Mistakes
Item No. 17
“A mistake used to remind us of our imperfect nature.”A mistake is a blunder, a gaffe, a miscalculation. A small slip. A misspelled word. But, let’s be honest, it is growing increasingly difficult to misspell a word. It is hard to make a mistake like that. This is because our spelling mistakes are now corrected in the blink of an autocorrect.
It is hard for us not to internalize the red underline as we’re writing. Or that loopy little arrow that points out it, autocorrect, has already made a correction for us. It fixed everything in an instant. Spell check and autocorrect don’t eliminate our errors, but they eliminate the sight of them pretty quickly.
So, misspelled words? It’s the (Death of a) thing.
Our visible errors and mistakes are disappearing from our sight, along with our individualized expressions. Our peculiarities. Our faults. Just try making a spelling mistake while texting a friend. It's hard to do. The autocorrect allows you to change the corrected version to the incorrect version, but by then, things are correct! What’s the point?
This means our human faults are growing less visible by the moment. Even though, presumably, we’re as faulty as usual.
And consider this: if a poet goes for a feeling, or a vibe, with their words upside-down, or backwards, nothing placed perfectly, not even the punctuation, to the machine? This is simply wrongdoing. It is simply not ‘correct’. Or, try creating a new word! The autocorrect will have none of that. It becomes a battle of wills–machine logic against our creative spirit. So even when we try to make a mistake, we’re corrected. Sentences straight and tidy, periods and punctuation placed properly, and no misspelled words.
The page appears flawless, even when we were reaching for something messier and more alive.
We can still make mistakes. It’s just growing ever harder to let them show.
Thus, we enter them into The Last Catalog: The (Death of a) Thing.
What do we lose? As our technology continues to maximize us, and our communication, how we are as humans in our language seems to shift too. Perhaps our humanity isn’t showing up in our language as it used to. A mistake used to remind us of our imperfect nature. Perhaps it showed our thinking in process as we rushed to convey what we had to say from our mind’s secret depths. Perhaps a mistake has always conveyed the uncertain beginnings of our thoughts, or at least it made our experimentation visible. Remember when our words originally appeared as scribbles in margin notes, and with erasures and re-writes, strike-outs and lines-through? Consider The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot published with original margin notes, exclusions and scribbles all there for us to see. That work reminds us that a finished product rarely reveals our effort, or the effort it takes others to polish it to perfection.
Now machines polish our work without the evidence that we tried.
Other costs? It is hard to know, but what else does the autocorrect erase? Stumbles, idiosyncrasies. Were we to meet our future selves, would we find narrowed expressions, blah language, just corrections? Will we lose our own judgement, our discerning nature? By avoiding mistakes, will we outsource our ability to decide what looks right? Also, errors are friction embodied. They’re a natural slow down, an invitation to pause, a reminder that perfection is not only a “moving target,” but that it is a target to aim for.
Other specifications:
Homogenized voices. Flattened tones. Mistaking polish for wisdom.