‘At this moment,’ the letter says, ‘we are facing our biggest challenge ever. Many forces including Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation and technology companies with deep pockets are mobilizing to promote ‘Copyleft’ in order to undermine our ‘Copyright.’

Today’s Americans don’t care to know how the gas comes to the pump, the food to the table, the iPad to the store.

Just make sure they do.

But now they’re staring, transfixed, at where things come from. And what people still do to get it to you, and the death and devastation that can result when something goes wrong and it can’t be fixed with a call to technical support.

They’d rather watch web video than anything broadcast. There is nothing Hollywood makes that can hold a candle to Fail Blog for them. Was it the control that the DVR gave them that made them so drawn the ultimate control of the Web? I’m not sure, but what seems clear is that they’re not going back.

What we want from writing is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts. This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: We want more time to think.