Word Processors Are Evil And Should Not Exist

A normal person reading that title will think it nonsensical. MS Word or some Mac variant of it are central to a modern student experience, and that carries right over into most white collar drone jobs. Even among Linux users, Libre Office, with its ability to output .docx and other proprietary formats, is often seen as indispensable to being productive in a professional setting.

It only is if you let it continue to be the addictive shit DT describes.

There are so very many other examples of this in our culture, like the supposedly necessary evil of carrying a smartphone. Or maintaining a nuclear arsenal. Or shopping for a commercially produced tooth paste. Or engineering regime change all over the world, because it’s vital to protecting “our interests”.

So many lies little and big embedded from childhood into our assumptions, and injected deliberately, for the profit of someone else far away, so gently that the lies are like water to a fish.

When I was a teacher, the people who liked me told me I was Good at it.

But ‘good’ is a very loaded word in this context. Sometimes it fit, like whenever I wrote a new Linux class. But about half the time, I was teaching someone Photoshop, or Excel, or some other vast and costly piece of unnecessary garbage, complicit in the game and the lie. Over and over I compromised with evil in the name of making an easy, middle-class living.

Like most people do.

Until I couldn’t stand it any more, and they couldn’t stand me pointing out the obscene nudity of the Emperors that co-signed the paychecks.

Anyway: DT is telling the truth about this particular little slice of the satanic.

Now that I’m free of their Hell, for now, 99% of the time I use a very basic GUI text editor called Pluma. Tonight, always trying to be a better boy, I’m playing around with Wordgrinder again.

If you’re really hip, you’ll question me for trading in a GUI text editor for a terminal-based ‘processor’ and tell me to just finally go learn vi.

And I’d have to concede the validity of your damn point.