• The title has changed a few times.

• An article is missing.

• There’s a vast chasm of time between uploads.

This newsletter has (since it first launched in November of 2022) had three previous names. First, it was Reject Twitter, Embrace the Blogosphere, more-or-less chosen as a placeholder and eventually changed when I could think of something shorter. Then, it was Posting Through It for about a year. However, I changed it a few months ago again after discovering that there was already a newsletter by that name elsewhere. Most recently, it was The Discourse Desk, a title that I chose as yet another placeholder. I’ve landed on a definitive title for this newsletter, now: Typewritten Digital. I promise that It won’t change again!

I chose to delete the article Our Glass Displays because the perspective that I hold on its subject matter is considerably different now than what I expressed there. I may choose to revisit the topic at a later time.

Lastly, there have been entire months between uploads primarily due to personal and scheduling reasons that have since been resolved. I intend to update Typewritten Digital weekly, though it may happen on different days.

Thanks, and here’s to the future.

Now, in 2023, that future is finally here, and I can’t find it in me to be as excited as that younger version of myself would’ve wanted. I imagine I might’ve been, had it arrived when I was still young enough to believe that new technology inevitably makes the world a better place.

I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not some sort of technophobe. The technologies that makes a self-driving car possible have been included throughout consumer vehicles for a while now, and for the most part, things like lane departure warning, blind spot monitors, and automated parking have made the roads safer. Put together, though, into vehicles without drivers, they create something that I’m a lot more skeptical of, especially given the way it’s currently being implemented.

In San Francisco, Cruise (a subsidiary of General Motors), and Waymo (a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company) were granted permission to operate paid, 24/7 robotaxi services. Since then, reports of malfunctions, including (but not limited to) an incident where a Cruise robotaxi collided with a fire truck en-route to an emergency have raised safety concerns among the public.

Of course, there will likely come a time where these vehicles are, as the companies market them, demonstrably safer than human drivers. Whether that happens sooner or later though, it’s clear to me that Cruise, Waymo, Zoox (Amazon’s entry into this new industry), and all the other companies out there with often-nonsensical names are using public streets to conduct their tech experiments.

I think, though, that ultimately my objection to the way this technology is being applied comes not from concerns about safety or even from questions about regulation and the ethics of allowing these kinds of public tests, but rather from the overwhelming sense that once again, a significant new leap in technology is being used in a way that rather than solving problems, will create new ones, or exacerbate existing ones.

In some theoretical future where robotaxis and self-driving personal vehicles are safer than human drivers and worked as advertised, that wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing for society at large. Automating cars does nothing to address the environmental risks of car dependency (electric or otherwise), the way that car dependency perpetuates financial and social inequality, or the negative sociological/health effects that such a system creates. It may even make those problems worse by further reinforcing car dependency and drawing resources away from public transportation.

I still think about that phrase, “the future is now”. It can mean positive things: that the great challenges of our time are close to being put in the past. It can also carry a darker connotation if we consider that not all “futuristic” things are good. The self-driving car and the robotaxi are a lot like another science-fiction future staple: the flying car. It’s a sensational sort of idea that conjures images of a techno-utopia, but is in reality just a bad idea made worse.

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I haven’t read any of Sanderson’s books; most of my knowledge about him comes from elsewhere in the genre-fiction-writing world, particularly in regards to his worldbuilding skills. To many familiar with the genre-fiction niche, Sanderson is best known for his novels’ magic systems. He has a ton of them—sometimes he has multiple per setting. I don’t believe that he invented the terms, but he appears to have popularized the concept of the “hard magic/soft magic” system distinction, which refers to the presence and audience knowledge of a magic system’s given rules, or lack thereof. Even without reading his books, one comes across this man’s work just by discussing worldbuilding on the internet or reading/watching other people’s thoughts on the subject. However, the Discourse (with a capital D, in fantasy novel fashion to indicate it’s a special version of a normal word!) isn’t about Sanderson’s magic systems or even about his stories in the broader sense. It’s about a profile in Wired.

