My life, had I been born in 1872
Not an agent, not a tool, no archives this time. One evening in July I asked ChatGPT, which by now has a long memory of me, to sketch what my life would have looked like if I had been born a hundred years earlier. It answered in Dutch; what follows is my translation, unabridged, because cutting it would spoil it. Then the family's verdict, and mine.
Its opening move was to give me the honest version first, in a paragraph, before asking permission to be entertaining. Having since actually looked up what my ancestors did in the nineteenth century (farmhands, a laborer, a carpenter), I can confirm the honest version is the correct one.
The strictly realistic version is that Onno, given his family background, would probably have gone to school for a few years and then been put to work young. In the Netherlands of the late nineteenth century, the life of a working-class child was determined mainly by the father's trade, the place the family lived, and whatever work happened to be available.
He would therefore most likely have become a factory hand, a farmhand, a porter, a carpenter's apprentice or a railway worker. That is historically probable, but not particularly entertaining.
So here is the somewhat more adventurous alternative.
Onno is born in 1872 in Haarlem, a city where paper, printing ink, newspapers and books have been part of the streetscape for centuries. On the Grote Markt stands, since 1856, the statue of Laurens Janszoon Coster, who according to Haarlem tradition invented the printing press. Whether that is actually true matters less, to Haarlemmers, than one might think.
The firm of Joh. Enschedé is by then long established in the city too. It began in 1703 as a printer and later busied itself with books, newspapers, type founding, securities and postage stamps. Haarlem is, in short, not an illogical place to develop an interest in print, publishing and new ways of spreading information.
Moreover, Onno grows up in a city that was connected to Amsterdam by the first railway line in the Netherlands before he was born. The first train ran to Haarlem in 1839. By the time Onno walks along the tracks as a boy, the train is no longer a miraculous novelty, but still an impressive symbol of speed, technology and progress.
In this alternative history he simply starts out in a working-class family. He does not go to secondary school and certainly not to university. Through a combination of luck, persistence and changing circumstances, however, he manages to work his way from manual labor into a position as junior clerk at a printer, a newspaper, a railway office or a publisher.
At first his work consists mostly of carrying paper, delivering letters, feeding stoves and carrying out orders from men who take it for granted that a boy from his background does not ask too many questions.
That last part proves difficult.
Gradually he is given other tasks. He sorts mail, keeps simple registers, checks addresses and takes proofs to customers. In time he knows every bookseller, printer, office clerk and station official between the Grote Markt, the Spaarne and the station.
Around 1900 he has by now an impressive beard, solid sideburns and small round spectacles with a thin metal frame. He wears a dark three-piece suit, a stiff collar, polished shoes and a pocket watch on a chain. In official portraits he looks stern, like nearly everyone in 1900, probably because smiling was not yet considered evidence of a successful personality.
He works behind a tall, sloping wooden writing desk. On it lie stacks of letters, pencils, dip pens, inkwells, blotting paper, a magnifying glass and a few curious instruments of which nobody knows precisely whether they are really necessary.
Because of his beard, spectacles and stiff collar he looks like a professor from Leiden, although he never got further than a few years of primary school.
Eventually he starts a small office or publishing house for teaching materials, administrative assistance and correspondence courses. The firm has a few clerks, a bookkeeper, a secretary and presumably one exceptionally patient young man whose main occupation is looking for documents that Onno, by his own account, put down "in a perfectly logical place."
As an employer he is correct, but not particularly indulgent.
An employee who has made an addition error gets the paper back with the wrong amount circled three times and, underneath, the question:
"Did this result strike you, yourself, as even remotely plausible?"
New employees quickly learn that they had better not say:
"But that is how we always do it here."
They also learn that when Onno says "I have just one small remark," an exposition of at least three quarters of an hour will follow.
His secretary develops an important function within the firm. She converts his letters from what he actually wants to say into what can be socially acceptably sent by post.
Onno dictates, for instance:
"Your request is unclear, internally contradictory and presumably impossible to carry out."
The secretary writes:
"Thank you for your interesting inquiry. In order to execute it correctly we would gladly receive some further clarification."
