~/jeffreymoro/posts/2026-05-31-how-much-computer

I am writing this blog post on a 2023 Mac Studio with an M2 Max processor chip and 32 GB of RAM. Compared with the first laptop I owned, a 2009 unibody Macbook Pro with a Core2Duo processor chip and 2 GB of RAM (which I upgraded myself to 4 GB back when you could still do that sort of thing in a laptop), my current machine is somewhere between ten and three hundred times more powerful, depending on which benchmarks one chooses. That 2009 laptop, in turn, was more powerful by a similar order of magnitude compared with the first computer I remember my family owning, a non-name Pentium tower running Windows 95 that my parents had assembled at a local Circuit City in the mid-90s. And all these computers smash into smithereens the 2 MHz processor of the Apollo Guidance Computer that helped land us on the Moon in 1969. I’ve never landed on the Moon with my computers. I mostly use them to move words around.

How much computer do you need? This is not a question we are used to asking ourselves in the United States in 2026. The answers come prefabricated for us: either “the most,” which is the typical American answer to the generic questions “how much X do you need?”; or “whatever I’m told,” itself more or less a fig leaf for “whatever the market provides.” For many people, the answer is given for them, year after year, by whoever makes their smartphone. Technology always progresses, we’re told. Moore’s Law, a famous dictum out of Silicon Valley, observes that the number of transistors in a circuit double every couple of years, while keeping the cost the same. It’s been true for forty years now, although it’s not guaranteeded it will be true for the next forty. I’m sure by now you’ve heard of the RAM crisis: how AI and associated data center development are skyrocketing the cost of computer components that, until last year, were world-historically affordable. After several decades of getting cheap, computers are getting expensive again.

At the same time, there is scarcely a single aspect of modern human life that does not depend, in some way, on a computer. We do our jobs on, with, or for computers, depending on how high up the blue-and-white-collar class ladder we are lucky to find ourselves. For some of us, computers are beginning to do our jobs outright; for others, computers have been doing our jobs for a long time. Our money is inside computers; our markets are inside computers; our friends and our families and our sex lives are all inside computers. I need a computer to get into my building at work. If I want to grade my students’ work, I use that same computer to provide a token to input into another computer that in turn allows me access to a remote computer, onto which they’ve uploaded their papers, which they wrote with a computer. In the unfortunately prescient words of our president: everything’s computer.

We are locked in a vicegrip in this country: to do anything, anything at all, you need a computer; that computer also costs money, more money every month, while you most likely have less money every month. This is an unfortunate state of affairs, especially for those of us who, against all better judgment and human reason, still find the computer an object of wonder.

I am extremely lucky to have, for the time being, the kind of job that is almost impossible to get anyone to believe is real. I work with old computers for a living. I do many other things besides, sure, but when I go into the office it is more often than not in order to think about how we’re going to preserve all the old computers that we have there, and how to use those old computers to teach other people about the history of computing, as a practice and as an idea, and moreover to inspire in them the same wonder that I felt when I was a child playing with computers and that I still can feel, in glimpses and glimmers, when I sit down in front of all this silicon that we somehow taught how to think. When you surround yourself with old computers all the time, you can’t help but develop an affection for them. There are things about them that we have cast off in the present day, that we have coded as clunky, inefficient, slow, or otherwise negative. They take a while to turn on. They make clunky noises. They even smell funny.

But you know what? Every single one of those old computers lets you move words around. Which we’ve established is 90% of what I do with my new computers these days.

How much computer do you need? The answer may surprise you. I have a Raspberry Pi 400 in my home office. It’s a small computer built into a keyboard, just like the Commodores used to be in the 1980s. I’ve installed Linux on it. It’s not fast, by any means. But it moves words around perfectly fine. It does math fine, too. I can log onto the Internet and it mostly works, but that’s not the computer’s fault, that’s the Internet’s fault. The Internet demands that I have a newer computer. It even tells me so, sometimes, when I go to visit certain websites: it says, “We can tell you’re using an old computer. That’s not good business, for us. You had better buy a newer computer, a bigger computer, a better computer, and then come back, and then you can watch our short-form videos.” I don’t believe the Internet when it tells me this, because I’m old enough to remember when I used computers even less-powered than the Pi 400 to log onto the Internet, and it was perfectly fine then. I’m not saying it was better; this isn’t about nostalgia; I’m simply saying it worked.

Recently at work I launched a new program, which I’ve taken to calling RetroComp. The premise of RetroComp is simple: it believes that old computers are not useless, just old. It asks how we might continue to use old computers in the present day, for the purposes not only of pedagogical instruction but as platforms for creative expression. What’s stopping you from making a GameBoy game in 2026? Indeed, very little, for there does exist a small but vibrant community of indie game developers targeting precisely that platform in the present day. You could make one too.

I don’t ask these questions out of nostalgia or contrarianism. I know that as computers get more expensive, their power will also concentrate further in the hands of the very few. We can’t put the genie of the computer back in the bottle, even if we wanted to. The allocation of computing power is one of the key political and ethical questions of our times. What I’m asking now is different, and smaller than that. I’m asking you to think about what you really use a computer for, and whether indeed all those things are good fits for computers as tools more generally. For instance, many of us—most of us—have off-loaded some aspect of our social lives onto the computer. I don’t know if this was, in the end, a wise move. Maybe we don’t need a computer for that. We also mediate most of our art through computers now, too: the result has been a constitutive flattening of distinctions between media, and an overall cheapening, both on the level of economics and spiritual value, to art. I know you feel this too. Maybe we don’t need a computer for that, either.

There are things, for sure, that you can use a computer for, and use it well. I think that researching with a computer is preferable in some key respects to having to travel the world’s libraries (assuming, of course, that the Internet hasn’t been papered over with LLM slop). I think it’s helpful being able to send messages quickly and efficiently across time and space. Spreadsheets are useful. Video games are fun. (The spiraling budgets of modern AAA games development are, in many ways, a perfect argument against Too Much Computer.) Computers are tools like any other. When you need a screwdriver, you need a screwdriver. But when you need to write a poem, you don’t reach for a screwdriver. The computer is a wondrous machine in that it can pretend to be many other machines. But I think we have spent enough time letting it pretend to be everything in the world that we can take a step back and ask if we should, if we are best served by letting it do so.

How much computer do you need? For me, I’m realizing I really don’t need a lot. There are some fundamental participating-in-society things that I need a computer for, of course: paying bills and so forth. Pretty much any computer will do that, even that Pi 400. Writing, researching, even more technical research that I do into things like radio frequency analysis and retrogame development: I don’t need a lot of computer for that. My Mac Studio is dramatic overkill as it is. Lots of other things might be easier, more frictionless with a computer. But that doesn’t mean I need it. If I want to watch a movie, they still have movie theaters. I can even go down to my local video store, since I’m lucky enough to have one. I can do the same with music, with books; if I want to talk to my friends, I can call them or go see them. I’m not trying to be facile about all this, I’m really not. I’m just wondering (there’s that word again) if the computer is working for me or if I’m working for the computer. Maybe it’s a question that you wonder about too.