Writing is an early digital technology that never degrades with copying

Evidence

It wasn’t until the 1970s that digital recording and playback technology became readily available. It is interesting to note that in a sense, the printed word has always been digital. Everybody who buys a book gets exactly the same book, exactly the same words. The w in what has the same meaning in any font or handwriting as long as it is legible and is the 23rd letter in our alphabet. You can think of it as digitized with the number 23. The fidelity of books does not degrade with use, barring rough handling. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 482

Categorization

• CANDY: “The letter w is just the number 23 encoded” is a fun, tweetable observation reframing writing as digital.
• XREF: Connects to The Library- A Fragile History’s account of manuscript copying vs print and lossless text transmission. — connects to: Digital control operates by word proliferation, not word destruction — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 87