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).
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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. You can almost hear the venture-capital patter in words like upskill, curate, funnel, or iterate. But we can’t create a space for a different kind of thinking if our nouns don’t push against verbs in reflective, witty, deliberate, fresh ways.
Check out, for example, how Thea Lim lets us know about “an outrageous historical fact that burbles to the internet’s surface every few moons” (burbles!). Or how Courtney Shea opens her piece on email practice: “If my inbox were a physical space, it would be the before scene from an episode of Hoarders—years and years of unsorted, often unopened messages, like the bags of old clothing that you are going to take to Goodwill any day now.”
That’s awesome. It’s the kind of sentence accelerationists hate. It carries mood and music. It’s not efficient. It doesn’t optimize. Obviously, a fountain pen doesn’t make it easier to write sentences like that. But using one might remind you that some activities still exist outside the engagement economy, rituals that prize craft over speed, expression over output—that we don’t have to just accept language becoming a unit of “content.”
Fountain pens are also a reminder that the old rarely disappears when the new arrives. Every parade of gadgets has to find its place among existing habits and practices. That’s why I’ve never been interested in covering technology purely as an aspirational example of genius. If our journalistic duty is to understand innovation rather than celebrate or condemn it, the most interesting question isn’t what a revolutionary product makes possible. It’s how it fits into the world we already inhabit—and how, in doing so, it might remake us: changing the way we remember, work, and relate to one another.
Such questions naturally lead to human costs. So it’s no surprise this issue, in large part, is about harms: the violent tack taken by people terrified of AI; grieving families suing social media companies; young women targeted by sexual deepfakes; or new age-verification laws sweeping away queer spaces online.
What we have to resist is the idea that each breakthrough creates a new moral landscape. Misinformation, polarization, surveillance, harassment, bias—these are not the effects of unprecedented machines. They are ancient failings magnified by digital tools. Fountain pens can’t fix these problems, but maybe giving a to-do list a little more flourish than it deserves is a small way of practising the kind of attention that can improve our corner of the world.
