The shattered dreams of Ryan Seacrest

Just wrote the thirtieth chapter and crossed 200K words. Still on track to finish the first draft this year.

From The Power Broker to What If?, here’s a list of books that are inspiring my book. (Also, a nice reading list.) If you can think of another volume my book reminds you of – please, let me know!

I didn’t suspect a simple wall of sticky notes would end up meaning so much. I first did it just as a fun, non-digital way to come up with the list of chapters. And yet, once I finished and saw my book as a whole for the first time, I knew I would not tear it down any time soon:

It remains the only way for me to survey my book in its entirety – forty-something chapters, themes, patterns – without the details overwhelming me. Red sticky notes are emotions, blue ones are personal stories or interviews, deep yellow ones are for chapters with strong visuals. The wall’s also… physical. I like simply standing in front of all this, seeing new connections, moving things around. The ritual of replacing an orange sticky note with a pink one after finishing a chapter might be a favourite moment.

It was here, a few months ago, when I realized the book is really going to happen, right after reaching some arbitrary number of pink notes that felt like a critical mass. 

Actually, wait, no. This is my favourite moment: Once or twice a week, a sticky note makes a run for it, falling to the floor with a quiet, distinctive whoosh. It always makes me smile, particularly when it happens at dead of night. Next morning, I pick up the runaway, find its original place, and stick it back to the wall. It’s a tiny physical manifestation of committing myself to the book a bit again – and in that moment I feel most like a writer.

What’s wrong with this keyboard? (What’s really wrong with it?) Email me if you think you know. I’ll share the answer next time, plus there will be a prize!

I was recently writing a chapter about ASCII art, emoticons, and semigraphics - basically creative uses of keyboards - and for fun I made a comparison of the first-ever emoji and the modern ones. (Also, I spent two hours typing in a portrait of Prince Charles. My right finger still has a bruise.)

In early 2010, my friend and I went on a date to Madison Square Garden to watch an NBA game. However, after one quarter of New York Knicks (her favourite) dominating Toronto Raptors (the team I was suddenly the most ardent fan of), we realized we’d rather just talk – and left the game to go to a restaurant. I had a then-new iPhone 3GS, she carried a work-assigned BlackBerry. We made fun of each other’s smartphone choices, as nerds do – and focused a lot on keyboards, as nerds used to do: BlackBerry’s was physical, but annoying; iPhone’s was flexible, but barely a keyboard. 

At some point, mid-dinner, I was curious how the game was doing, so I went to Google to look it up. To our surprise, the score was now 80-something to 80-something. All the advantage Knicks once had was gone. It was now head to head, the winner changing every minute. We watched it towards the end – assuming you count refreshing a website every 10 seconds as watching. In the end, against all the early odds, the Raptors won:

Compared to that, the iPhone vs. BlackBerry battle was one-sided, brutal, and over sooner than anyone expected. And yet, even by 2014 there were still companies trying to make BlackBerry-like keyboards for the iPhone. One of them was Typo Keyboards, a keyboard case with the most unfortunate of names, backed by none other than the radio/TV personality Ryan Seacrest. This is what I’m using to type this newsletter. 

It’s weird and unpleasant. It’s making my fingers sore. I’m two-thumbing it, and feel like I’m one Bluetooth headset away from being a Wall Street douchebro – Marcin Szkreli, if you will. But there are benefits: Typo actually responds to my fingers, it allows me to “touch type,” and it frees up a significant chunk of the screen. I can see learning to love it, if I had a chance. Except no chance was there to be had. BlackBerry sued Seacrest out of existence, and the keyboard was not to be, making typing on it today a rare experience.

It’s not the only exciting part. Typo Keyboard is fascinating as an in-betweener, like early cars pretending to be horse carriages, first home televisions masquerading as credenzas, or 1970’s word processors having a typewriter toggle. This here is the uncertain future dressed up as the comfortable past. 

But this story is also a testament that we can give up a lot of what we once thought non-negotiable – if we get more in return. People loved their BlackBerry keyboards since they were a solid improvement over the regular texting on a shitty phone keypad. But the iPhone keyboard wasn’t better than BlackBerry’s. (TechCrunch wrote: “That virtual keyboard will be about as useful for tapping out emails and text messages as a rotary phone.”) And yet we accepted it, because… well, because the whole computer-phone suddenly allowed each one of us to catch up with a basketball game in a small Manhattan restaurant.

(It’s a lesson Mr. Dvorak never learned, but that’s a whole different story.) 

Jesse Vincent from keyboard.io for his hospitality, teaching me tons about keyboards, and lending me the Typo; Dag Spicer for his amazing help with researching Univac; and Jake Knapp for his great support.

Marcin