The pencil as argument

I still write longhand when I want to think something through carefully. Not from habit, and not from sentiment. The pencil does something the laptop cannot replicate: the pace, the weight of commitment, the absence of a delete key. I have kept the pencil because I know, from direct experience, what I lose when I put it down.

That, I think, is where Nicholas Carr's argument in his epilogue to The Big Switch[i]  needs complicating.

Carr's thesis is that each wave of technology reshapes cognition, and that the losses are invisible from the inside, absorbed by a generation that has never known the alternative. He is making a generational argument: by the time the damage is done, no one remembers what was lost. It is a compelling case. And he is not entirely wrong.

But the pencil is still here.

So is, in a different sense, am I. I started work in 1976 and have lived through enough technological transitions - ledger-keeping by hand, the telex, the word processor, the fax, the first Mac, the Blackberry, mainframe coding (1968 and 1969, since you ask: interesting, and of no practical use to me now), the gradual accumulation of drawers full of equipment that newer equipment had made redundant - to have formed views on each crossing. And not simply received views but earned ones.

Some technologies disappear and they should. The fax machine served its moment; mainframe coding in the idiom I learned it has gone, and I do not mourn it. But others persist because they still do something that nothing else does quite as well. And the question is not whether to accept the new but whether you have paid enough attention at each transition to know what you are trading, what you are keeping, and why.

That is what Carr's generational model misses. He assumes that comparative knowledge dies with the generation. That only the dead truly know what was lost. As he puts it, “humanity’s sense of progress hinges on generational turnover—on death, to be blunt”.

But he does not quite account for the professional who has moved through enough of these transitions to carry the comparison forward as a living resource. Who watched the ledger give way to the spreadsheet, and noticed what the careful, visible, unforgiving precision of handwritten accounts had given - and what vanished when errors became trivially undoable. Who kept the pencil, not because the laptop is bad, but because they have used both and know the difference.

This isn’t nostalgia but discrimination. And discrimination of this kind, grounded in experience, not ideology, is harder to acquire than it looks.

My perspective has shifted on what this actually means. For a long time, I thought of these transitions as simply part of a career. They were just things that happened, to which you adapted, and then moved on. What I have come to see is that adaptation was never the whole of it. Each time I took something forward: a calibrated sense of what the new tool could do and what it could not, what the old one had given quietly, and what was genuinely worth preserving even when the technology itself was not. The pencil. The discipline of the library search. The habit of writing a letter rather than sending an email when something important needed saying.

Carr is right that the generational pattern is real. But there is a counter-example: the single professional who has crossed enough thresholds, attentively enough, to hold the comparison across time. Who can say not merely that things were different but how, and what the difference cost, and whether the cost was worth it.

I suspect there are more of us than the generational thesis allows for.

And I wonder what we do with that knowledge, before it becomes another thing that quietly disappears.

[i] Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2008) – and rerun in Carr’s 1 March 2026 Substack New Cartographies