Are Typewriters Alive?

This essay came alive to me in unexpected ways as I was sitting in front of the Hermes 3000 under the shade of the umbrella at my patio table, on a warm spring day. It started as a thought I had while I lay in bed several nights previous, which was that it seemed as if typewriters had the power to impart their own effect on the writing process, even to modulate the writer's voice. In a flight of fancy I asked myself if this might even be construed as a form of intelligence on the part of the machine, all the while simultaneously knowing they to be a complex assemblage of bits of metal parts, and that these thoughts were mere nonsense. Yet, following the chain of thought further, I asked myself if perhaps they possessed some primitive consciousness, in the way that people in the early 1970s began to think of plants as possessing a consciousness of their surroundings, as documented in Tompkins' and Bird's The Secret Life of Plants.

It's most likely the effect being observed with typewriters involves the process of how tools modulate the work of the artisan, yet it seemed sufficient to follow this fanciful thought further. If typewriters do possess a primitive form of consciousness -- or, like a virus that harnesses the reproductive process of living cells to procreate, the machines' harness the physical and emotional abilities of the writer -- do they do so individually, or is there some collective consciousness that might explain the slow but steady resurgence of interest in the typewriter? Are they reviving themselves, by harnessing the enthusiasm of writers and aficionados; or is their revival intrinsic and inevitable, a natural expectation in the evolution of human technology, with its ebb and flow in repetitive cycles?

All of this is mere fancy, and at most metaphoric of observations writers make about how they interact with their tools. These thoughts are a mental model and nothing more, that happen to explain some phenomena we observe as we create new work with these tools. Like most models, they are imperfect and subject to change. In the way that the Aether Theory served as a model for how space works, and even as it still seems to explain some observational phenomena today, we now know of better models; so too is the theory of living typewriters a mere mental construct, which we can choose to hold close or discard, depending on the breadth of our imagination.

Of course, ask any typewriter aficionado and they are certain to agree that, yes, some typewriters seem to be alive, seem to impart that something special into their creative process. I will leave it to you to decide if that constitutes some form of consciousness. I know where I stand.