For the most part, Kehe’s article isn’t saying much that strikes me as incendiary. He spends the first few paragraphs introducing Sanderson and explaining his success as a writer before introducing a theme—that Sanderson, despite his status as one of the most successful contemporary fantasy writers, has an extremely quiet personal profile. Kehe discusses potential explanations: He’s a Mormon, a fantasy writer, whose works haven’t been adapted to the screen.

What really got people talking though, was the way that Kehe wrote about Sanderson. He recounts a deeply strange accounting of his time interviewing the man and spending some time witnessing his quotidien. What follows is a scathing, at-times-painful examination of Sanderson from the perspective of an outsider taking a look at a life that people rarely see. It’s the kind of literary profile that seems to have fallen out of favour—the interrogation. Not, of course, in the traditional sense—Kehe’s not bearing down over “Brando Sando” (as his fans call him) at a table in a dimly lit room—I mean that fundamentally, it’s a profile that refuses to be a puff piece. When I first encountered the Discourse, I was confused. Shouldn’t we want an honest examination of a profile subject? It’s not like Sanderson is just a normal guy—he is fundamentally weird.

One—Dragonsteel’s new “head of narrative”—lets slip that Sanderson feels no pain. It’s true, Sanderson’s sister-in-law says. Even though he writes for eight hours a day on a couch, he has no backaches. The hottest of hot sauces cause scarcely a sweat. At the dentist, he refuses novocaine for fillings. When I ask Sanderson later to confirm this, he does but asks if I really have to print it. I’m sorry, I say. I really do.

The writers’ group is standard stuff: What’s this character’s motivation? Can the reader follow that fight sequence? Sanderson gives feedback with half his brain, the other half occupied with autographing books. It’s only afterward that the real talk happens, such as Star Wars debates. When those subside, I bring up the pain thing again. Turns out Sanderson doesn’t seem to feel pain of any kind, even emotional.—Kehe, Brandon Sanderson is Your God, Wired, 2023

Now, I’m not saying that its wrong to feel absolutely no pain, even emotional, but it is weird (in the sense that it isn’t normal). Whatever moral weight you may ascribe to that is your own business, but in any case, it’s certainly the kind of thing that you’d expect the person writing a profile to include. There’s even something kind of sad about the whole thing:

For his part, Sanderson actually, at this moment, looks pained. He might not feel, he says, but his characters do. They agonize and cry and rejoice and love. That’s one of the reasons he writes, he says: to feel human.

This is the point of a literary profile, is it not? To tell us things about a writer and their work? Sure, there are lines in the article that I found on a first read to be a bit mean-spirited. I think the derisiveness with which Kehe describes the attendees of Sanderson’s…fan convention…borderline on pretentious. But people take particular offense to two parts of the profile in particular: the comments about Sanderson’s Mormonism, and the criticism of his writing.

Most will hear this and think: At that rate, none of the words could possibly be any good. They’d be right, in a way, and that’s what Sanderson agrees with. At the sentence level, he is no great gift to English prose.

The early books especially. My god. Here’s a sample sentence: “It was going to be very bad this time.” Another one: “She felt a feeling of dread.” There’s a penchant for redundant description: A city is “tranquil, quiet, peaceful.” Many things, from buildings to beasts, are “enormous.” Dark places, more thesaurically, are “caliginous.” On almost every page of Mistborn, his first and probably most beloved series, a character “sighs,” “frowns,” “raises an eyebrow,” “cocks a head,” “shrugs,” or “snorts,” sometimes at the same time, sometimes multiple times a page. I count seven books in which one of the characters frets about their metaphors. “I have trouble with metaphors,” one literally says. Of his own work, Sanderson has said: “I detest rewriting,” “I write for endings,” and “I write to relax.” It shows. He writes, by one metric, at a sixth-grade reading level.

This, to me, is on its face, not an unfounded criticism. Sanderson is, in a technical sense, not a very good writer. Moreover, his entire ethos seems to some, antithetical to the point of literature.

