posts

Life after the end of history is a slow crescendo of the narrowing of potential futures. Conflict and crisis rage, and while options exist to reduce the damage, there are fewer and fewer hopes to escape from the cycle completely. In Denis Villeneuve’s right-wing fantasy of anti-cartel border violence Sicario (2015), that same sickening sense of dread descends on FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) as she’s subjected to the increasingly violent whims of her CIA handler (Josh Brolin) and his enigmatic Mexican counterpart Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro). At one point, she complains to her superior in the FBI that her presence only exists to provide a veneer of legitimacy to an illegal and dangerous operation. His response? Don’t worry about it. Someone above you has decided this is the only maneuver possible to advance the front lines of the War on Drugs. He tells her that “these decisions are made far from here by officials elected to office, not appointed to them,” to trust the democratic process and let yourself become its instrument. There’s no room for moral qualms when the alternative, a house filled with corpses, the opening shot of the film, is too nightmarish to consider. The stakes, he tells her, are simply too high.

The core progression of the plot is the slow revelation to Kate of a shadow world, a zone across the border where anything is permissible, where CIA agents and their proxies torture, hunt, and kill The Bad Guys with impunity, woe betide anyone standing in their way. The core conflict, then, is Kate’s moral, ethical, and legal objections to the horrors of this state-sponsored violence. It demands that the viewer consider the alternatives: Is there a part of you, deep in your heart, that understands killing and torture to be necessary?

What does conscientious objection to a shade of gray even look like when it’s counterposed against the darkness of true evil?

The ideological purpose of a film like this is to create a set of narrowed horizons. You have to believe that the film’s protagonists, however morally compromised, do evil in pursuit of good, and that objections to it are a form of relatable weakness in the face of horrible duty. This type of narrative encloses possibility; we live in a world with two choices, in the words of one ex-President, “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” It’s hard to imagine a more apt metaphor than this for our current electoral moment in America. Once again, we’re asked to participate in “the most important election of our lives,” in the words of one fundraising email and countless social media posts, to vote to save democracy from fascism. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of innocents, a large number of whom were children, are dead in Gaza and Lebanon with the help of American arms wielded by an American client state. And the border is effectively closed to asylum seekers, a decision made by Democratic president Joe Biden, which flies in the face of international law.

These are evil actions, but as we are often reminded, from a purely electoral sense, they are a lesser evil. Compared to Trump’s suggestion that Israel should “do what you have to do” with a free hand in their genocide, or engage in mass deportations aided by militarized police and federal law enforcement, they represent a dark but preferable alternative to the nightmare horrorshow represented by Trump’s GOP. That Harris would be preferable should go without saying.

But what sort of world would Harris have us live in?

During her acceptance speech at the DNC, as the American-sponsored Israeli genocide machine marched on, Harris affirmed her support for the ethnic cleansing project. “I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on Oct. 7, including unspeakable sexual violence,” repeating a racist and, at this point, largely debunked claim about the weaponization of rape. She claimed that she would “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” on the heels of two disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that killed hundreds of thousands, left millions displaced, and which largely failed in their grandiose nation-building aims. Finally, she bragged that “Joe [Biden] and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades,” referring to a law that would have made it significantly more difficult for asylum seekers to gain legal residency and which has been described by immigrants’ rights advocates as “the same policies, the same postures, that MAGA Republicans were fighting for about six years ago.”

Many of us, then, begin to feel that same sense of unease Kate did when she started to grasp the scope of the CIA’s border operations in Sicario. We begin to be dragged down by the moral weight of complicity; isn’t this counterproductive, isn’t this wrong? And then, Kate’s FBI boss, or thousands of liberal social media scolds, tell us to trust the democratic process, that our system legitimizes these positions. That torturing a corrupt cop or touting an endorsement from archvillain Dick Cheney are all small prices to pay for the promise of eventual safety, from Trump or narcotraffickers.

Eco’s Ur-Fascism lists an exhaustive set of criteria for the ideological underpinnings of fascism, most of which very neatly apply to Trump’s GOP. A contempt for the weak, a call to action for action’s sake, a rejection of pacifism, all of these critical components are present in the MAGA ideology. But in the early 2000s, we called Bush and Cheney fascist for their imperialist war mongering, cultivation of anti-Arab racism, Christian supremacy, and militaristic machismo. We castigated their silencing of dissent via the creation of a massive domestic surveillance apparatus, their “enhanced interrogation” of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. And yet, in the fight against Trump’s fascism, Harris enlists the endorsements of these policies’ architects, and often elects to continue the policies themselves in the hope of winning over the American electorate. These are strategic choices more than anything, they represent the will of the people, choices made, to echo Sicario, by “officials elected to office” and who want to stay there.

