I come to this defence of writing as an unabashed partisan of text, a diehard literate in an age pivoting to video – I barely watch television, which marks me as a philistine these days. Every week seems to bring fresh news of a dimmer future for writing, whether it’s thanks to AI-curated, voice-operated information interfaces or in the hopes pinned on emojis as a universal writing system. So after reading Scott’s book I was moved to throw some gravel at the thinking that rolls along this track: if writing is the offspring of accounting and keeps the powerful in power, then let’s unshackle ourselves and return to purity.
Who needs writing, anyway? Seen through the filter of a military analogy, writing might be like nuclear weapons (which were developed specifically by the military), or it might be like gunpowder, which was discovered by alchemists searching for life-prolonging substances hundreds of years before its use in weapons. The question is this: is writing the product of the state in every single stage of its evolution, invented de novo by administrative elites? Or is it composed of pre-existing representational practices that expanded to fill the needs of the state and complex society?
Humans love to read meaning into the unexpected and the improbable, even where there is none. As the title of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s best seller has it, we’re fooled by randomness. When Germany fails to make it out of the group stage of the World Cup, the pundits say it turned out to be a weaker team than anybody thought; when Ocasio-Cortez beats Crowley, we say that’s because she ran a powerful grassroots campaign that was largely invisible to the media elite; when Trump is elected president or when Britain votes to leave the EU, that’s because of ... [insert any one of a thousand explanations here].
None of these narratives is wrong, exactly; they just tend to overlook the simple fact that improbable events happen on a regular basis, and that for every improbable event that happens, there are dozens which don’t. In certain artificial contexts, the frequency of improbable events can even be quantified: If you’re playing backgammon or craps, for instance, you know that you’ll get double ones one time in every 36 rolls, on average. If you roll a pair of dice a hundred times and never get double ones, you might not be surprised, but at the same time something fishy is going on.
Leave it to a sneaker historian to note that when Tommie Smith and John Carlos made their famous Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, they stepped up to the podium shoeless, each sprinter carrying a single Puma Suede. (The gesture was meant to symbolize black poverty.) In “Kicks: The Great American Story of Sneakers,” Nicholas Smith is continually freezing such iconic moments and zooming in on the overlooked footwear.