Typewriters are the start of a fightback against cyberspying
A German politician called Patrick Sensburg announced this week that his country's government was thinking about reverting to the use of an un-hackable technology: typewriters.
Mr. Sensburg is head of the Bundestag inquiry into the US National Security Agency's snooping in the country and a member of the governing party of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Another member of the inquiry from a different party said Mr. Sensburg was being "ridiculous". But Mr. Sensburg - apparently hell-bent on undermining the German reputation for being high-tech - said his remark was "no joke", adding that the typewriters were "not electronic models either".
How many typewriters are being used by the German government is not known, which suggests their new policy could be working already. We do know that the Federal Guard Service of the Russian government, which protects VIP officials, ordered 20 typewriters last year in the wake of revelations about US surveillance from Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.
Mr. Snowden has taught us that "the net" is not as metaphorical a term as we might have thought. There is, in fact, a big net in which we can all be caught - by governments, our personal enemies, our commercial rivals. Email has long been recognised as both insecure and a hostage to fortune. As the actor and writer Stephen Fry once put it: " The email of the species is deadlier than the mail."
Some people are attempting to counter technology with technology, including Mr. Snowden who this week urged that any "communications should be encrypted by default". Others have had a different brainwave: turn the machines off. I quote an article in this paper from 2011: "Anecdotal evidence suggests that in an age of heightened regulation, bankers are eschewing email in favour of less traceable forms of communication, such as handwritten notes." Or typewritten ones?
We do have a typewriter in our attic, purchased 20 years ago by my wife so that she could (if I understood correctly) carry on writing in the event of some apocalyptic power outage.
My conversation was overheard by a man called Jack Row, who told me he makes "luxury pens", priced from £1,000 to £29,000. If typewriters are not yet coming back as part of the technology backlash, then pens are. "I sell a lot to the Middle East, where the high-rollers will wear a pen as an item of jewellery with the clip facing outwards," he told me. "There are usually a couple of diamonds on the clip." Mr. Row believes these pens are increasingly used not only to sign but actually to write commercial agreements.
After reading Mr. Sensburg's comments, I walked into the technology department at Harrods and said I was interested in buying a typewriter. A man with an Apple logo on his shirt frowned at me, and explained that typewriters were not technology. He pointed me to the Grand Writing Room - the stationery department, in other words - where an assistant said nobody had asked for a typewriter in 15 years.
This tied in with my own understanding of the super-rich, whose lifestyles I have been researching for a novel. The super-rich of Mayfair (the focus of my research) may not use typewriters, but their money has earned them the luxury of living in the past. They are always meeting face-to-face in their clubs, where carriage lanterns burn at the doorway and real fires burn inside. They do not subject themselves to the glare of fluorescent lights; they do not wear manmade fibres. The look they prize in their clothes, cars and watches is "classic". ("Bentleys have been hideous for years," I overheard a cigar- smoking stroller in Green Park say). If the super-rich want to encounter a famous person they do not log on to YouTube; they invite them round.
It all reminds me of something a the- atre director once told me: "In the future, digital entertainment will be associated with the plebs." The real glamour, he believed, would reside in face-to-face encounters, hence the popularity in my own profession of "meet-the-author" events.
If we do not start turning the machines off now, it may be too late. Those envisaging nightmare scenarios of artificial intelligence point to the fact that not only are we humans being networked but so are the machines. This could make them unstoppable as they supervise our lives via the looming internet of things, by which sensors will monitor everything from the food in our fridge to the rubbish in our bin.
The reintroduction of typewriters could be the start of a fightback. In Harrods, I imagined being overheard by a second person; not a maker of luxury pens but a scruffier, furtive individual.
"You want a typewriter?" he asks. "Follow me."
He leads me to a more obscure part of London. We enter a shop with a dusty display of laptops. "Forget about them," he says. "They're for the mugs."
We head to a backroom full of old-fashioned typewriters. "We've got the ribbons, Tipp-Ex - and the carbons, if you do want more than one person to see what you've written."
I ask why typewriters are so hard to come by these days. "Google, Theresa May?.?.?.?all the big players don't want people to have them. That's why the price, I admit, is a bit steep." (The writer is a novelist, author most recently of 'Night Train to Jamalpur')
Courtesy Financial Times, UK