Carolyn Petit, writer for Kotaku summarizes the whole thing pretty well to me.

Then, there’s the Mormon thing. A lot of people were insisting that it’s wrong to comment about the man’s religion. I’m not really gonna unpack that except to say that Sanderson has, both in the past and as recently as last year defended the homophobia of the LDS church. Criticisms about Mormonism notwithstanding, his politics are pretty much left out of the Wired article. Kehe points out the similarities between the core themes of Sanderson’s work and tenets of Mormonism, which are admitted to in the article BY Sanderson!

The short of it is that I really don’t understand why people are going crazy over all of this. If a profile isn’t a puff piece, that’s probably fine! Things like this should be scathing and critical, even if a writer’s devoted fans get mad about it. Especially when there are things (as demonstrated in the article) that’re worth criticising. Perhaps someday, I’ll write something about the “Let people enjoy things” phenomenon, which is definitely at play here in the Discourse. For now, I’ll leave you with another Carolyn Petit quote:

Now, I don’t think that I’m the first person to point all this out, nor will I be the last. There are many other queer people (particularly trans people) who have spent the better part of the last few years exhaustively cataloguing the resurgence of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric in mainstream conservative media and politics. In particular, Seattle-based transgender YouTube creator Jessie Earl has spent the last year taking on Matt Walsh and people like him.

Others have more comprehensive works documenting this particular issue, and I would encourage you to give them your support. I’m here to ask two simple questions:

1. Why is this happening?

2. What is the end goal?

Well, I don’t think it’s got much to do with religious dogma or with a sincere belief in anti-trans conspiracy theories—it’s likely a lot simpler than that. People like Matt Walsh, Chaya Raichik, and Ben Shapiro are reactionaries, yes, but more than that they’re opportunists. All the sturm-und-drang about “groomers” and trans-affirming care is demagoguery. Whether these bad-faith actors actually believe the things they’re saying is immaterial (though I do happen to think that some of them hold the beliefs they espouse), the effect is the same. It galvanises a political bloc in a way that gives power to their cause. When people show up to “protest” drag events armed to the teeth, their prejudices are being exploited for political expediency.

This isn’t a way of excusing this behaviour—it is still abhorrent and the harm that they cause is very real.

Now, I don’t know if the “Wake up, sheeple!” approach is enough to combat this, but it’s important that the queer community and their allies try everything we can.

The stakes haven’t been higher in decades—we have politicians like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis actively attempting to use the power of the state against the LGBTQ+ community. We have stochastic terrorists like Chaya Raichik (a.k.a “LibsofTikTok”) galvanising real-world violence and intimidation. The cynical tactics being employed here are effective. As Susan Benesch wrote for Just Security:

Speech that increases the risk of intergroup violence, often by describing one set of people as posing a mortal threat to an in-group, can make violence against those people seem defensive, necessary, and even virtuous.

In her testimony before the January 6th congressional committee, Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace pointed out that the United States is experiencing an unprecedented rise in the acceptance of political violence. With the data showing that approval of political violence in the US is nearing the levels seen in Northern Ireland at the height of The Troubles, we’re in an undeniably precarious position. For the Right, queer people make the perfect scapegoat. Mixing this rhetoric with our current political situation poses a very real threat to our community.

However, I didn’t write this to make people afraid (though I think that we certainly have good reason to be). The point of all this is to encourage the people reading this to share an idea with people they know who aren’t particularly concerned with the state of things for queer people—the kind of person who still thinks that we’re in the 2019-era paradigm: get involved.

As some on the internet are prone to say: This is not a drill.

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And so it is that the blogosphere makes its triumphant return. I was a little too young to be blogging back when it was a thing so this is all a bit new to me. At least for now, though, this won’t be a blog in the traditional sense. Think of it as an anthology series with basically no unifying theme. Like my Twitter account, the things you’ll be reading here will vary based on what I feel like writing about. You may get commentary, opinion, fiction, whatever. The main difference is that I’ll have to think about what I’m typing a little bit more. So, here we are—in a new age. Welcome!

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