Science & Tech Quote by Winston Graham

Resistance to the laptop here isn’t Luddism; it’s an aesthetic boundary dispute. Graham frames the computer not as a tool but as a social demand - “considerable pressure” suggests the late-20th-century moment when authors were quietly reclassified as inefficient if they didn’t digitize. The push isn’t about his productivity; it’s about everyone else’s need for him to become legible to a new workflow.

His rationale is slyly personal: he’s “never done creative work on a typewriter,” which flips the usual technophobia script. He isn’t defending the romance of clacking keys against the cold glow of a screen. He’s defending a pre-typewriter creative habit - longhand drafts, perhaps, or a method where composition is bodily and paced, not mediated by a machine designed for speed, revision, and infinite undo. That matters because computers don’t just replace instruments; they redesign the rhythm of thinking. A laptop invites you to treat sentences like editable objects, endlessly provisional. Some writers thrive on that elasticity. Others rely on the friction.

Then he lands on the real complaint: “a lack of empathy.” The line is almost quaint, but it’s pointed. Empathy here means a tool that meets the writer where he is - that respects a lived creative process rather than demanding he adapt to the machine’s logic. Graham implies that modernity’s bargain is convenience in exchange for conformity, and he’s refusing the part where the work starts serving the tool.