stylotranshumanism

• date: 2026-04-14
• tags: writing
• identifier: 20260414T082829

recorded language is a formidable technology. the memory is much more easily augmented than the mind, and to no small effect.

the particular experience of writing on paper owes to the precision of the hand, and reading relies on the speed of the eye. this is one case. people whose hands are absent or not suited to writing have learned to control wrists and mouths just so precisely, and Braille can be read as fast as sighted text. the non-body recording interface, too, is malleable. many dictate and listen to ebooks.

we might reimagine writing by co-elevating the body and our recording materials. in one hundred plastic ways, the body actuates precisely, and it senses quickly.

at a symposium honoring Vannevar Bush, the hypermedia pioneer Ted Nelson said:

The paradigm I have lived in for 35 years is that we would have new media objects of arbitrary dimensionality . . . which could be tacked together, stretched, and flipped at great speed, with interfaces which I would visualize as being somewhere between a theremin and a bicycle.

(TODO brief and link gestural computer)

(TODO it's more difficult than for other senses for smell and taste to quickly differentiate sequential experiences. what if reading via smell and taste can be like the alien language from /Arrival/?)