As I mentioned yesterday I’m writing all of these blog posts on a tiny, underpowered computer about the size of my palm, with a shitty-but-functional no-name keyboard I bought off Amazon, and on a CRT monitor older than I am. The monitor emits a high-pitched whine. The whine is caused by the scanning frequency of the cathode ray tube, along with some other internal components that may simply be wearing down with age. It’s around 15.625kHz. Human hearing tops out at around 20kHz, but we lose more and more of that upper capacity as we age. I’m 33; I’ve lost enough such that I can’t really hear the whine as such, but nevertheless I tend to get a bit annoyed if I have the monitor on for more than a half-hour or so. Noise canceling headphones seem to help a bit. My younger colleagues and students can definitely hear the whine, though, so I try not to keep the monitor on much when they’re around.

Here is the moment where I could offer the whine as a metaphor. Shit is fucking hard right now, in the year of our lord 2025. It’s especially hard to concentrate on anything, or to get any large projects done, because of all the noise, which feels like it’s starting to move all-too-rapidly down the frequency scale from the edges to the center of our perception. I don’t know how bad things are going to get. Maybe they won’t. But in any case, that’s one way I could take this post: towards Grand Pronouncements about how Things Are and the Fear that sits at the heart of trying to be a decent person, or even just a person, in the aforementioned year of our etc. and so forth.

I don’t really want to write that post though, because it’s not kind to the whine. The whine isn’t trying to rip up the basic, fundamental structures of the social contract that has otherwise permitted so much prosperity and so much pain. The whine is just a whine; a mechanical fact of how a technology works, a technology that frankly no one really uses anymore. I would bet good money that this monitor, the Zenith ZVM-123 in phosphor green sitting in front of me, is the only CRT monitor currently plugged in and working within three miles of me. Maybe there’s one on an oscilloscope in the physics department. If anything, the whine is a reminder of the Way Things Were, back decades ago, when our dream of what technology could do for us was different – not better, just different.

I don’t know what it means to be a Computer Person anymore. Computer People seem, to my mind, directly responsible for more evil than good in the world. I don’t know if things needed to be faster. I don’t know if we needed an information superhighway. It seemed so necessary at the time, but look where it’s gotten us.

In closing, I think it’s okay to have a bit of a whine in our systems. That’s what reminds us that they work and how they work. I think we have gotten too comfortable not knowing how things work. Because when we don’t know how things work, we can assume that they’re magic, or simple, or that we could easily build something better – after all, we’re from the future, and the whine is from the past. I care too much about the past to denigrate it like that. I just wish more people felt the same way.