Ignore the Howler Monkeys

They only produce noise

Mike Meyer
4 min readJul 18, 2024

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Rhesus monkeys are outraged at the Howler Monkey’s stupidity. Photo by Manoj Seenivasan on Unsplash

I expect people to figure this out, but it doesn’t happen.

Our cultural system is in the late stage of collapse. Institutional structures have been disintegrating for many years; this is not a sudden process.

In many ways, this failure is like analog video versus digital video failure. In the old days of analog TV, a degraded video signal produced a snowy picture. Some of you may remember that.

The audio was still there, and you could still make out the images. It was amazing what people would put up with, not realizing that they were mentally remaking most of the pictures they were looking at with only hints from the TV.

Without turning this into a technical lesson, the nature of analog video relies on the human ability to ignore gaps in information and use experience and guesswork to “see” a video image. The original video for TV was 525 interlaced scan lines that acted like a movie presenting a rapid sequence of fixed images that imitated motion.

The analog video was purely a signal-to-noise illusion. The noise could be very high, and you would still have images. This is called graceful degradation.

Digital video, the world we are in now, remains perfect until it fails. Our cultures are still analog.

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Mike Meyer

Writer, Educator, Campus CIO (retired) . Essays on our changing reality here, news and more at https://rlandok.substack.com/