“Your eyes are not your ears, and language is only a modest portion of communication. I ask that you explore, in person, the incredible impoverishments that conducting personal communications »in text enforces and continuously magnifies. This coercive deprivation has become, in our time, a disease of the mind… an addiction to desolation that leads us ever further into various branches of isolation and insanity.

There are thousands of aspects of spoken communication that have no representation whatsoever in text; yet this is but a minor inconvenience to the enforced loss of a mutualized context that is established by the mere agreement to speak and hear our voices, and its abject obliteration in text.

To conduct personal communications in text is a kind of modern autoterrorism; for, bereft of context, tempo, music and pauses… the mind invents false contexts, connotations… and ‘possibilities’ of meaning that could never otherwise exist. And shouldn’t.

Because communication demands the shared context established by our agreement and our music. Text replaces these with a sort of demonic convenience, whose awful costs increase with each repetition of the habit.”

— an intelligence agent