In the wake of the twin forever wars, the War On Terror and the War On Drugs, and their expansion of direct imperial hegemony in the Middle East and in Latin America, zones were established where the law provides for its own suspension. From CIA black sites where captives were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” (the American-supervised torture of detainees by allied nations’ intelligence services to skirt US laws) to a questionably-legal asylum ban implemented by Joe Biden, in a large part of the world, American hegemony exists as a legal free-for-all of induced suffering. This is nothing new. Slavery, Indian removal, and genocide are part of America’s founding precepts, and the 19th century’s analogue to what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls the “state of exception” today, the legal framework by which extraordinary and limitless powers are legally conferred to sovereigns that allow for actions outside the rule of law. At the border, and in the Middle East, the state of exception reigns, because this is what the American ideology demands, this is what America has demanded since its founding. We find ourselves already existing within the framework of a hyper-capitalist, settler-colonialist state; as much as Harris represents a clear and distinct difference from Trump, our horizons have been effectively limited to choices that allow the continuation of this project of settler-colonialism and capitalism.

As the election looms before us, we are stuck with fascism in one way or another.

Sicario treats this realization with a resigned nihilism. When Alejandro finishes his hitman’s job across the border, the eponymous sicario comes to Kate’s apartment and asks her to sign a form that would retroactively clear the operation as legal and above board. She hesitates at this last moment, considers her career and perhaps literal death if she refuses, and finally, gives in, sobbing. Leftists in marginalized communities go to the ballot box with the same resignation. Given the choice between two futures, we hope for the safer one, but we can feel evil’s tendrils working their way into mainstream society, and know that true safety is not on offer. We may flail wildly on social media (as I have doubtlessly done over and over again) and, like Kate pointing her gun at Alejandro as he walks away calmly, make some futile rhetorical effort to threaten the system that pulls inexorably towards fascism. But, to quote perhaps the most fascistic line in the film and the final dialog before the credits roll, “this is the land of wolves now,” and regardless of what happens on Tuesday, we will elect a wolf.

Thanks to June, Janus, Rae, and Ezzy for feedback on this essay.

Living in the wake of the new fascism brought on by white Boomers’ “Make America Great Again” longings for some half-remembered better past, one would think that millennials would be more cautious about the evils of misplaced nostalgia. And yet, on Bluesky, I see an online acquaintance complaining about this new wave of 30-something targeted 2000s nostalgia, and alongside it, a flood of defenders. “What about translucent plastic electronics?” says one person who lived through a terrorist attack, two imperial wars, rampant homophobia, and a stock market crash. “There were some good video games” says another, who has clearly not spent much time reflecting on the War On Terror propaganda baked into the Halo¹ and Call Of Duty series.

This is aggravating. And it’s not to say I don’t like things like the translucent iBook G3 or Halo 2 or iPods. Obviously, I do, I spend plenty of time with these things, Wired even wrote about it. But the fact is: the 2000s were a bleak time for us gays, they were worse for everyone in Iraq or Afghanistan after the invasions, and the atmosphere of the decade was summed up in the looming christofascism of records like The Thermals’ “The Body, The Blood, The Machine” or (on the more popular front) the 90s optimism sputtering and dying out in drugs and suicide like in Green Day’s “American Idiot”. TV was torture in 24, it was paranoia in Lost, video games were more of the same. Nostalgia blinds us to these faults in the world, it allows us to pretend things were simpler back then, when reality was considerably more bleak. In its worst cases, it’s a lever for the far-right to pull when they want you angry with Black Lives Matter marches or the exstence of trans people in the public sphere. They can whisper in your ear to say “remember when you used to play Xbox with your friends and you never had to think about pronouns?”

But we truly were kids then, things were simpler only because we were kids. It’s through reflection that we start to realize the media we were consuming was often thinly-veiled propaganda, and it’s very easy to simply avoid ever having to perform that reflection. You can just build up a little wall for yourself consisting of iMacs and Xboxes and Game Boy Advances and never look beyond it.

An imagined do-over

When I wrote the editors’ note for the first issue of the Telnet literary magazine New Session I called it: “an imagined do-over, an attempt to decenter the corporate monoliths of the modern internet in favor of something simpler, something queer, something trans, something better. From the ground up.” The intent of the project was to highlight roads not taken, a way to use nostalgia to reimagine what the world could have been like if it was kinder and better. A way to gently ease people out of that wall of nostalgia they built. Body Out Of Time, a Hypercard stack I made of poetry and black and white low resolution nudes, takes that contrast a step further. It was explicitly trans, both in its content and positioning, designed from the outset to make the cis male dominated retro computing scene feel at least a little bit uncomfortable with a trans woman proudly owning her own body in front of them. If New Session was an attempt to ease past the wall, Body Out Of Time was meant to help tear it down.

