giving them meaning in our minds. As a physical medium, the spatial awareness of where the lesson is recorded gives our brains a better way to record and remember it in the first place. As professor Kuniyoshi L. Sakai explains:

Paper is more advanced and useful compared to electronic documents because paper contains more one-of-a-kind information for stronger memory recall.

What I’ve found, as longhand scribbler and digital creator, is the true value of writing by hand is that paper is disposable. There is no pressure for perfection because we rediscover the religious rite of the rough draft. And in reading the finite words that end up on an individual book, the space of the experience gives us a space that is all our own and an identity that is divinity within pages.

Neil Gaiman agrees: “To me, typing is like work… Writing with a pen is like playing.”

Writing makes us slower and more thoughtful, which can make us more creative because it gives our mind a chance to rest. According to neuroscientist Claudia Aguiree:

“Recent neuroscientific research has uncovered a distinct neural pathway that is only activated when we physically draw out our letters… And this pathway, etched deep with practice, is linked to our overall success in learning and memory.”

Did I mention writing by hand makes you more empathetic? As professor Virginia says:

“When we write a letter of the alphabet, we form it component stroke, by component stroke, and that process of production involves pathways in the brain that go near or through parts that manage emotion.

It’s possible that there’s not the same connection to the emotional part of the brain when people type, as opposed to writing in longhand.”

Even tech companies have found that writing by longhand is better for meetings and next steps, just because paper as a medium is easier to remember and physical writing is easier to tie back to other information.

When seeking that space on screens, a text or a notification or flashing color are sins that sink our holy self. Pull out a pen and start scribbling. Or at least try to think of technology as a tool first and trough second without thinking about how the tool can fill the trough. See what creation means without an audience and what expression means without efficiency.