Weird time to be a writer. There’s writing everywhere, a deluge of words, and it’s all free. But in the beginning, when writing was brand new and Iraq was Sumeria, dotted with city states and kings and gods and zigurrats, there were perhaps a few hundred of us, etching sentences into clay in cuneiform, “woven” an ancient scribe wrote, “intricately like a net”. Almost no one could read then, and fewer wrote, and it took years to master their craft; writers were a specialist caste, powerful, feted, privileged. Imagine that. Kings would utter commands, scribes made them real. Now we writers plug away on Facebook between pictures of cats. Lo, how the mighty have fallen.

Yet beneath this very post, in the programming, is the work of coders. I open the source page and see their work, the thousands and thousands of characters, letters and numbers and slashes woven intricately like a net. Few now can read it, and fewer write it, and like the ancient scribes, mastering their craft takes years. I can’t imagine any of them see the irony–they, hunched over in their cubicles, are the scribes now, and if not feted or privileged, they at least make a living. My words are just keystrokes, their code makes them real.