samizdat typewriter& the underground soviet

An electric typewriter at SudoRoom provides delight as the underground intelligentsia create a samizdat publication spreading subversive ideas!

During hardware hack night a cool member brought an IBM selectric typewriter in near-perfect condition. He said it is “up for grabs” whoever wants it and will take good care of it! People of all ages squealed in delight and rushed to type revolutionary pamphlets and samizdat novels to smuggle in our lunchboxes to the factory shift. Just kidding.

It’s interesting to see how typewriters have regained popularity again even though we have word processors. Typewriters, especially the beautiful Olivetti models, have new fans among creatives. (Do check out the documentary “California Typewriter” which features one of the last typewriter repair shops in the Bay Area.) Not only is it romantic, it’s also remarkably distraction free, completely disconnected from any internet and endless wikipedia articles on interesting things.

Still Efficient

Another angle is that with AI and cell phones, you don’t necessarily lose efficiency using a typewriter over a word processor, since it’s not a big deal to just photograph the typewritten page and store them for later to edit in a word processor. You can even do interesting art projects where you type, scan the image, then print it out, and then type over the print out — just imagine all the infant terrible artists this will unleash at the SudoRoom!

In the Soviet Union intellectuals smuggled forbidden books in through samizdat, sometimes handwriting entire books but also using carbon paper to retype pages from books, which would then be passed along in secret. At that time the copy machines were also monitored, so typewriters and handwriting were the way to go. Over time the messiness, unprofessionalism and rough edges of the samizdat became a symbol for coolness and intellectualism, such so that people continue to make zines with intentional spelling mistakes and layout errors even today.

*A copy of Dr. Zhivago, a famous samizdat*

This gave us ideas for an entire hardware hack night centered around underground press, samizdat and more. We’d be in for a cool history lecture! Maybe we can set up a rudimentary Gutenberg press in the basement next to the silkscreen machines and churn out some pamphlets to start our next religious cult / hackerspace collective / alternative economic experiment. Ha!