The Revolution will not be Computerised

I was going to write something about AI today, so however much you hate the next few minutes, at least you don't have to deal with that.

I was also intending to write something about great European software apps, because Silicon Valley is chock-full of douchebags right now, and it's nice to see so many smaller European companies making really great software, especially for writers. I probably will write that piece soon, but you've dodged the bullet for a few days at least.

I'm not writing either of those pieces because I have decided to go on a freeform ramble about something else, something kind of opposite. I had intended to spend Sunday doing absolutely nothing, other than reading and watching movies. Yesterday we accompanied my daughter to Leeds to check out the university (it's great, and has one of the nicest libraries I've ever seen in my life), and that was knackering, so I was going to write off today. But I didn't. Here's what happened instead...

So, by way of setting the scene, Sunday is the day when I set aside some time to get all my admin in order. That generally entails catching up on emails and clearing the inbox, scanning bills and receipts and sending them off to my business manager (I appreciate that this sounds horrifically bougie, but trust me; NEVER having to think about VAT and accounts is a game-changer), and going through a suite of project management and productivity apps to make sure I'm on top of all the things I'm meant to be doing, and scheduling work for the coming week. I don't love doing all of this, but I do enjoy the feeling, however fleeting, of being on top of things.

But today there was a wrinkle. Today, I opened up Notion and moved some tasks around and then Akiflow, which talks to Notion and deals with scheduling and time-management, decided to file some new tasks incorrectly. And I don't mean it "decided" in the way a boiler might "decide" to stop delivering hot water or a dishwasher might “decide” to flood the kitchen. Calling it a "decision" wasn't me anthropomorphising a technical glitch; Akiflow's AI system actually made a decision. The wrong decision. And it didn't ask me first.

Now, this was not a problem on any reasonable scale, but it did give me pause. I'm not anti-AI (don't worry, we're not getting into that, I promise), but in this moment I realised that I was just a drone feeding data into a computer and letting it, more or less, categorise and schedule my work for me. This has been the case for a while, but the glitch this morning, for whatever reason, brought me up short. On any given day of the week, I fail to do the work that Sunday's Me timetabled, and I end up rescheduling it. And that involves moving stuff around a Notion timeline and checking dependencies and calendar events and blah blah boring blah. But I do it, almost every day, sometimes several times a day, pretty much on autopilot. I get up in the morning, look at the day's schedule, make a half-hearted attempt to get work done all day, and then bump everything I didn't do onto the next day. Probably most people do some version of this. But the drudge of it really hit me this morning.

Maybe I'm getting old (we're all getting old, but you know what I mean), but I realised today that days and weeks are just flying by while I just tinker with ("optimise") a work schedule. Ask me what I'm doing today and I won't really know; I'll have to check my phone, where the day is time-blocked to within an inch of its life. I'm just following a plan laid out by Sunday Me, who was a coffee-jagged idiot just throwing tasks around on a calendar as quickly as possible so he could go watch Daredevil.

Obviously this is largely a problem of my own making, but I am also going to choose to blame the technology, which has made scheduling easier and easier to the point that the tech is almost at the stage of deciding for me what I'm going to do and when. And I don't think I want that. I have no idea if the human race is going to one day be enslaved by an Artificial General Intelligence, but I am already more or less running my life based on what most neatly fits into a Notion schedule.

And so today I decided to stop it. And that's where Sunday went. It went to pen and paper, and the determination to be "intentional", which is an annoying word used by annoying people but in this single instance suddenly found some resonance. Fountain pens, lovely ink, gorgeous notepads and an array of smooth, clean paper. I've been a stationery nerd since forever, but it's always been a nice thing to have, rather than something I actually put to good use.

I had no idea how deep the analogue rabbit hole goes. I have repurposed a notebook into a bullet journal, and that is now the centre of my analogue world. I've always kept a daily journal, but now that has a proper place on my desk and it is where I get to have conversations with myself (if you've ever struggled with journaling, "having a conversation with yourself" is a good jumping off point). When I'm dead, my daughter might like to read it (if her boredom threshold can accommodate), but Elon fucking Musk and Tim fucking Cooke and whoever fucking else will have no access to it whatsoever.

Further down the rabbithole, I discovered a stack of Foglietto cards. Ah Foglietto, the little French company, based in Jules Verne's hometown of Nantes, who created these lovely coloured A7 index cards and accompanying boxes and pouches and assorted gubbins to go with them. I had stumbled across the company a few years ago and bought some of their wares because they seemed charming and I had a vague plan to do "something" with them. On finding the cards again, I looked up the company to see what they've been making recently. Nothing, is the answer; they appear to have gone bust and shut up shop. Because of twats like me using fucking Notion and Obsidian and whatever else instead of nice things made by creative people.

Cards have been a bit of a theme this week. On Thursday (my birthday, no I didn't get your card, it must have been lost in the mail), my wife took me to the Warburg Institute to see their Tarot exhibition, which was stunning. They had Crowley's deck, Austin Osman Spare's deck, the original artwork for those, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I've always liked tarot cards, for the artwork and for the same serendipity of inspiration you might get from Oblique Strategies or John August's Writer's Toolkit. Now, faced with a stack of blank, and apparently irreplaceable, Foglietto cards, a new analogue idea occurred to me. For as log as I have been writing professionally, I have stored scraps of ideas in a PKM app on the computer. There are advantages to this, I'm sure, but I can't remember what they were supposed to be. I know I hardly ever see any of these scraps again once I file them. But what if each of those scraps got a card? And the cards were in a really nice wooden box that had been built especially for them on my desk? Sure it might just turn into another thing that attracts dust, but there's also the constant possibility of taking the cards out and rifling through them and unearthing some hitherto unnoticed connection that might spark a story. Even if it never happens, it holds a lot more potential for joy than a bunch of ones and zeros in the fucking cloud.

There's also a little pouch for carrying blank cards around, so when I have an idea, I could write it on one of these and then file it in the box when I get home, rather than tapping it into my bloody phone like some Redshirt.

And so after several rather enjoyable hours, I now have a dedicated journal, a bullet journal, some project notebooks, and a card file of ideas. Actual analogue tools that I can touch and interact with. A way to make my life a fraction more INTENTIONAL.

And also, in the bigger picture, a way to turn my computer and assorted devices back into tools. If I need to write something, I sit down at the computer and open an app and do the work. But when I'm done, like when I publish this piece, I don't need to stay at the computer, waiting for it to hand me my next task; the next task isn't there, it's written on paper in a book, and it exists as an optional thing rather than the next step in an ongoing, never-ending, production line. The computer can go back to being a posh typewriter and I can get on with my life.

For more years than I care to consider, I have been anchored to a keyboard and a screen, and even stepping away from my desk has felt, at times, like an act of rebellion; something dangerously close to slacking off. I've read all the Jaron Lanier and Cal Newport books, and I have absorbed them and I consciously understand the perils of knowledge work and the need for agency and "intentionality", but today may have been the first day that I really felt like I had broken away from a process that has gripped me for years.

I like this feeling. I only wish I had got here in time to single-handedly buy up all of Foglietto's stuff and save them from going under.

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