Draftback is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to watch every keystroke of every revision made to a Google Doc played back to you, opening up a new way to study how writers write. Chadwick Matlin at FiveThirtyEight tried the extension, however, and he sees a dark side:
Embedded in Draftback’s ingenuity is also a certain kind of inevitability: that writing, like any commodity, is at the mercy of a technology that never forgets.
[Its creator] has laid out the utopian case for what that can mean: People learn how to write in a way they never could before. But there’s a dystopian one, too. Because of the way Draftback works, anybody with editing rights to a Google Doc can see that document’s past.
