Chapter 1: What is the significance of handwriting in human history?
NASA's first space shuttle, Columbia, was a marvel. On her final flight in 2003, experiments ran smoothly and data poured in as she calmly circled Earth. Then, upon re-entry, Columbia shattered, claiming the lives of all seven astronauts. A villain of the piece was bad writing. Minutes after liftoff, debris was seen near one of the wings. Engineers flagged it. Managers were briefed.
And the warning got filtered into a PowerPoint slide. A badly worded warning. Making it easier for decision makers to decide it's probably fine. Fortunately, words usually build rather than break. The light bulb didn't just stroll into your living room. It arrived dragging a suitcase of patents, contracts and juicy headlines.
Written words are the meaning we make and the receipts for the life we've built. Welcome to Life Without, where I pull a single thread from our magnificent world. Something we take for granted just vanished. It's my doing, of course. No warning, no clever workarounds, just the unravelling. How far will it run? Can we stitch a patch and survive the wear and tear?
For BBC Radio 4, this is Life Without with me, Alan Davis. And together, we'll find out if a life without writing ends up unpicking reality as we know it.
How on earth are humans in their tens of thousands going to organise themselves when writing is one of the key tools? that we had to get stuff done.
Dominic Wise is coming with me on this adventure. He's Professor of Early Childhood and Primary Education at UCL and author of How Writing Works, From the Invention of the Alphabet to the Rise of Social Media. And Nels Abbey, a British-Nigerian writer, satirist and author of The Hip Hop MBA.
Well, since this profession has gone up in smoke, I might have to resort to the oldest profession, so we'll find out how I fare in there.
Writing was revolutionary. 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?
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Chapter 2: How does writing impact our ability to organize society?
Unless we can have picture-based AI, that's reminded me also of... the important place of graphic novels. They are almost wordless books. So we can do incredible things with pictures.
Before we learn to write, we learn to tell stories. And I think that one muscle gets a little bit weaker, the other gets a little bit stronger because you're using it increasingly more. And I think that returning to storytellers via paintings, via pictures, our artists who have somewhat been neglecting in recent times will have a little bit more value to us.
And with the death of AI, too, we'll find ourselves returning to the guy at the back of the class drawing comics all day long. Exactly what I was thinking. Or she becomes a hero. So there we go.
Yeah. The quick drawers, the people who can... draw you a text, as it were, in images. They're going to be the kings and queens of the new world.
When I started life without writing, we had enough written material to stretch to the moon and back several times over. And I've kept it all. Would those suddenly become the ultimate treasure?
Absolutely, yes. But I'm thinking a lot of my work these days uses search engines, specialised databases to help me to access quickly. So maybe we're going to have more intense access. emotional connections when we come across something that really is a revelation to us, but actually finding something in particular is going to be very difficult.
The key thing I think that we'll probably witness is, since we can't print more work, and everything has to be protected and preserved, and of course, as authorities would normally tend to do, I wouldn't be shocked if a mechanism emerged in which we actually had to control what people were allowed to read and what they were not allowed to read.
So I find that the more we are looking towards this dystopian future, it looks a hell of a lot more like the past than we probably bargained for.
We've had 10 years without writing and smart tech is limping along and some authoritarian government saying we better gather all the books up because we need to look after them. Now we're 100 years in.
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