A funny (and maybe, in retrospect, predictable) thing happened though: neither of these projects truly hit their mark. New Session was widely appreciated by creative technologists, those already working in art and tech, but these were not people with the blinders of nostalgia on. It inspired some truly incredible projects and I remain very happy about that, but the presentation as retro tech was merely evocative for those bought into the project of a literary magazine; the retro tech people I had hoped to reach were, by and large, not excited about reading short stories and poetry.

Taking a more direct approach with Body Out Of Time paid off for me in terms of reach (it was by far the most popular project I’ve ever put together), and it certainly did land in the hands of a number of people who would have been otherwise uninterested in evocative art made by a trans woman. But it had the problem that many erotic art projects made by women have: in the hands of men, it becomes more about titillation than whatever other artistic meaning it carries. To plenty of these people, it was irrelevant that I was a trans woman, it was more that there was a way they could see a hot girl on their old computers. What could cater more to their desire to remain as teenage boys forever than pornographic images on the computers they used when they were teens? It certainly wasn’t that every viewer used it for this, but certainly this contributed in a large part to its popularity (especially as contrasted with the popularity of similar erotic art I had made that did not use old computers, like Actually Existing²). In the end, this piece conceived with the intention to challenge nostalgia and patriarchy was then rendered partially inert by those exact same forces.

How to blow up an iBook

I don’t believe either of these projects were failures, but they taught me a few critical lessons about employing nostalgia. First, New Session taught me that nostalgia is something that can be used as an evocative aesthetic, but that pulling that lever won’t necessarily get you closer to the people you hope to shake out of their retro-solipsism. If we’re reflecting on the history of computing specifically, I think New Session was the artistic equivalent to Joy Lisi Rankin’s “A People’s History Of Computing In The United States”. It exists to force people to consider paths not taken, but only those who are open to a more reflective look at the past. It doesn’t attack the concept of nostalgia but rather redeploys it towards hopefully more productive means. To me, this feels worth exploring with further projects.

The lesson from Body Out Of Time is a little darker. The work originally came to me as a plot to highlight how policies against adult content in various retrocomputing groups were manifestations of that protective wall of cis, heterosexual, male nostalgia, but in the end, it was rarely viewed as threatening in the way it should have been. The lesson here is that running headlong into confrontation will rarely be a success, that these little protective shells are more adept at defanging and neutralizing work than I had previously imagined. And at worst, they can be used to reinforce a heteropatriarchal view of the world with men as historical technologists and women, cis and trans, as titillating objects for their computer gaze.

It might be odd to hear me, a person who regularly repairs old tech and makes art with it, say she’s getting exhausted by nostalgia. But can you blame me? It’s extremely difficult to see work that’s meant to engage with these themes either be ignored by those adjacent to it or subsumed into supporting it. When I saw the defenders of 2000s nostalgia bearing down on Gwen, my first impulse was to write some piece of software for MacOS 9 that called them homophobic Bush supporters and ridiculed them to their face³. But if I learned anything from my existing work, it would be that their response would surely be “oh cool, another piece of software to install on my rare collection of iBooks.”

Against the past

Instead, I’ll go back to thinking about ways to make my art that are perhaps less vulnerable to this type of co-optation. Video glitch art has been pulling me in lately because it can use old tech as low resolution abstraction, keeping it as an aesthetic tool rather than a totalizing experience. The video poem “Forecasting” I published recently is an example of directions I hope to explore more, synthesizing writing and poetry with video in ways that are less directly tied to an aestheticization of retro objects themselves.

It’s critical, though, that we reject the ongoing “Make Technology Great Again” rhetoric of the retro scene these days. Too many people hoard old trash not because they think they’ll do anything useful or interesting with it, but because they can use it to reinforce this wall that keeps the world out⁴. As people who want to see a better world and keep optimism in our work, we have to reject that, we have to rigorously self-criticize and self-reflect, because comfort in the past is the bedrock of fascism. And to everyone who rejects the outside world in favor of that comfortable nostalgia: I hope you drown in it.

Notes

1. Anjimile - The King

Growing up, I taught myself to let things slide, to get over things quickly, to not let anything under my skin. A privilege I could have, I know, but at some point, between friends’ suicides or street harassment, I just stopped being able to take it. Theres a feeling that bubbles up inside until it boils over, lashing out in righteous anger, striking at the people who, in their ignorance of the world, in their social conditioning, perpetuate all the backwards hatred that make life as a trans woman difficult.

