I’ve been looking at those ’distraction free writing’ devices, they’re a keyboard attached to small e-ink screen designed to ‘keep you focused’ and away from social media. They don’t have web browsers, only need modest internal storage to store more than you’ll write in a lifetime and combined with a long battery life, you might begin to see the appeal. You can write your screenplay in a Starbucks and not be pulled away from it by free wifi and long form twitter threads dunking on people for being wrong.

Now I want one of these, the promise of additional productively, locked behind a price tag and wrapped in a gadget? this trap gets me every time. But reading some reviews and seeing YouTube videos, I realised while I’m the target audience, the big problem this seeks to solve isn’t one that affects me. I have an easy way of staying off twitter, the website has trained me off because it’s a constant stream of uninterrupted transphobia.

Before I uninstalled twitter from my phone, I’d frequently open it to the afterimage of the transphobia that made me close it. Just for a moment, before the feed updated I’d see some braindead hateful moronic tweet, something that made me put my phone down. It would then wiz away and be replaced by something else, but the damage was done, I’d end up hurt twice. It wasn’t always like this, I’ve met my closest friends though the site, I’ve enjoyed those treads about the people who are wrong. But with shifts in the underlying discovery algorithms, people leaving for other spaces and my own lack of engagement, the twitter of the past is gone.

That’s why the next great writer will be trans, they won’t need a device that only writes, something that’s between a typewriter, kindle and an iPad. Distraction free is provided free of charge.