The non-manifesto for verticality
I take a particular pleasure in bringing very old devices back to life by making them usable for some specific purpose. Every time I do it, I discover new sensations coming from a past I never lived, from a world in which priorities were very different.
Today’s case is the HP Compaq nx7300 on which I am writing this article, a notebook that has only the name of Compaq, given that it is as thick as a book with thousands of pages and, roughly speaking, weighs four kilos.
Coming from the distant year 2000 and left in a drawer of my father’s desk until my rediscovery today, it boasts a majestic single-core Intel Celeron M, accompanied by as much as 2GB of RAM (originally 512MB). Its computing power is small, but despite that it is a real pleasure to write on, caressing keys with a travel of a width unthinkable for a modern computer. It almost feels like typing on an external keyboard because it is so comfortable, especially compared to my MacBook’s.
Then, by installing an ultra-light Linux distro (I am using Puppy Linux), it is possible to use all the basic offline functions pleasantly, being encouraged (or rather, forced) to be productive in the IDE or in the text editor, given the slowness in visiting demanding sites or carrying out distracting activities.
The workflow becomes very simple: edit the text (whether it is code or an article), git add. , git commit -m … , git push ….
No Barbero lectures lasting hours, no geopolitics videos, or any other distraction one likes to have time and life stolen by.
A change of perspective
It is easy to criticize the verticality of today’s education, longing for a nostalgic past in which knowledge was limited enough to be entirely contained in a human skull. I will not, therefore, be the one to do it in this article.
What, however, intrigues me (and at times unsettles me) is noticing that, in the days of cultural horizontality, the tools used were almost all vertical, each with its own purpose and its own function. Horizontal culture -> vertical tools.
Today’s situation is exactly the opposite (and it is not a disadvantage, at least not from every point of view). The individual is confined by necessity in a very thin vertical slice of the immense crumb of knowledge reached by humanity and has at their disposal horizontal machines capable of doing everything.
On the one hand, the convenience of condensing a great many functions inside a single object is undeniable but, on the other, I often find myself unable to concentrate precisely because of the excess of possibilities. Then, speaking of digital systems, preserving the individual’s intentionality does not exactly fall among the producer company’s parameters of success, given that, if the user were encouraged to choose, they probably would not waste hours of their life in front of a matrix of luminous pixels and would go for a walk in the woods at the first opportunity.
Returning to the dear Compaq nx7300 on which I am writing these banalities, you will have already guessed what involuntary killer feature it is equipped with: if I have to write an article for my site, I turn it on, I use it, when I finish writing the article I push to Git, I close it, and I can do something else.
A single function, it performs it reliably, it allows me to do it better than on other devices, it does nothing else.
This applies in very many cases.
For example, do you love listening to music? If you use your phone as a media player, it probably often happens that, as soon as you enter the home screen and see colors and patterns of the icons of instagram/tikok/insert_any_social_name, a process starts that leads you to forget your initial intention: you self-deceive yourself thinking “come on, let’s just see for a moment what’s happening on X” and after 2 hours you wake up from the digital coma realizing you have not listened to any track. The benefit of a vertical device like a dedicated music player, maybe offline, is priceless in terms of preserved life and listening experience.
Another banal example: do you like taking photographs? Perhaps, instead of replacing your good 300€ phone with an iPhone 17 pro max for 1600, you could simply buy a camera. It is true, you do not always have it in your hand like a smartphone (and perhaps that is exactly how it should be), but the simple fact of pausing every other action you were doing to dedicate a slot of your time to this activity will certainly get you better shots.
With this I do not want to write a manifesto for verticality, it is obvious that one cannot go around with a suitcase full of single-function tools among which to choose the most appropriate from moment to moment, and it is obvious that in today’s reality it is also partly impossible to do without this multitude of functions.
The idea I am reflecting on, however, is that of rediscovering vertical tools; I am thinking that it could be useful and constructive to choose the 3 productive activities (and not necessarily from the economic or professional point of view) that one believes to be most important in life and dedicate to them vertical tools that allow them to be isolated from the rest of convenient but superfluous functionalities.
And so
I am not a productivity guru and I do not claim to teach other people how to manage their lives, but it seemed interesting to put into writing a reflection born from a notebook from 2000 used by my father for work, resurrected by me at the end of 2025 as a “typewriter”.
For my part, I am experimenting with this approach on the activities I do, dedicating vertical tools to writing, photography, and studying. For now it seems a positive choice.
Ps. I am sure that much of what I have said has already been experimented with, written down, and theorized, perhaps even more coherently, by people who came before me. I am living now, giving an order as much as possible to my way of existing. So do not be scandalized if you are more experienced than I am on the topic or if you know books that express these concepts better; rather, write me an email if you have advice you consider interesting. I would be grateful.