John McPhee and More Personal Computing

In Draft No. 4, McPhee describes his pre-computer writing method. Handwritten notes and audio tapes are transcribed by typing on a typewriter. He manually rolled the paper after each note to leave space. Once all the notes were typed up, he photocopied them and then used scissors to cut out each individual note. Notes were then categorized and placed in an envelope for that section. Only then did he feel organized to write.

When computers came along, word processing offered a lot of features that could make writing more efficient. But no out-of-the-box program could split, categorize, and organize notes like his analog process did. McPhee happened to find someone locally who could write macros to do exactly what he wanted. This digital version of his specific process was so valuable to him that he pledged to follow the developer around the world if he had to.

The current advancements in AI give us all the opportunity to benefit from more personal computing like this. Software doesn’t have to be written out of the box for our own unique workflows; we have the power to make it so ourselves. Many LLMs on the market today could probably implement McPhee’s system with prompting alone. At the very least, they would make wring macros accessible to a broader audience. Putting the power of programing into the hands of everyday users has the potential to transform how we use digital tools and can empower us to delight in our own idiosyncratic processes.

Two quick asides:

Maryanne Wolf, in her book Reader Come Home, writes about how the physical dimensions of paper books fire up the spatial reasoning parts of our brain, which helps us remember content sequencing. I would love to see a digital solution that brings that same sort of spatial awareness to digital content.

“The note-typing could take many weeks, but it collected everything in one legible place, and it ran all the raw material in some concentration through the mind.” We would be wise to remember that efficiency can come with a price. Expediting data organization robs us of our time to sit and absorb the contents and let them marinate in our thoughts. It is up to us to decide when to outsource that work and when to sit in our drudgery and see what emerges.