He becomes fascinated by every new invention. A typewriter arrives at the office, then a mechanical calculator and eventually even a telephone. He predicts that rapid communication will change society completely.
At the same time he complains that the telephone gives people the ability to interrupt him at will, without first explaining in writing what they wish to speak to him about.
The telephone therefore stands not on his own desk, but on the secretary's.
He regularly travels by train to Amsterdam, Leiden or The Hague, with a leather briefcase full of papers on his lap. Delays annoy him, but loud fellow passengers annoy him more, especially when they make firm pronouncements about matters of which they demonstrably understand nothing.
In Haarlem he mostly gets around by bicycle. It is a heavy black machine without gears, with a leather saddle, a coat guard and a bell that sounds as though a small metal fire alarm is being operated somewhere.
For exercise he takes long walks through the city, along the Spaarne or toward the dunes. Running through the streets for pleasure would, even in this alternative history, be considered exceptionally eccentric.
At home in the evening he reads the newspaper, magazines and whatever happens to be within reach by gaslight or a paraffin lamp. He supplies newspaper articles with commentary out loud and corrects incorrect usage, also when nobody has asked.
When a journalist uses a word wrongly, the article is read aloud at the table, followed by a precise account of what the word really means and why the journalist in question would have done better to choose another profession.
In winter the family sits by a coal stove. The room is warm at the front and ice cold at the back. Outside, hooves sound on the cobbles, handcarts rattle through the alleys, and from the direction of the printing houses there sometimes hangs the smell of paper and ink.
By the 1920s Onno has become a respectable gentleman in his fifties. His beard is bigger, his sideburns more impressive, and his eyebrows are beginning to lead an independent existence.
The staff at the office are loyal to him. They also know that a simple question rarely yields a simple answer.
During the economic crisis of the 1930s he keeps the firm afloat through caution, thrift and an almost physical aversion to unnecessary expense. Envelopes are reused, paper is written on both sides, and every lamp that is not strictly necessary is turned off at once.
Nevertheless he spends an irresponsibly large sum on a new mechanical office machine, because in his view it:
"Will in the long run save an enormous amount of time."
The machine does not save an enormous amount of time.
Mainly, it makes a lot of noise.
In 1940 Onno is 68 years old. He is by now an elderly gentleman with silver-grey sideburns, dark spectacles, a walking stick and the air of someone who has spent half a century correcting other people's forms, letters and invoices.
During the German occupation his knowledge of offices, registers and official procedures could suddenly become useful in graver ways. He would presumably not waste big words on it. At most he would observe that a certain document could better be filled in differently, that a name in a register had accidentally been misspelled, or that an official did not necessarily need to know everything.
So the nineteenth-century Onno would live in a world of steam trains, horse-drawn carts, printing ink, coal stoves, handwritten letters, stiff collars and an extraordinary quantity of facial hair.
He would have had far less education, worse dental care, and would have had to do without antibiotics.
But he would presumably still be occupied with new technology, language, newspapers, staff, unclear requests, and the question of why other people had organized something in such a needlessly illogical way.
Apart from the beard and the sideburns, then, perhaps not everything would have been different.
The verdict
I sent it to the family. The first reply arrived early the next morning: "So from the sound of it, the Onno of a hundred years ago would also have been a know-it-all." Someone else thought the realistic version was the likelier one, given what most of the ancestors did for a living, but preferred the second. And one relative reported that, asked the same question, ChatGPT had answered: world dictator.
My own reply: it's still a language model, it hallucinates. That bit about reading the newspaper aloud at the dinner table and taking the journalist apart, for instance. Pure fabrication.
Nobody bought it. Everyone at that table has sat through the newspaper routine.
Which is the actually interesting thing about this exercise. The story is not history and was never meant to be; the Haarlem details are real, the man is a projection. What it shows is what the model has concluded about me from a couple of years of conversations: impatient with "that is how we always do it," fond of new machines and skeptical of what they deliver, frugal, a stickler for words, prone to answering a simple question at length. I did not tell it any of that. It read it off. As a mirror it is a caricature, and like a good caricature it works because the exaggerations are of real features.
Tool: ChatGPT, one prompt, no editing on my part beyond the translation.