Systems Theory

My head is full and my heart is empty. Another day another day another day, marching towards graduation. Like so many other mornings I sit in a lecture picking up what the professor puts down on the board. Outside snow dances in the twilight, pirouetting in the icy winds. Its odd, I’ve been going here for years but it still feels like a foreign place. I know the best sitting places for charging my laptop, the best bathrooms with the fewest people, the fastest routes above and below ground to each building, but it still feels all wrong. And the snow falls falls falls painting an unfamiliar world in a cold wet layer.

The function of a silicon diode is relatively simple. A voltage is applied and as it approaches a certain limit the current it allows through increases in an exponential relationship. So simple so simple so simple yet it is the ground on which the entirety of modern computing technology is built. From it came the transistor, and from the transistor came the logic gate. AND OR NOT NOR NAND XOR INV the names of the roots from which springs adders and subtractors, multiplexers and demultiplexers, ROM and RAM. Even further still ALUs, registers, I/O interfaces, and on into CPUS and GPUS. How brilliant to learn the foundations of a world most take for granted?

Yet still still still I sit here waiting for something to happen. I know it all, I test well, I see the pattern language of which the entire world is composed yet nothing nothing nothing feels like it should.

When I was a kid I had visions of university life. Fiery social situations, art and soul everywhere, adventure and new experiences. Yet, the experience I came to learn was one of quiet and solitude. New experiences, sure, but rare. In general, more of the same with a slightly different coat of paint. Maybe I was desensitized to new things in the same way our eyes perceive color less vibrantly as we age. How horrible? Irreversible magic death. Nothing new under the sun sun sun so they say.

Have you ever seen a picture of a city in Russia during the blue hour? Let me paint it for you. A single light on in an endless Soviet apartment block. Gray skies and yellow street lights. The dull dull dull grays of a life among the ruins. Its cozy isn’t it? To imagine a sparse apartment, a jar of pickles in a cupboard, and a loaf of bread on the counter. A couch with holes in the fabric. A television older than the students who live there. Strangers strangers strangers in a homely homely homely land.

Alienation. Not a nation of aliens or a strange EDM artist from 2004. Alienation. Having no place. I know so much about how the parts fit together. I know about how the wholes interact into even larger wholes. Systems within systems systems systems ever and ever increasing in complexity. I know how it all works. I could build the infrastructure. Yet it doesn’t work for me. And I feel the same same same.

The Talking Heads, surely you’ve heard of them? “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was” David Byrne would echo with increasing hysteria into the microphone on Once In a Lifetime. “Well, how did I get here?” he would ask before launching into the chorus. A question I ask myself frequently. Where is that social ecstasy, the fire of life, community and camaraderie? I see how all these silicon parts fit together, a world designed with interlocking systems, yet outside the people seem ever more disconnected. I can piece all the systems in the world together, but the human factor remains out of reach. So I sit here, my head full and my heart empty. Waiting waiting waiting.