In my subterranean office I have about a dozen replicas of notebooks of famous thinkers from years past.
A small publisher in Barcelona, Knonecker Wallis, publishes reprints some of these notebooks and charges handsomely for them. In about a year, they go out of print, and I wish I had bought two copies.
Here are a few pages and the cover from Isaac Newton's college notebooks. You can browse them on this site from Cambridge University.
I can't say I understand anything here but that doesn't matter. They show the flow of ideas, the cross-outs, the hard-work of actual thought. All that is marked down so it can be thought about, remembered, re-worked like a tough Saturday crossword. That's the point.
Thinking.
Just like in real-life the Turing one is clipped together with the kind of clips I last used in seventh grade. They didn't work for Turing. They didn't work for twelve-year-old me, they don't work any better now. Open the Turing a few pages and the things breaks apart.
That's part of its charm.
Johnnie von Neumann was the genius who intimidated all the other geniuses. By the age of six he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head. By eight he had mastered calculus. He even knew the word dumb had a b in it.
This is von Neumann's blueprint for an early computer.
I like note books like these--and I have half a dozen more--because while I don't understand what's being deciphered in them, it helps me to see the very act of deciphering.
Too many people, especially those who grew up with sophisticated digital tools like those we use so readily today, think work springs fully formed like Athena from Zeus' head.
They start designing and 'word smithing' before they have the vaguest idea down. They refuse to acknowledge that many of the greatest discoveries of human-kind--from the very beginnings of human-kind--radiated from the simple human act of making a mistake, taking a wrong turn, talking your way out of a jam, or getting lost.
From an evolutionary point of view, finding yourself in a fix has always lead to ingenuity, risk taking, rolling the dice and finding something magical.
As Ogden Nash wrote...
In other words, the termite got where she got by mistake. Most living things do.
The Shibboleths of our era prize speed and efficiency. They'll put up with a Library of Congress' -worth of AI slop from a NASA's-worth of computer brains so long as it's fast and cheap and meaningless, and for the most part, insulting. 99.78-percent of everything we read and heard uttered, regardless of the medium or the speaker, is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 99.78-percent of what we read today makes the Gilligan's Island Christmas Special look like "Hamlet."
Robert Caro, two-time winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer-Prize, told a story about slowing down his writing. While at Princeton, he would wait till the last moment to write for his fiction class.
Though Caro always got A's, his professor R.P. Blackmur, encouraged Caro to slow down.
When Caro interviews people, he follows similar "slow down" guidance.
Much of the decline of nearly everything is because we have so much to do we believe nothing is worth our time.
The truth is, however, whether or not people know for sure whether the messages you or brands send to them are made by humans or machines, they may very well sense how they are being treated.
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| Very few people are gulled by a dirty carpet at an understaffed hotel front desk that says "elite" on it. |
Most people, most creatives, most agencies, most of the world are treated like a pothole on the way to enormous profits. Caring, craft, time, pencilling get in the way of ever-more Mammon.
I remember years ago a story I read about Bill Bernbach. It's said a client said to him, "Why do you spend so much time on copy? Nobody reads it."
Bernbach is said to have answered, "Ten percent of people read copy. That's who I write it for."
The best way to be a human is to care about other humans who care.
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