Quick to the Typewriter

Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Hey remember that time when the USSR policed typewriters so you couldn’t produce Samizdat fast enough?

Copiers and fax machines? Forget about it. That was the break through tech they couldn’t control anymore, and as people started sharing impressions, news and ideas — at the same time that Ronald Reagan of Blessed Memory was putting the economic screws on them by refusing to shut down our defense industry — the USSR’s empire of lies (probably more lies than anything true, ever) melted away like spun sugar in hot tea.

But the cartoon characters who think themselves the “ruling class” of the US (while being merely the inconveniences we’ll tolerate until they become intolerable) think they can shove us back to their ideal age of media and narrative control by putting up a law that only lets “licensed” journalists report the news.

For the next move, they’re going to make it so that only licensed “authors” can write fiction.

At which point you’re sitting there and wondering “Are they for real now?”

Yeah, so am I.

The problem is not that they think we’re Chinese peasants. The problem is that they think we’re imaginary Chinese peasants. You know, the ones that the PRC portrays as jumping to every order and complying without a peep.

Even the Chinese don’t do that; it’s just we don’t hear of their rebellions. And compared to Americans they have almost no resources and certainly not technological resources for rapid information dissemination.

For the Russians, typewriters, copiers, and faxes were the killing blow. We have computers and printers. And before you say anything, even Venezuela has electricity, even if intermittent.

They can go ahead and make their laws. And they will inconvenience us majorly. And, to be fair piss us off.

What they can’t do is put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Oh, they’re going to try. And it’s going to be a terrible inconvenience.

But in the end — in the end — yeah, we can lose, but not to them. Because they can’t win. And we’ll never lose completely while we’re still fighting.

To your typewriters, go!

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for December 6, 2022