the worst person you know writes in all lowercase.
they’re someone who made the deliberate decision to either disable autocorrect or manually re-type their auto-corrected words rid of capitalization. they’re likely someone who wears wired earphones and exclusively drinks matcha. they’ll tell you its a symbol of authenticity, vulnerability, and perhaps even a resistance against institutions. they’re someone like me — someone who managed to strong-arm my wired editor into hacking the conde nast cms to publish an essay completely rid of basic grammar. why do we write in lowercase? for what? for whom?
i pitched this story over a glass of wine with my fabulous editor, right around the time charli xcx made her entrance onto this platform, jack dorsey fired half his workforce in an all-lowercase tweet, and chase bank launched their all-lowercase newsletter. it was a moment accented by a growing desire to exhibit humanity online.
i felt the weight of a thousand substack girlies when i filed the essay. after all, writing in lowercase is a hallmark of this platform. self-publishing is meant to give way for more authentic voices, it only makes sense that writers want to deliberately reject editorial conventions to further signal their independence. it seemed impossible to capture the entire lifecycle of this ran-through practice in just 1600 words. it did emerge sometime during the 1st century.
i distinctly recall getting lost in the many microblog rabbit holes about the practice, of which many essays left me more confused than before. there were many ways i could tackle this thorny subject. i could…
investigate the way writers like ee cummings and bell hooks resisted capitalization as a political statement
survey the canon of justgirlythings and early 2010s tumblr feminism a la rupi kaur and nayyirah waheed
connect 4chan conventions to early hacker speak
dive into how the german bauhaus deemed lowercase as an affront to style
unpack how this substack bestseller is actually all ai-generated slop (despite writing in lowercase)
… and oh so much more
what i did land on, was the very technical (and pragmatic) functions of lowercase writing during the infancy of tech as we know today. the moral associations we now have with capitalization (or lack thereof) actually came from a video game: when turing award winner ken thompson, freshly let go from a research project he had poured himself into, wanted to port a simple computer game he had programmed to a pdp-7 computer. it was called space travel. it gave rise to unix which, inadvertently, planted the seed of our case-sensitive identity politics.
read my full story on wired :)
how would you have approached this? what did i miss? should i do a follow up?
Hello! If you’ve made it this far — thank you for joining me on my neo-luddite pilgrimage. If you’d like to support some of my more rogue ventures in cyber celibacy (typewriters, building a printing press… more to come), upgrade to paid! You’ll find treats sprinkled in your inbox <3
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all lowercase is patented by me, since the late 90s :P
as someone drinking matcha without milk and contemplating wired headphones because i don't use any, i'd consider writing everything low case. also using words in not the most idiomatic form. now i'm excited 😆