"But with carefully chosen keyboard macros to activate it, Mass Copy is quick, convenient, and powerful. Most users who have mastered it depend heavily on it. That certainly includes me"
About this Quote
The most revealing phrase here is "carefully chosen". Patterson isn't really praising Mass Copy so much as praising the small ritual of control that makes a tool feel like an extension of your hands. Keyboard macros are the quiet religion of power users: invisible to everyone else, transformative to the initiated. By foregrounding the setup work, he frames convenience as something earned, not granted. The "quick, convenient, and powerful" triad reads like marketing copy, but the surrounding sentences undercut it into something more intimate: a confession of dependence.
"Most users who have mastered it depend heavily on it" is doing two jobs at once. On the surface, it's instructional reassurance (you're not weird if you lean on this feature). Underneath, it's a soft boundary line between dabblers and devotees. Mastery becomes a gate, and dependence becomes the proof of entry. This is classic writer-technology discourse: the tool is ostensibly neutral, yet the writer's identity gets wrapped around the workflow. Efficiency isn't just productivity; it's self-definition.
The final pivot, "That certainly includes me", matters because it punctures any pretense of detached documentation. Patterson signals ethos by joining the crowd he's describing, but also reveals the subtle bargain of modern writing: we trade a bit of autonomy for speed. Once a macro collapses a multi-step action into a keystroke, the old way starts to feel not merely slower, but almost morally wrong. That's how habits become infrastructure.
"Most users who have mastered it depend heavily on it" is doing two jobs at once. On the surface, it's instructional reassurance (you're not weird if you lean on this feature). Underneath, it's a soft boundary line between dabblers and devotees. Mastery becomes a gate, and dependence becomes the proof of entry. This is classic writer-technology discourse: the tool is ostensibly neutral, yet the writer's identity gets wrapped around the workflow. Efficiency isn't just productivity; it's self-definition.
The final pivot, "That certainly includes me", matters because it punctures any pretense of detached documentation. Patterson signals ethos by joining the crowd he's describing, but also reveals the subtle bargain of modern writing: we trade a bit of autonomy for speed. Once a macro collapses a multi-step action into a keystroke, the old way starts to feel not merely slower, but almost morally wrong. That's how habits become infrastructure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Robert
Add to List
