Dispatch
Somewhere beyond the last paved road

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All I want
is text.

A small, entirely unreasonable manifesto
in 95 printable characters.

I want a cabin in the woods. A stove that burns wood. A chair that does not need an account. And one small computer through which my family can tell me they got home.

That is the whole technological future I am asking for.

Somehow this has become an extremist position.

01 / We had enough characters.

ASCII gives me 95 printable characters. Letters. Numbers. Punctuation. A space, which is a beautiful invention because sometimes the correct thing to put between two things is nothing.

I can say "i love you". I can say "bring soup". I can say "the creek is up, take the other road". I can express the entire emotional range of a father with "ok", "OK", and "ok."

If the situation demands visual art, I have this: :-)

If the situation deteriorates, I have this: :-(

The system is complete.

02 / Unicode should be banned.

There. I said it. Put it on a wooden sign. Use normal quotation marks.

I do not want a character that is secretly three characters in a coat. I do not want an invisible passenger in the middle of a word. I do not want two things that look identical to have a disagreement at the byte level.

I went outside to split a log. When I came back, a family portrait was a sequence of code points negotiating custody of a zero-width joiner.

My mother is trying to ask whether I have enough blankets. This should not require a summit on how to render a tiny yellow person.

Ban it. At the very least, ban it within shouting distance of my porch. The squirrels and I will enforce the perimeter.

03 / A message is not a small website.

No stickers. No autoplay. No confetti because I typed a date. No link preview opening a little window into a place I did not ask to visit.

I do not need to watch three dots perform the suspense of another person thinking. Let them think. I will also think. We can meet at the sentence when it is ready.

A message should arrive, contain words, and stop making demands.

04 / Boring is a feature.

With printable ASCII, every character is one byte. The allowed set fits on a small chart. I can point to every member of it. None of them is waiting for a font update to reveal its true identity.

I want text I can save in a file and read years later. Text that survives being copied. Text whose punctuation has no aspirations beyond punctuation.

My apostrophe is straight. My hyphen is humble. My parentheses know when to leave.

This is not nostalgia. I also own a good kettle. Some things are simply finished.

05 / I want to be alone. Not unreachable.

There is a difference.

I want the woods between me and the world. I do not want the woods between me and my family.

I want my brother to tell me about his day. I want my dad to send the same terrible joke twice because he forgot. I want my mom to ask if I am eating properly, and I want to lie very slightly and say yes.

mom > are you warm enough?

me > yes. stove is going.

mom > love you

me > love you too <3

Look at that. Everything got through.

No animated heart could make it mean more.

06 / These are my terms.

Give me a small program. Give me private words. Give me a keyboard and the people I care about on the other end.

Keep the feed. Keep the badges. Keep the expanding universe of things a message can do besides tell me something.

I will be out here with the rain on the roof, a stack of firewood, and 95 printable characters. If you need me, send a sentence.

All I want is text.
All I need is for it to be from you.