Humming away in offices on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon and in the White House is a technology that represents the pragmatism, efficiency and unsentimental nature of American bureaucracy: the autopen. It is a device that stores a person’s signature, replicating it as needed using a mechanical arm that holds a real pen.
Like many technologies, this rudimentary robotic signature-maker has always provoked ambivalence. We invest signatures with meaning, particularly when the signer is well known. During the George W Bush administration, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, generated a small wave of outrage when reporters revealed that he had been using an autopen for his signature on the condolence letters that he sent to the families of fallen soldiers.
Fans of singer Bob Dylan expressed ire when they discovered that the limited edition of his book The Philosophy of Modern Song, which cost nearly $600 and came with an official certificate “attesting to its having been individually signed by Dylan”, in fact had made unlimited use of an autopen. Dylan took the unusual step of issuing a statement on his Facebook page: “With contractual deadlines looming,” Dylan wrote, “the idea of using an autopen was suggested to me, along with the assurance that this kind of thing is done ‘all the time’ in the art and literary worlds.” He also acknowledged that: “Using a machine was an error in judgment and I want to rectify it immediately.”
Our mixed feelings about machine-made signatures make plain our broader relationship to handwriting: it offers a glimpse of individuality. Any time spent doing archival research is a humbling lesson in the challenges and rewards of deciphering the handwritten word. You come to know your long-dead subjects through the quirks of their handwriting; one man’s script becomes spidery and small when he writes something emotionally charged, while another’s pristine pages suggest the diligence of a medieval monk. The calligraphist Bernard Maisner argues that calligraphy, and handwriting more broadly, is “not meant to reproduce something over and over again. It’s meant to show the humanity, the responsiveness and variation within.”
I certainly think it is valuable, and I hope it remains a required learned skill for kids, but as someone with dysgraphia—and much to my dismay, dyslexia—writing has always been completely miserable to me. Although I’m glad I learned how to write properly in both regular hand and in cursive, and I’m fully able to read it as long as it isn’t excessively ornate, I’m so thankful I was able to learn to type as a kid. What a wonderous feeling it was to actually excel in my typing class. To this day it’s one of the most worthwhile skills I learned at such a young age.
As an interesting aside, I wonder if there are any learning disabilities that affect typing but not writing?
I’m not sure. I’ve heard that some high schools no longer have typing classes, and there’s apparently a rise in gen z kids who are unable to type the traditional, “touch type,” way with all ten fingers and opt for the two-finger style or some hybrid quasi-effective style. They say it can be just as fast but I’m pretty dubious about that.
Yeah, no way hunt and peck is as fast as touch typing. I guess the issue is that it’s no longer a critical skill.