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Amazon First Novel Award

Not Everything Digital Is Good: Tech Isn’t Always an Example of Genius

It’s our duty to understand innovation rather than celebrate or condemn it

I LIKE FOUNTAIN PENS. I’m hardly a connoisseur. I picked up the habit years ago, fond of the scriptural feel it gave my scrawl. My collection is modest: a basic Lamy Safari, a dressier Lamy Studio, both cartridge fed. But I also own a clear TWSBI Mini, which fills by piston. That means I own literal bottles of ink (and the stained hands to prove it).

It may seem an odd way to open a special issue on Big Tech, but I sometimes wonder if my affection for writing instruments reflects something about my attitude toward technology and my philosophy when covering it.

Journalist Nicholas Carr called the online world “the shallows” for the way it erodes concentration. But the paradox is that its depthlessness arrives as immersion. I live a life embedded in recommendation algorithms, targeted advertising, and social media feeds. My job has me wade through Trello notifications, Slack threads, dashboard metrics, shared calendars, and real-time analytics. Then there’s the Google Docs, PDFs, Zoom calls, AI-bot scraping reports, and an inbox clogged with synthetic spam that regenerates faster than I can empty it. Most days, it’s a lot.

On those days, the feel of nib on paper is not a nostalgic hobby but a cognitive discipline. It brings friction to my decisions. Editorially, my team and I try to do just that: slow things down. At a very basic level, it starts with a pleasure in sentences. Fast-moving platforms pollute our vocabulary with jargon.........

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