Flattered by Claude

Tools don’t just serve us; they make us, just as we make them. Sometimes the realisation of this truth arrives late, and it stings. I felt all of its ego-deflating pungency only recently, reading an argument to the effect that the invention of the printing press brought about, as an unintended consequence, the advent of an official written culture: early presses were expensive to build and run, and therefore far less accessible than ordinary quill and paper, so that their relative exclusivity invested the printed page – its very look and feel – with the aura of official sanction. My cheeks burned as I read this account because it brought home to me, with the Proustian vividness of involuntary memory, the recollection of my former self as a little boy, sitting at the kitchen table and gazing in solemn excitement at a newly purchased and as yet pristine writing book. Less than an hour later I would be putting it away in despair and shame. I was distressed not by the content of what I had written, but by its physical appearance: the irregularity of the letter shapes and the indentations left by my ballpoint pen on the all too yielding paper bespoke effortful violence, as if my ravaging hand had trespassed on hitherto unspoilt land, which by rights belonged to someone else. My manuscript had none of the glossy smoothness of my textbooks, whose pages shimmered like the godly limbs of marble statues. This is a mortifying recollection: it is not easy to admit that, as a little boy, I was so abjectly ...