The 105 Collective has been pretty quiet in 2021, at least in public. Behind the scenes, though, we have carried on doing what we enjoy most: creating a safe, supportive haven for each other in this crazy world we call cryptoart. In the (almost) two years since we convened to create MORE THAN GLASS as a response to the first Covid lockdown in England, the NFT world – as the mainstream public now knows it – has gone, well, totally ape. As the ecosystem exploded almost beyond recognition, it presented us with interesting challenges as artists and humans. How do we want to show up and engage in this space? What are our goals and values? As we carried on exploring and developing individually with our own projects in 2021, our group conversations kept coming back to the richness and importance of cooperative creativity. That’s why we’re still here, and we are working on a new project we’ll share with you soon. Meanwhile, UnrealcityArt has written this beautiful piece expressing in his own inimitable way his thoughts on the subject. We hope you enjoy it, and wish you a peaceful 2022. See you in the new year! – oculardelusion
Our familiar QWERTY keyboard was, rather surprisingly, never intended to increase typing speeds. It is a hangover, an artefact of previous technology, designed to avoid the incessant striker lockups in the mechanical writing machines of the nineteenth century caused by letters commonly typed together being arranged adjacently on the keyboard. QWERTY solved this by separating common digraphs, but an unintended consequence was the slowing of typing speeds as machinists had to hunt for and peck at keys out of alphabetical order.
But as a thoughtful and socially entrepreneurial company, when Remington launched the first office typewriter in 1878 they also launched a free education programme on how to use the rather counterintuitive new keyboard arrangement. This sought not only to circumvent the shortcomings of the new technology, but more importantly to raise the lowly office girl out of poverty by teaching her a unique and highly marketable skill. Alongside discounted or even free typewriters, Remington offered a course in the freshly developed skill of “touch-typing” to business schools, universities, and the YWCA. The notion that a keyboard layout could be sublimated into tutored muscle memory and used kinaesthetically, rather than visually through “hunt & peck”, was revolutionary. The Remington QWERTY touch-typing course equipped a generation of young women to capitalize on the expanding office and secretarial job market: less than 4% of clerical workers in the US were women in 1874 but by 1900, the number had increased to approximately 75%. Christopher Latham Sholes, the inventor of QWERTY, once said, "I do feel that I have done something for the women who have always had to work so hard. This will enable them more easily to earn a living”.
Cool story.
I wish it were true.
I wish the QWERTY keyboard had been invented both as a sincere and ingenious solution to an engineering problem and as an engine of women’s economic empowerment, as the urban myth says. But it wasn’t. For starters, QWERTY was never designed to avoid striker lockup. In fact, it’s not much better than alphabetical order for splitting digraphs. Just have a look at any keyboard and there’s the reality: for example, the E and are R together, a common digraph I’ve typed five times in this sentence so far without even trying (by the way, the reason Remington built this refutation of their own sales pitch into their own design is so you one write “typewriter” with the top row of a QWERTY board, allowing sales reps to out-type their competitors with the industry standard demo word).
More fundamentally, there was never a problem with striker lockup in the first place: keyboards were originally for accuracy and for telegraph technology, not speedy office work, and before Remington brought typing into the office everybody used the “hunt & peck” system. WPM speeds were glacially slow and striker lock wasn’t an issue. Arguably, QWERTY caused the lockup problem: it certainly didn’t solve it.
And finally, the argument that QWERTY is the best compromise between the mechanical necessity of avoiding digraph adjacency and the office necessity of high WPM speeds is rather scuppered by the fact it is demonstrably awful at both. In the ‘30s, when typewriters really took off, the educational psychologist August Dvorak tested hundreds of keyboard layouts and concluded that QWERTY was one of the worst. By the way, if Dvorak’s alternative had caught on, I’d be typing on a PYFGCR keyboard, which I just decided is pronounced “pifgakra”.
All in all, and contrary to popular belief, QWERTY wasn’t much to do with faster and more accurate office communications for the benefit of humanity in general and women clerical workers in particular. It was to do with giving Remington a monopoly on an idea.
Granted, it was a really good idea: we all use office keyboards and while I can’t touch-type, I absolutely wish I could. Touch-typing on a QWERTY keyboard is an extremely useful skill, an extremely marketable skill, in fact. I mean, if someone were to offer me a discounted writing machine and free tuition in how to be faster with it than anyone using a competing technology, I’d jump at the chance.
Which, of course, is what a lot of people thought in the 1880s; which is why we are stuck with a completely awful keyboard layout to this day.
The QWERTY Myth of noble free market forces humanizing technology for the elevation of those disempowered by the patriarchy is in itself a piece of marketing. That’s the problem with “free market” capitalism, Libertarianism, laissez-faire economics, all that stuff: when we decide the game is to make money, people will invent profitable things rather than useful things. The profitable thing invented here was the monetization of neural programming, not the mechanical keyboard, which happened years before and which QWERTY did its best to ruin. The Remington Model 2 was the first commercial typewriter, but there were other keyboard machines with alphabetical or otherwise arranged keys before that. It had the first shift function, granted, which allowed two functions for every key, but that wasn’t what made QWERTY ubiquitous: what gunmakers Remington realized was that if they cornered the market in the training of office typists with a touch-typing system for a given keyboard layout- their proprietary layout, obviously- they also cornered the market in typewriter sales.
