Alan Davies

It changed how we live and think.

Now we're sliding into what some call a new orality.

Screens, feeds, voice notes, videos, memes.

So here's the pitch.

I keep every shiny invention, but I delete the text.

Now, technically, code is writing and music is writing.

I'll let those slide.

I'm erasing only one thing, our ability to write words to convey meaning.

What could possibly go wrong?

We are one week in and chaos reigns supreme.

Dominic, can you take me on a tour of the institutions we rely on every day?

It's sounding quite catastrophic.

Writing allows institutions to operate at this massive scale.

So if power is forced to become local again, does that create more freedom or does it leave us vulnerable?

Now, Dominic, for thousands of years, we've been outsourcing our brains onto clay tablets or filing cabinets.

and lately the glowing rectangle in our pockets.

My phone has got access to about 20,000 photographs.

If you want to know what I was doing on December 10th, 2018, I can find out.

But it's hard to distill that down.

A week without writing and every we'll sort it out later task becomes we can't sort it out at all and we're all a bit stranded without our old calendar.