H. G. Wells once proclaimed that “If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting.” There’s something sterile and spooky about total technical possibility. It’s like being married to someone who is all things to all people. Sure, you may think you want them to be utterly obliging and responsive, at all times, under all circumstances. But in reality, that behavior is humanly unbearable.

So it’s good to have some grain there. There needs to be a little vivifying resistance within the medium. Technical perfection merely brings you face to face with your own inadequacies.

The heroic struggle looked something like this:

3000 B.C. Sumerian scribes created cuneiform. You held a high-tech palmtop of wet clay, and you deftly poked it with the wedge-shaped tip of a reed. The inherent limits here created a typography like hard-baked chicken scratches. It might not win many design prizes, but it’s still legible 5,000 years later.

2500 B.C. For ages, Egyptians had chiselled and painted classic hieroglyphs of eagles, scarabs, breadloaves, and snakes. Then they bashed and boiled the papyrus reed into a new material, “paper.” But reed-pen and reed papyrus allowed notation that was very swift and abstract. An accomplished, up-to-date scribe used paper-and-pen hieratic cursive.

400 A.D. The writing surfaces of paper and vellum became slicker. Highly advanced quill pens were in wide use. Uncial lettering was invented. Letter forms acquired ascenders, descenders, and ligatures. It was all about whipping that feather across the leather before Charlemagne lost his temper.

1455. Movable type appeared. This was a technical breakthrough of colossal dimensions. First, you banged and cut the letterform into solid steel (in relief, and reversed). Then you pounded this hard steel letterpunch deep into a soft copper bar. Next, you poured a molten tin/lead/antimony mix into the copper mold, creating a slug of type. Then you assembled these metal letters into big racks, inked them up, and squeezed them onto damp paper. This horrifying Rube Goldberg technology seemed perfectly natural for four hundred solid years. Entire tribes of specialized craftspeople appeared to move the practice forward. Decade by decade, country by country, they created many small, cumulative improvements in punchcutting, typecasting and page layout.

1800s. Industrial mechanization and automation broke down old production costs and constraints. Typefaces became bolder, louder, expanded, ornamented, floriated, decorated. Great shouting wall-posters went up all over major cities. Long-established standards of typographical decency and decorum collapsed in an orgy of cheap commercialism. The horror, the horror...

1880s. Linotype and Monotype machines showed up. They could cast type automatically, on the spot. A punch-cutting machine was also invented. Now anyone could design a type without mastering the exigencies of cutting and filing steel. People began to think of themselves as type designers rather than foundry experts.

1920s. Modernist art theory people were firmly convinced that machinery was too dumb to ever handle swashes and/or serifs. So ornamentation and handicraft had to go; the constraints of industrial efficiency demanded this. Modernists knew that there was no line of retreat from the streamlined Machine Age, but they couldn’t imagine that Henry Ford would also be quaint and obsolete, someday. Simple geometrical letterforms become the mode. They certainly looked great on the 20th century’s many military recruitment posters. Modernist typefaces looked like they were riveted together from a catalog of uniform parts.

1950s. Phototypesetting became commercially available. Metal type was no longer required. The new photo-letter forms could be overlapped, blown up and shrunk, slanted back and forth at will. An orgy of intellectual piracy ensued as the new rubber-offset guys stole all the old, classic metal typefaces, and hastily screwed them up.

1970s. Early computerized typesetting. Life looked mighty grim for the typesetting unions. Newspapers looked like they were spooled out automatically by unskilled labor.

1980s. At last, the mighty dawn of desktop publishing! Suddenly it was all about bitmaps, outlines, pixels, and dots-per-inch. Type took on an elastic, diffuse, hallucinatory quality. Anyone could click the mouse and spew out justified copy in a cool font. Everything aspired to look like a desktop screen.

Techno-utopia had arrived. Nothing much ever happens in a Utopia. There is no grain of resistance in Utopia, nothing to kick against. Pretty much anything is possible, so nothing much is interesting. In daily practice, Utopia spends most of its time looking backward wistfully to the difficult, challenging, funky world of pre-Utopia. Digital typefaces, like other forms of computer-assisted art, are mostly about appropriation, sampling, deconstruction and detournement. The prototypical digital typeface looks like a time-traveling bandit kidnapped Aldus Manutius and shot him full of horse tranquilizer.

Today’s truly native, authentic computer fonts are the jumpy graphic entities that live inside the screens. Flying animated logos. Chromed TV fonts. Blood-dripping movie fonts, complete with soundtracks. Dancing Java baloney on web pages. Lettering that breaks up into particle animation, or throbs, or changes colors, or catches fire, or flies out of gun barrels. Here we see digital typography enlivened by the harsh constraints of a crude, young, barely-functional medium. It’s really living it up in there, what with the bad video capture cards, and the inadequate compression, and the herky-jerky streaming and such. Today’s web-monkeys may lack health insurance and job security, but they find holy inspiration in fighting their constraints.

On paper, however, it rather looks like it’s over. It’s apotheosis. You can place any number of pixels, anywhere on a page, in any shape you want, at any time you want, at arbitrary levels of precision. So where’s the limit? Where’s the challenge?

But of course it isn’t over. A computer is a glass box on a desk...it’s a gizmo of its period. The 1990s Gates computer is no more permanent than the 1920s Ford assembly line. Someday, perhaps much sooner than we think, “computers” will become boring. They’ll become your uncle’s technology. Your grandfather’s. They’ll become passé.

But paper won’t go out of use. Because paper contains a huge installed base of knowledge that can last for centuries without upgrades, backups, or batteries.

So we may live to see a day when we confront new creative challenges on paper, with an advanced design technology that isn’t “computers.”

What do you suppose happens then?

Bruce Sterling is a writer, editor, and net activist. He was co-founder, with William Gibson, of the cyberpunk movement, and his face was on the cover of the first issue of Wired.