This is paper – remember it?

Holy holy holy holy holy holy paper. Everything now is ‘computerised’ and all your work, or I am guessing most you reading this paper, is done through a keyboard and only at seldom occasions entirely through the noble black ink that our forefathers used to ‘quill down’ on paper.

You don’t scribble anymore, you don’t draw on the margins of scrappy brown paper little suns of thought, letting out your stream of consciousness like in the good all days when you used to take notes as a young pupil still wetting your pants at night, abandoning your worries to a – meaningless only with hindsight, – brown smelly moleskin personal diary. The only way you kept secrets from people, from your siblings and other predators to whom your diary was the ultimate prey, was this small shiny fancy little lock.

Now you haven’t got pages, you’ve got databases. Now you don’t throw it in the bin as a personal challenge, now you don’t tear it apart, or erase it with the ever-darkening piece of rubber left in your pencil case, now you don’t seal it in an envelope and send it to your lover with a bit of fragrance sprayed on the paper made transparent by the wet perfume. Now, you “Trash it, change it, mail – upgrade it”.

And let’s not even talk about how this affects your imagination. Isn’t a keyboard the biggest restriction to a healthy train of thought? Only writing through the prism of buttons available before your hands, all gathered in a rectangular piece of plastic surmounting noisy mechanisms that make a screen blinding and exhausting. We’re all bound to express our ideas through this channel, nay, this hollow corridor of censorship, where abbreviations, self-notes and personal symbols are not allowed.

How about once you’re done? Once you’ve written your piece. Once the essay is finished and you can pack up, close the machine and have a drink in the real life (and not a sex on the beach on facebook). Well, the whole beauty of the work has disappeared. All the erasures, crossed out words and black furry ink balls of frustrations do not, and have never existed.
This is frustrating. You hand in the work and it’s all clean, all nice, all fake. It’s all bleached and white and black and that’s all. The traces of sweat and of long nights of deep intellectual scribbling just vanished in the clean .pdf document you just sent.

It’s like buying all your furniture in IKEA. It’s all nice, it’s all clean, for all you know it might not even be wood as it looks more like brown-beige plastic than anything. IKEA’s cool and all but it’s like your .pdf essay, there’s no charm. There’s no chips and dust of wood on the chair, and the smell of wood that was worked and chopped by the big fat handed artisan. Well now we’re all like that. We all hand in veneered bleached pieces of work, no traces left behind to remind you of the hustle of composing. The Boar wishes we could just all go back to the grace of writing on paper, and we might end up having big fat muscular hands like the beautiful artisan whose nails are still stuffed with last night’s manual struggle with his wood.