They decided to buy the rights to an 1868 typewriter design by printer and inventor Christopher Latham Sholes, and introduced him to their marketing men; William Wykoff, Clarence Seamans and Henry Benedict. Wykoff and Sholes worked up a number of revisions to the Sholes keyboard layout and the resulting Remington Model 2 hit the shelves in 1878. By 1882, Remington had established a new company- Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict- to teach touch-typing on the new machine, a technique exponentially more efficient than hunt & peck but which took a good 600 hours to master. WS&B alumni were very employable but found it almost impossible to use any other keyboard layout than QWERTY; WPM speeds dropped by about 80% if they tried (according to research by Remington itself, at least- and given their general humanity and concern with fairness and the betterment of the species, I can’t imagine why they’d exaggerate).
And if every typist is a product of WS&B, every typewriter is a product of Remington. By 1898, over 70% of typewriters sold were Remingtons.
There is a parallel between QWERTY and cryptoart, I think: we have a new technology, namely the blockchain, equivalent to the new technology of the office typewriter. We also have an associated set of technical chops, equivalent to WS&B touch-typing: namely, the linking of art with NFTs with a money value. And just as QWERTY exists to makes profit for a small number of people by manipulating human behaviour around a new technology, so does cryptoart in its current form. Everyone competes, the first to the prize and the last man standing win and everyone else loses, nothing has value unless it can be turned into money and the game is to collect as much of that as you can, which is the measure of everything and an end in itself.
And as we’ve seen from the story of QWERTY, when the game is to make money, people will invent profitable things rather than useful things. So, we need to change the game.
We need to break the relationship monopoly between blockchain technology and NFT art as cash valuable. If the typewriter and touch-typing had been allowed to dance together, rather than being frozen in carbonite in 1872 and locked in a vault, do you think we’d still be stuck with QWERTY today? Imagine all those early typists working with distributed authority on the best layout. Every typewriter would have been closer to PYFGCR than QWERTY by the turn of the century and we’d all be better off. We need to change the game and we need to change it so it values useful things, things useful in themselves, and then everything else follows: the keyboard morphs to the Dvorak layout; diverse schools of touch-typing grow up and everyone gets faster; many good houses are built from the ruins of one palace; our relationships default to cooperation rather than competition. In short, we work together for the common good.
This is both how we find the solution to the problems of QWERTY-style free market capitalism and the solution itself. And it seems to me that DADA are doing it.
Since 2015, DADA has existed as a cooperative art platform, breaking the relationship monopoly between blockchain technology and NFT art as cash valuable by relating the blockchain instead to art NFTs its people create and value collectively. Ultimately, it aims to provide participants with a basic income.
DADA itself does a far better job of explaining its principles than I could, and I recommend you read this excellent article by Beatriz Ramos and Yehudit Mam https://powerdada.medium.com/the-invisible-economy-db46897d4f07. I’m not here to mansplain DADA, I’m here to explain why I like the idea of it and also why I am nervous about joining, because I think that might be useful to others.
I hope it’s already clear why I like the idea of DADA, and perhaps why you should too: it is a thing useful in itself; it enables the fecundity of cooperation rather than the sterility of competition; it encourages sharing rather than hoarding; it treats the people as creative, autonomous individuals rather than as a mob in need of either centralized control or vulnerable to centralized exploitation. It is all the quirky and none of the QWERTY.
It’s probably not so clear why I’m nervous about joining, and perhaps why you are too. Firstly, it’s all very new and it takes a bit of time and attention to understand, two things we all rather tend to be short of these days. But, as the QWERTY story makes clear, if you always do what you’ve done you always get what you’ve got. Maybe the time it takes to learn the new thing is worth it (and in this case it’s a lot fewer than 600 hours), especially if the new thing really is different and better.
Secondly, DADA is about drawing in cooperation with others and what I do is make conceptual art on my own (amongst other things). I suck at drawing and am nearly as bad at cooperation. But if I let that stop me, I’m a dreadful hypocrite: I whine about a world where only a few superstars get affirmation, where the only affirmation is money and where individuals compete; then when I get a chance to be part of a world where everyone is affirmed by artistic responses and love and where individuals co-operate, I say it’s not for me.
It’s scary because it involves a deep change in neurological programming, like learning a new language or switching from QWERTY to PYFGCR. It’s scary because it’s about believing the truth, not just saying it. If I want the world to be cooperative, I must cooperate. If I want there to be value other than money, I must share things that have no money value. If I want blockchain technology to be used in art for activities other than enriching a few collectors and even fewer artists, then I must invest time and attention in that activity.
In short, my resolution for 2022 is to be less QWERTY and more quirky. And I really need to get on DADA.
29/12/21