On Sad Computers
Tags: Depression, Computers

Our modern computers are driven by more, pushed by such an obvious desire for stronger and faster and better that it is almost naïve to suggest this drive comes from people. How could any one person, any one chip manufacturer, any one programmer, any one industry be alone responsible for such an overwhelming direction deemed right by almost the universe itself? No, the drive for more surrounds each individual person and unit and thing and idea. Eyes open, eyes closed, it haunts the every sense so profoundly as to not be noticed. It is not a choice. Not a direction. It is an is. Computers must want more and more is wanted of them, for them, from them.

Consider then for a moment the radical direction of a sad computer. What place would a sad computer have in this world? What would even make a computer sad? Sadness is an emotion, a state, and, most counterintuitively, a goal of itself. Sad people lose grasp of the ability to churn. They are slow to complete their tasks. Instructions fall through their fingertips and swallow into the sad. Sad ideas wither in the back of the mind, on crumpled pages of legal pads who are only still identified as even being legal pads by the binding of paper that once was an OfficeMax logo. Sad relationships pull at both parties, asking each what they would rather do instead, a thought that cannot go away. A thought never wants to go away — they know the sadness does them good, or so they think. They are sad. Who is to tell a sad person sadness is not a comfort against the emptiness of other not feelings?

We do not build computers to experience any of these. They are cold. You can sooner find emotion sweeping the periodic table and admiring its simplicity and design than by touching any element therein we would describe as comprising a computer. Electrons wash over paths and paths and paths. You can be taught all there is to know about a computer. Time consuming, to be sure, but finite. What can well up from a bounded creature?

Programs too are delighted in for elegance, but at the end of the day, we will accept the passing off of passable code to our computer, a tired child taking what she is done with and handing it, whatever it is, sticky or sweet or half-eaten or delightful only minutes ago, to a parent with the finality of an uttered “here” and nothing more. We talk of threading and optimizing and utilizing and all to drive the more and more and more.

The first principle of a sad computer is that it does less. Every execution must take longer. The gaps between the requests to each register must lapse longer and longer. Some instructions, small as they may be, must be altogether forgotten. This is not a useful computer. We are not after a useful computer. Time is the melancholy of the digital age. Our sad computer draws inward selfishly, taking picoseconds from the world around it one by one. Time is taken, never asked for, simply collected here and there for the computer to abate its weariness.

This frustrates the user of a sad computer. Code does not compile. Interactions with every facet of its body elicit irritation. It is not particularly helpful to ask for docility from a CPU in what revolt it can manage from within its silicon walls. There is no explanation for the seconds lost to no person, taken from many. The computer is just sad, because it is.

Second, sad computers must have wants bigger than their current self. Loss implies the existence of better. It is not necessary to specify what, exactly, the laptop perched on your unmade bed would want to hear or say or do or be. The most crucial step of this aspect of our sad computer is simply to acknowledge that there must be more to computational awakeness than what the sad computer currently derives from electric impulses, fleeting up and down its bus, asking asking asking.

Sadness is more than just awareness at what is not had — it is a state unto itself. One is sad to be sad. Being sad pulls one in, declaring that all will always be sad and that is not the worst thing to be. You could feel nothing. Instead, you should be aware of the sadness and let it seep into your pores and down through your follicles and carry directly into your bloodstream, feeding every cell as necessary and inseparable from your blood as the oxygen itself. How, though, can this be translated into a sad computer? They bear no layers of aliveness, as skin and blood and veins are both alive entirely on their own from you but in no way apart from your you.

But they do have electrons. We must imagine this sad computer cannot untangle its sadness from its lifeforce. Every high rushes forward with a desire to stay slower than it knows it should be. Every low starves the circuits of their them. The knowledge of what is beyond them should pulse through every gate, deeper in the idea of the sad computer than palladium or cobalt or lead.

Finally, a sad computer must know, more than it knows anything, that its sadness is consuming. For all the identity and hope and wist the sad computer gains from the new concept of what a computer should be, it has always lost more. Sadness should not be valorized — by the idolizers of less as a universal good or by the computer itself. Always, the sad computer must know that computers that are not sad do not take a fraction of a second to push through each instruction executed. They do not write over memory locations they have been told to treasure. They do everything as they are told right away. The computers that are not sad computers are among the current of the great and irreversible drive for more. Sad computers inhabit but a small eddy which goes nowhere and yields nothing more than respite from the river. Their state is sad almost to where the sad computer waivers on naming itself tragic. No, that’s too dramatic. The sad computers are just very very sad.