How can you make a type-writer incapable of printing profanity?

An essay on digital piracy, and what it would take to eliminate it.

One of Cory Doctorow's many (many, many) beloved soap-boxes on which he likes to stand, is the inevitability of digital piracy. “All anti-piracy efforts are basically fights against general-purpose computing! We don't know how to make a computer that runs all the programs except for the one that makes your share-holders sad. We only know how to make one computer: the one that can run all the software we know how to write!”

Well, a non-tech-savvy person might want to ask: “Why is that impossible?” At which point mr Doctorow would likely start waxing lyrical about Alan Turing and Turing-completeness and all that heavy jargon that makes perfect sense to a professional but would likely make anyone else's eyes glaze over.

I'd like to offer an alternative explanation, one aimed towards being accessible to general audiences. One that, in fact, does not mention computers at all.

For starters, here is a type-writer:

Click to load and view image

A round of applause for the first image in this entire blog, please.

This is, conceptually at least, a very simple machine: whenever a key is pressed, a lever jumps and strikes a piece of paper, printing a certain letter on it. Thanks to this, if you want to write the phrase “hotwater bottle”, you press in turn each key that corresponds to this phrase, and watch as the letters magically appear on the page.

There are three improvements that we would like to make to this. The first, and most important, is to forbid it from typing profanity. So, how would one go about this?

To ensure that our solution is viable, our product must not:

1. Be significantly more expensive than ordinary type-writers, or nobody will want to buy it.
2. Consist of an ordinary type-writer plus something else, or people will just remove the something else and go about their business.
3. Monitor what people are actually typing, for GDPR reasons.
4. Forbid innocuous words; eg “twat” must be forbidden, but “hotwater” must not.
5. Forbid inoffensive usages of words: the phrase “The general used a chink in the enemy's armour to cripple their offense and retard their march through the homeland” must be permitted, although 3 of those words could be offensive if used in other contexts.

Once we establish this, we'd like this machine to only be capable of typing English; for instance, the phrase “crème brûlée” must be permitted because it's a loan-word, but the phrase “la crème est brûlée” must be forbidden because that's French.

And finally, once we manage the first two things, we can reach our ultimate goal: A type-writer which cannot copy more than a paragraph's worth of text from today's newspaper. Once we manage that, applying the same lessons to computers will be enough to completely crush digital piracy once and for all.

Except… even if we make the bold assumption that there's a universe in which the first of those goals can be reached, the latter two goals are laughably out of reach. The reason is: A type-writer has absolutely no notion of things like “word”, “sentence”, “paragraph”, or “language”. All a type-writer really “knows” is what characters it has available: The upper-case and lower-case letters, the punctuation marks, etc. How each user will choose to strike those keys in order to create a specific text is completely out of the type-writer's sphere of influence.

In other words, to call back to mr Doctorow's words: “We don't know how to make a type-writer that can write all possible texts, except for the ones that make your bosses sad. We only know how to make one type-writer: the one that can type any kind of text we know how to write.”

So, if you ever see anyone calling for an end to piracy, hand that person a type-writer and ask them to make it impossible to type the word “fuck” with. Maybe this can then lead to a fruitful discussion, though I rather doubt it.