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Dept. of Technology
December 20, 2021 Issue

Can "Distraction-Free" Devices Change the Way We Write?

The digital age enabled productivity but invited procrastination. Now
writers are rebelling against their word processors.

By Julian Lucas

December 13, 2021

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a shiny pen surrounded by circles of computers and typewriters
Computers made the writer's life easier, until they made it harder.
Illustration by Timo Lenzen

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For a long time, I believed that my only hope of becoming a
professional writer was to find the perfect tool. A few months into
my career as a book critic, I'd already run up against the limits of
my productivity, and, like many others before me, I pinned the blame
on Microsoft Word. Each time I opened a draft, I seemed to lose my
bearings, scrolling from top to bottom and alighting on far-flung
sentences at random. I found and replaced, wrote and rewrote; the
program made fiddling easy and finishing next to impossible.

I'd fallen into the trap that the philosopher Jacques Derrida
identified in an interview from the mid-nineties. "With the computer,
everything is rapid and so easy," he complained. "An interminable
revision, an infinite analysis is already on the horizon." Derrida
hadn't even contended with the sirens of online life, which were
driving writer friends to buy disconnected laptops or to quarantine
their smartphones in storage bins with timed locks. Zadie Smith
touted Freedom, a subscription service that cut off the user's
devices--a chastity belt for procrastinators.

Published in the print edition of the December 20, 2021, issue, with
the headline "Focus Mode."
[Julian-Luc]
Julian Lucas is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
More:WritingComputersTechnologyProcrastinationToolsDevicesApps
Typewriters

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