The Evils of the Gutenberg Editor

Someone has asked for a clearer explanation of why I object to the new Gutenberg Editor on the WordPress.com sites. This blog allows me the freedom to keep the Classic Editor, a choice I don’t have on WordPress’s own site.

I’m writing this in a rather simple text editor. I utterly hate composing anything in a word processor. Even when I expect to publish something through a word processors, I always start with a plain text editor. That’s no mere habit; there’s a very solid reason for it. Further, I’m not alone by a long shot.

When the focus of your mental process is honest expression, you will use language differently from people who have some other purpose. It’s not so much a question of generational differences, but a different philosophy entirely. I’ve been involved in the public education system and I can tell you from experience that, over the past few decades, the emphasis has been away from content and more onto presentation. Even content itself has been mangled in teaching to fit this approach. In other words, people aren’t taught to report honestly on anything, but to think and write in terms of propaganda.

Have you noticed the big money in being an “influencer”? It means learning how to make everything you do into advertising. It’s meant to influence people somewhere just below the conscious level. It works quite well. There’s a whole branch of behavioral science dedicated to just this one means of manipulating the common consumer.

This is a reflection of what education does to people, both in common schools and in college. The Gutenberg Editor was created to match that philosophical shift. It emphasizes presentation over content. It forces you to think about how the end product will turn out. It discourages thinking about the content; it gets in the way of that kind of process. It keeps throwing in your way questions of presentation. Stop contemplating; just express yourself, and do it this way.

I’m not sure how much of this is down to ADD. Now, quickly I must note that ADD is not what most people think it is, nor what most behavioral scientists have been taught. The research has intentionally asked the wrong questions. It’s really not a malady, but a different approach to thinking that a great many people have always had. However, when the underlying core of educational philosophy began working toward intellectual enslavement, it was recognized that a certain segment of the population simply could not be herded down that path. So they dreamed up a name and treatment plan for it, because anything that makes you resist being herded is a “mental illness.”

At any rate, I don’t operate like the mainstream wants me to operate. I didn’t have trouble in school; I had high grades when I felt like doing the work. The problem is that the system was drifting away from accommodating my different approach to learning. Whatever they think ADD is, it represents a different wiring in the brain. My intellect will sacrifice effort in one area for a preference in promoting another kind of processing.

I must have everything in a pattern. I struggled with memorizing the alphabet until I came up with my own private pattern for learning the letters. I struggled with spelling until I came up with my own mnemonics. I can tell you that discovering etymology made a huge difference; it provided the pattern I needed (not to mention really blessing my grammar). Now I can spell better than just about everyone I know. Though you’ll catch plenty of typos, that’s not a spelling issue, but a matter of how I process. This is far, far better than my handwriting. My brain will let certain kinds of details slide in favor of the big picture.

So I can forget labels and names, in that I struggle to pull them out of memory. I can recognize those names and labels pretty easily when they are presented to me, but I can’t always generate them directly. That kind of processing take a back seat to the bigger pattern that my mind prefers. I excel at things that can be managed by patterns and matrix. I see patterns most people do not see. I’ve become very creative with that.

Furthermore, I think in paragraphs. I don’t think in terms of words and sentences. That should explain a lot for some of you who understand what I’m saying here. My whole process seldom gets below the level of paragraphs. I can rewrite what I know an endless number of times because I don’t learn it in words. Even if I come up with a sentence that captures the essence of something well enough to use it repeatedly, what goes on in the background is the paragraph of thinking that goes with that sentence.

So the Classical Editor for WordPress does only what little I need an editor to do. It allows me very minimal control over the presentation, because I simply don’t care about that. I want to set it and forget it. The Gutenberg Editor demands that you operate with a constant harassment about presentation questions. It hinders me; it’s like always starting from scratch, setting up the presentation every time. It shuts off my flow of thinking. There is too much to do when I need to start writing, and it keeps coming back to seize my attention every few minutes. That’s what block-style editing is supposed to do. It derails deep thinking and gets you bogged down in presentation issues.

And this is entirely intentional. It’s part of the shift to making everyone into an air-head propagandist. You cannot propagandize eternal truth, so it gets censored by the very process itself. For people whose minds work that way already, or who were able to adapt to that, it’s not much of a problem. They are blessed. But I have to have it my way, and I won’t tolerate broken tools when I need to write.