Whatever Happened to Creative Technology?

I got my first laptop in 2005. I was twenty-three and about to start an MA in creative writing. The university had changed its policy the year before. Essays had to be typed and printed. Handwritten manuscripts would no longer be read. I had spent my undergraduate years filling notebooks and copying out passages in my neatest handwriting, and then, later, typing them out in the computer room. Now, everybody was buying their own machines.

The Dell arrived in a box that took two hands to lift. An Inspiron, silver and grey, thick by the standards of what came later but ordinary for its time. It was only heavy against everything else I had ever carried. A mini-disc player weighed nothing. A Nokia weighed nothing. The laptop made your backpack nag at your shoulders. I called it the tank.

Back then, mobile phones were for phone calls and texts. Social media was not yet what it became. Connecting to the internet was something you did in computer rooms and internet cafes, surrounded by other people’s clicking. You logged out when you left. A modem at home was rare in the student houses I knew. When the tank arrived in my room it functioned like a black box.

Everything on it was creative, illicit or both. My Word was pirated, passed to me on a disc by a friend who knew a friend. My FruityLoops Studio was pirated. My Winamp skins were the only honest thing on the machine, because they were free. I ripped my friends’ CDs onto the hard drive and within a couple of months I had more music in one place than I had ever owned. I made bad electronic music at three in the morning with headphones on. I wrote stories, poems and scripts, then edited what I had written, and the whole loop took place inside the tank.

What I remember most is the privacy. I filled notebooks in weeks back then and lived with five housemates. There was a low background hum of anxiety that someone might wander into my bedroom while I was out and read my most private thoughts or witness my failures of craft. Notebooks were visible. They could be picked up and rifled through for the sake of curiosity or amusement. The tank could be locked. It left no trail. The worst and most self-exposing writing I did could die quietly inside it, with no one to witness the dying, and the next morning I could begin again as though I had been a serious writer all along.

I think now that this was the deepest pleasure of the machine, and one I have not had since. The mind had a room of its own. The room had a door and a key. Whatever happened in there stayed in there, available to only me.

I resisted the internet. I did not want a dongle. I had a feeling, hard to defend now and not much easier to defend then, that connecting the machine would contaminate it. The corporate world, the viruses, the advertising, the pornography, all of it waiting at the door of a place I had built for writing and music and the slow private work of becoming someone. The tank contained a sacred realm. I wanted to keep it that way for as long as I could.

The dongle came in the end. Essays had to be submitted digitally. Tutors had to be emailed. The course assumed you were online and the course was the reason I had bought the machine. I got a small white stick that plugged into the side of the tank and found a place with wi-fi. I sent the essay. I unplugged the stick. I held it in my hand for a moment and felt that I had got away with something. The machine could still be sealed off from the world. For a while that felt like a workable compromise. It was the happiest I have ever been with a laptop.

The compromise lasted about six months. We got the internet at home. The dongle started coming out for other things. A song I wanted. A film someone had mentioned. The Pirate Bay, which I had heard about but not yet visited, turned out to be a library with no librarian and no closing time. But it took hours for things to download. The dongle started spending most of its time in the machine.

Then came MySpace, which was the first thing that made the connection feel worth it on its own terms. Local bands from anywhere in the world, uploaded by the bands themselves, with comment walls and top eights and the slow accumulation of a network you had assembled by taste. Chat rooms that were genuinely funny. Forums where people argued about books in good faith because they had nothing to sell. There was no hook. There was no algorithm. You had to search for the good stuff, you had to ask a friend, you had to scour, and the scouring was part of the pleasure. I do not want to get nostalgic about it, but the early internet was genuinely good for a while.

By the time I bought my next laptop everything was licensed. Everything forced you to connect. Offline machines no longer existed. You could not install software without an account. You could not open the software without a check. The connection was built into the hardware, because the hardware had been designed by people who had decided that connection was the point. Not writing. Not listening. Not making things badly until they became better things. Connection. Verification. Updates. Accounts. A machine that had once opened inward now opened outward by default.

From there, the medium of information started to change. Paperbacks and CDs slipped out of my friends’ lives. The trips into town to Borders and Track Records stopped, and the rituals around them. The walk in, the flick through, the conversation at the counter, the bus home with the bag between your feet. All of that went, and what replaced it was a window on a screen. You opened the internet before the Word document. You wanted to smile before you worked. You wanted a small hit of someone else’s life before you sat down with your own.

That was the beginning of the long struggle, and it is the struggle I am still in. We all are. To stay engaged with your own creativity when joy and connection, or the veil of joy and connection, are always one click or tap away. To put something down before seeing what other people are putting down. To keep a room in the mind that nobody else has the key to.

The tank is long defunct - in a landfill no doubt - but I think about it more than any machine I have owned since. It was the last one that gave me something, and didn’t want anything back.