Analog or digital? Fingers or digits?

When NEO rings a bell, do you RETURN or ENTER?

Is                                                 the Final Frontier, or the Pen-Ultimate?

Writing with-out a page? Will this save autonomy from automation, belt chastity from rhythmic autofeedback excess?

Or…did you not see this as the impetus for a radicalized aesthetic practice?

Predating the release of the iPad in 2010 and the popularization of the tablet computer as hyperportable alternative to the laptop, NEO is neither tablet nor laptop but an obscure Other option of portable computer monocultured for writing in the same way the e-reader is for reading. Quite simply, it’s the severed writing appendage of the desktop computer, resurrected autonomous.

Strictly speaking, NEO isn’t a “digital typewriter.” For that, one would better refer to an Underwood USB typewriter (1, 2), the iTypewriter, or perhaps even a laptop running ClickKey (software that maps typewriter sounds to keystrokes). But this is precisely why NEO is striking: though not a typewriter, cultural memory—especially when the avatar of the target demographic is a Boomer-aged rustic—cannot but associate it with one.

For we tend to think of the typewriter teleologically, as a stand-alone keyboard just waiting to get CPU-leashed. The typewriter was eviscerated in the process, reduced to a pile of keys, peripheralized to a Machine in which both writer and writing become but one among many: “email,” “Web-surfing,” “game[s]”…. NEO, by association with the typewriter, severs the umbilical plug to distinguish the art and tool of writing once again autonomously from those of computing and (ironically) bureaucracy, and “the Writer” from the common man….

“Man”: because this stand-alone keyboard is for lone rangers, not copyists. Only boys will be (cow)boys on the Frontier delineating the white virgin page from the Wild Wild Web. The typewriter began as a symbol of female autonomy, but ends as a symbol of male autonomy/fertility as defined against the writing assembly lines that absorbed the career woman in the same way webbing and computing now absorb all writers. For the modern-day Romantic, you are only as autonomous as your keyboard. Only NEO can unplug from the Matrix; only NEO can reconnect you with Self and Nature—even if it requires an Internet metaphor (i.e., connection) to do so: NEO “instantly connects you with your thoughts.”

In fact, NEO can do all of the above even better than the real thing (true to nostalgia, it’s a hypertypewriter; “it acts like a hardcore typewriter“)—because it’s light and portable: NEO only has the psychological (whimsical) heft of a typewriter. True, part of the typewriter’s appeal is its machine-ness, but luckily NEO lets you toggle between two modes of technophobic nostalgia: 1) autonomy from modern-day technology; 2) autonomy from the Machine altogether. For, heavy machine-ness also is what chained the typewriter and writer to the bureau in the same way that the subordination of the writing tool to the computing tool chains the keyboard and writer to the computer & the Machine. Moreover, the NEO is quiet—one can bring it into the woods without adulterating Nature’s musicscape—and the battery life is so long as to make the organ seem to have a life of its own, autonomous from the Power grid, powered as though by a hidden Source (if not, environmentally friendlily, by kinetic energy from the writer’s own digits). This means the object becomes material only every 700 hours!—more than enough to write Walden. And less work, too: it’s easier to punch the buttons, and hence easier to unsee writing as labour.

This, all in the name of guarding the fragile independent creative mind from “distractions.” There is an implication, however, that the most important defensive function might be, to protect the writer from (the distractions of) the writing tool itself. The one respect in which NEO resembles neither computer nor typewriter nor Atari nor quill is that there is no screen/page proper. There is a miniscule, slight-angled screen at the top; but looking at text on this is like looking at text not on a page but through a voyeuristic mail slot, and unless you don’t mind hunching over and/or you have no keyboard memorization or typing prowess whatever, then I daresay you’ll be (your head will be) more inclined not to look at the screen/page at all and simply TYPE. Type, and look at…what?

Picture a pen of ink super-volatile once penned. Actually, such a pen is within easy grasp: the tongue, whose “writing” within an oral culture would seem page/screen-less. Or is the “screen” simply the audience? Which is to say, that the paginal equivalent of an oral audience are the scratches/impressions, visibly reacting, within the mirror page, to our performance. The page is like a performance chart or to-do list: put a check mark on each coordinate of the time-table on which you achieved your daily goal; this compels you to want to see more checks. The typewriter’s bell? That’s Pavlovian. What Flusser points to, the necessary “motive” to write and the unseen text from which the writer “copies” (pp. 2, 5-6), are thus perhaps no better represented than by the blank page itself. Moralist police of good writing Strunk & White elaborate:

When writing with a computer [“typewriter” in older editions] you must guard against wordiness. The click and flow of a word processor can be seductive, and you may find yourself adding a few unnecessary words or even a whole passage just to experience the pleasure of running your fingers over the keybaord and watching your words appear on the screen. It is always a good idea to reread your writing later and ruthlessly delete the excess. (p.74)

Enter NEO, a guard against material excesses. “Focus,” orders the Page: “Turn off your targeting computer,” to the space cowboy.

But perhaps NEO’s shown us something: The Page. To look away from the teleprompter (which NEO’s own miniscreen resembles), to a diff-errant audience.

Postscript

NEO can be loosely emulated through your own laptop by running Freedom “Internet Blocking Productivity Software” while having your screen’s brightness turned to zero. (Cf. Darkroom.) A more daring experiment is to simply turn the laptop off.

Intertexts

Flusser, Vilem. “The gesture of writing.”
McLuhan, Marshall. “Front Page.”
NEO. [Ad]. Writer’s Digest. February 2009. p.7.
Strunk, William and E.B. White. The Elements of Style. 7th Ed. p.74.

Note: This article refers to NEO. A “NEO 2” has since been released.

— Kevin Kvas