Russian typewriters and Somerville's reputation

[ron_newman]

A editorial in Thursday's Boston Globe whimsically(?) connects Russian intelligence agencies' decision to buy typewriters with our local "hispter" culture:

In Russia’s case, the typewriters are a security measure; according to the newspaper Izvestia, Kremlin officials decided that the only way to protect against American Internet snooping is to avoid computers entirely for sensitive communications. But perhaps we’re also finally seeing the fruits of the Cambridge-based Russian spy ring that was busted in 2010: Those agents may not have discovered the state secrets they wanted, but apparently they did discover Somerville.

If so, they would have returned with news of a hipster fascination with analog technology — manual typewriters, vinyl records, knitting — that’s been one of the more fascinating cultural backlashes of the 21st century. Chasing the latest vintage fad often looks like a form of status seeking, a way of keeping up with the Joneses for people who believe they’re above that sort of thing. More charitably, though, hoarding bygone technology may also reflect a modern yearning for a sense of connectedness with the material world that’s increasingly lost in a digital sea of ones and zeroes.

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Every time I hear "Russian intelligence" and "typewriters", I think about that old Cold-War-era story about how the KGB had samples on file from every typewriter produced or imported to the USSR, so that they could track self-published dissident material ("samizdat") to the individual typewriter that had produced it. Don't know whether that one is true, or American propaganda, or maybe KGB propaganda to scare the would-be publishers of such material.

It seems to me that Roman-alphabet typewriters would be of limited value in a country that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, but what do I know.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

Wait, whoa, did somerville invent hipsterism, now?

[cos]

Nahh, Somerville was being progressive, alternative, cool, and urban, before hipsterism was invented!

[ron_newman]

- before hipsterism was invented

.... in the 1940s?

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

"These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I’d had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on the lathe, and then load them myself; I’d had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand-loading cartridges; I’d had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers – all very tricky." --William Gibson, Johnny Mnemonic

It is a labor of love - real, true, amateurism - to reproduce what once were mass-produced goods 'by hand,' that is, without a factory.

Some technologies lend themselves better to acceptance. Here in Somerville we have several dozen people and groups who will produce bespoke consumer electronics in unit quantities which rival Apple for sophistication. We've got machinists, and woodworkers who can produce convincing replicas of any Human artifact produced between roughly 1740 and today.

As a nitpick, though, seating shotgun primers is easily done by hand. the 209 size primer is pretty darn big.