Chenoweth: 1.) We’d have keepsakes. We’d probably care more about punctuation and capitalization. And every day, around the time the mailman was due to arrive, we’d start to get happy. 2.) We’d know more about our own histories. We could have ping-pong tournaments. If I made the soup, Grandma could make the salad and Uncle Jim could set the table. 3.) We would feel awe—at the technology that brought him to life, and at the forces (climactic and otherwise) that killed him off. Maybe we’d think more about our own evolution and our own eventual extinction.

McNally: No longer would the computer be blamed for formatting problems or spelling and grammar errors, which, astonishingly, my students try to pawn off on the poor machine.  Nope, it’ll all be human error, which is the actual cause of 99% of my students’ problems.  No longer will I have to hear “My hard-drive crashed” or “I got the dreaded blue-screen last night, so I took my computer to IT.”  The typewriter is a difficult machine to lay blame on.

A typewriter instills discipline.  I used to write longhand and then type my short stories, but I would make damned sure that each draft of a story was as good as I could make it before I began typing, because the act of retyping was so laborious.  The computer has made me lazy.  I can be slack on the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth drafts.  Also, I’ve forgotten how to spell words I used to know how to spell, because I no longer need a dictionary by my side.  (In truth, I do keep a dictionary nearby, but I don’t open it nearly as much as I used to.)  

If we all had to go back to the typewriter, our days would be longer and more productive, and we’d give our brains some much-needed exercise.

Reyn: Maybe these dinner parties continue to exist among certain circles, but I have yet to be invited to the perfect one of my dreams. Okay, so maybe the present would not be entirely improved, but how bad would it be to unplug ourselves from our computers, peel ourselves away from our five-disc sets of The Wire or Entourage, and instead huddle around the table for a long evening’s discussion of Kant or Ingmar Bergman or the unfathomable meaninglessness of our lives?

Trachtenberg: One, a revived IWW would have to ditch communism. If history’s taught us anything, it’s that Politburos are even worse than corporate boards. It would need to redefine what makes somebody a worker, as opposed to a boss, or recognize that some bosses really are workers, or have the same interests as workers. It would probably need to give up the rhetoric of ‘smashing’ shit. Personally, I don’t care if we keep capitalism as long as no corporate CEO makes more than 20 times what the janitor does. And a reconstituted IWW should expand its constituency to include consumers. If nothing else, that would give the union much more power. If the workers at Bank of America go out on strike, how long will it take Bank of America to find new ones? But if you can get a million Bank of America credit-card holders to hold back their payment one month, you can bring down the bank.