A Digital Longhand Writing Renaissance is At Hand

Year Four with reMarkable: The Renaissance is Real

More than fifty-five years of pathological writing attests to this eternal truth.

Whatever is most wrong with me, it seems most to do with writing. From as long as I can remember, I read books in order to learn how to write.

From assigned classical literature, to novels, to scientific papers and western cannon classics. Every topic. Every style. I was obsessed by the question, how do they do that?

Probably around age twelve is when this first started getting me in trouble. All the usual, normal, prurient thoughts of any twelve year old male human being were poured out upon the page. No filter. Compulsive. Like the self-soothing escape behaviors resultant from the overwhelming, relentless over-stimulation and trauma of growing up in a family of eleven, both adaptive and not so much. Behaviors that would continually pile up over the years, growing, predictably into a series of rotating addictions. Heal from one, pick up another. The underlying pattern of obsessive compulsive tendencies was not nearly as well known in the 1970’s and 1980’s as it is today.

Another thing that fifty years of pathological writing has proven: the character, nature, and qualia of written content produced by long-hand printing, cursive, typing, and voice-to-text dictation vary tremendously. This is not an argument for the superiority of any of those means of speaking thoughts into bits and bits into pixels; or of transcribing thoughts into script and script into pages. The observeration is: there is an important and valuable difference between these modes of self-expression.

For years, I waited hopefully for the first reMarkable paper tablet. Traveling with a stack of composition books is not easy, especially when one is prone to filling up a dozen per year, lugging along the history of streaming consciousness becomes increasingly burden; some. When you find yourself, with permission and assurance, storing a stack of those most personal and private of journals at an AirBnB for later retrieval; only to be told several months later that they were discarded, despite well marked e-mail contact information both outside and inside the weather-proof bin, that’s when the value of your personal, most intimate, what Andrew Bustamonte calls [secret](add link) identity becomes glaringly clear. Moreso, when other items from the bin are returned to family members, as if you had somehow been grifting them (your own family) all along.

So, now you know for certain that the journals were not destroyed, they were stolen, and you’ve been trusting pathological, potentially predatory liars, again.

Because your pollyannish autistici aspect is prone to that vulnerability.

Probably your situation is not so pathetic, which means that this extreme example might be helpful in defining your use case for the reMarkable line of paper tablets.

In the 2026 era of Cognitive Warfare , overt, covert, explicit, implicit, cultural, political, societal, and personal, try to imagine what an unthinkable violation and invasion of privacy the act of stealing one’s most private inner workings. Not on the internet. Not on a blog. Not on a Substack. YOUR PERSONAL DIARIES. Imagine the potential for asymmetric harassment, abuse, and the breath-stopping feeling of not knowing who holds this advantage over you.

In comparison, suddenly, trusting reMarkable’s [Cloud Sync](add link) with your most personal inner life seems to pose far less risk and far more convenience for traveling pathological writer.

Probably, you aren’t a traveling pathological writer with an endlessly embarrassing reputation for documenting your worst (and best) cringe TMI.

Probably, you’re wondering where this non-commercial, full-on commercial for the reMarkable product line is headed.

The Digital Longhand Writing Renaissance

The reliability of the products, the battery life, the longevity of, and hence impressive affordability of the replaceable writing tips, and now, the accuracy of handwriting recognition – printed and cursive – in addition to screen presentation capabilities make the Digital Longhand Writing Renaissance real.

Why should we teach our children long-hand writing again?

I’ve dumped Asperger’s rants on this topic years ago on Reddit and other internet productivity-capture platforms and find that heading into my fourth year of daily dependence upon the reMarkable Paper Pro for first drafts, random ideas, goal setting, pseudocode, flow charting, quick costing, etc., in addition to all the functions described by Cameron and Carroll, merits a return and reiteration of the suggestion made back then.

From a pathological writer’s perspective, human brains are amazingly intricate and gorgeous machines of electro-chemical, electro-magnetic, bio-engineering and expression; both created and evolved, ever creating and ever evolving.

Having run the experiment of complete abandonment of the kinesthetic in favor of the ephemeral – an absurd paradox, given Steve Job’s passion for hand-hewn calligraphy – it’s the pathological writer’s perspective that humanity is on the verge of losing something beyond priceless. Immeasurable.

An entire way of thinking and being in the world.

That way of thinking and being is called longhand writing. Printing. Script. Cursive. Wrought by hand.

In this hopefully fleeting and retreating moment of shrinking attention spans and increasingly pervasive artificial creativity, my latest dopey idea is for the reMarkable Corporation to consider the Steve Wozniak and Liza Loop strategy of giving Apple Computers to elementary schools in order to spark the Digital Longhand Writing Renaissance. Is it a costly proposition? Most certainly. Is it fraught with risk of failure? Definitely. Is it a moon shot consistent with the values that have built the company and the product to this potential inflection point of adoption and revival of one of humanity’s most pregnant and prolific means of expression and [ways of thinking](add link). This pathological writer certainly thinks so. Which means precisely nothing, as the remainder of the curated and created content on this probably foolishly far too open diary web site attests.

If this site is the kind of worthless junk that handwriting leads to, maybe that’s proof enough to ditch the idea, once and for all.

How in the world did you make it through all that cruft posing as craft? If you think I might be being too hard on myself, you can vote against me.