How is a laptop like a typewriter?

In David Cronenburg’s 1991 film Naked Lunch the protagonist Bill Lee (Peter Wellers) is an author wrapped up in a conspiracy run by bugs. He communicates with them through his type writer, which transforms into a creature. In one still, the machine becomes a head whose teeth are the keys; Bill sits calmly at his desk and puts his hands into the alien creature’s mouth to type. There are stalks on top of the head and its skin is waxy and pale. In another scene the machine obscenely opens to him, pink and sticky; he massages it.

I think that this machine is essentially a type writer. Or rather: in a previous generation, there were people who wrote on typewriters. There were, of course, people who wrote longhand and then sat down to type, but there were also people who sat down to write at the type writer. A type writer really is a marvelous thing: now anybody can produce typed documents, and it’s possible to create some number of duplicates as you type.

I sit down at this computer to write; I carry it with me and tinker with it. I mess around in its guts, a tweak here, an adjustment there. It complains; I attend to it. Is this an enormous waste of time? Do I long for a system that “just works?” No, I don’t, and anyway, I already have one: really all I mess around with is the software. Besides replacing the hard disk drive with a solid state, I haven’t done any hardware hacking on this machine at all. All of the finickiness has come from the linux distribution I chose and how I chose to set it up. And still there was a lot that was set up for me and works tomagically.

It’s hard to explain: I’ve been using a computer for such a long time, and it was very rare that I ever felt as though there were something that I couldn’t do or didn’t know how to do. On the other hand I am now learning the computer for the first time. I guess that I’m learning.