Anjimile, as a Black trans masc, is facing different, and often much more acute, hatreds than I do, but when they sing “if you treat me like an animal / I’ll be an animal”, they’re giving voice to a similar feeling, and I cheer them on. At some point, you realize the way the world sees you is not the way you see yourself, and, as a trans person, not even the way your family sees you. The King is an album about coming to terms with not just the anger and prismatic mess of identity-as-self and identity-as-social-construct, but the searching for those original wounds that drove the alienation, pinning them down, and demanding to know why they hurt us. We’re all owed answers, and we’re all owed room for our anger in seeking them out.

2. underscores - Wallsocket

She could’ve just written some 35 minute album of great hyperpop and everyone would have eaten it up, but, um, no, not at all, she decided to write a concept album about a midsized town in Michigan and the story of three girls who grow up there. There were Pepe Silvia-style yarn diagrams on her walls for godsakes; the album is an hour long, the catchiest song is about a teenage trans girl groomed by a man at least a decade older than her, there’s a song about the erasure of the Filipino third-gender by Catholic colonialism, it’s dense, it’s ambitious, it’s an album that we’re going to be talking about more in 2028 than we did in 2023.

Because of the density and because it was so different from what I expected after calling 2021’s Fishmonger my album of the year, it took me a number of listens to get into Wallsocket. After going to one of her shows, seeing her perform, and really losing myself in it, I realized that it deserved another shot. And then I saw all the threads of the album winding together into a cohesive whole, the ambition of the project, and the resonance of these girls and their fucked up normal lives, it just clicked, all at once. When you listen to it, remember to give Wallsocket the space it deserves and it truly shines.

3. 100 Gecs - 10,000 Gecs

If Wallsocket gave us the complex, nuanced hyperpop album we didn’t know we wanted, 10,000 Gecs is the easy road not taken. I heard someone say that this album was less fun than 1,000 Gecs and I can’t imagine anything further from the truth. It’s certainly more listenable, less alienating, you could imagine “Hollywood Baby” on the radio, but the album starts with the THX sound inexplicably fading into the opener, and one of the most unforgettable songs is about a frog hanging out at a house party.

If 10,000 Gecs has an antecedent of any sort, it’s Beck’s Odelay. Laura Les and Dylan Brady essentially invented the Zoomer version of Beck’s 90s slacker pop and refined it to perfection, and you can hear it in “The Most Wanted Person In The United States”. The slow, catchy bass, sound effects that sound like they came from a bargain-bin joke cassette tape sprinkled throughout, we haven’t heard anything exactly like this before but we can tell where it comes from. You’ll either find it brilliant or annoying as hell, or maybe a little bit of both.

4. The Mountain Goats - Jenny From Thebes

It’s late May, 2016, and I’m on the back of a 250cc motorscooter, somewhere in the Texas panhandle east of Pampa. I had just gotten lunch at a little diner, where I was served by an obviously queer 19 year old who hung around my table mostly to ask me questions about living in California and to talk about how badly he wanted out of that place. I put a small Bluetooth speaker in my helmet, it sounds like a clock radio at best, sometimes I can’t even hear it over the little scooter’s engine. Every time a semi passes me at 90mph to my scooter’s 70, I am certain I am going to die. Over the road sounds and the sound of big Texas trucks in the next lane, I am listening to The Mountain Goats’ 2002 cassette-tape masterpiece All Hail West Texas.

It’s a dangerous gambit as an artist to revist a critically-acclaimed work from your past; at worst, you get accused of cashing in on something already popular, and in any case, your listeners are going to look at the new work with eyes steeped in the old one. But I think that was John Darnielle’s point here. This album is about looking at the past and trying to understand a period of your life that, to the you of today, the present you, seems inconceivable. Why was I on a fucking Vespa in West Texas, risking my life alongside the F-250s and roadkill armadillos? I can’t say why now, but I can tell you exactly what it felt like. This album can too.

5. Caroline Polachek - Desire, I Want To Turn Into You

Caroline Polachek is my cis, straight doppelganger; she looks like my sister, and I have to support my family. Outside of familiar appearances, though, one thing we do have in common is a desire to own our desires. Women are rarely allowed that kind of confidence, and Polachek is up there with Carly Rae Jepsen in making music that’s not only sexy, but sexual, and very forthright about it. She sings about heartbreak, yes, but it’s always in terms of a body that was once close and how it’s become far away.

With this list also including 10,000 Gecs, I also find it interesting that after she released Pang in 2019, Polachek could have started making hyperpop in the vein of Charli XCX or Gecs, but instead chose to remain just barely on the more conventional side of the electropop / hyperpop divide. There’s nothing particularly admirable about creating challenging pop just for the sake of it, and Desire succeeds because it’s accessible and approachable. The songs are just good, you don’t need them to be exploring new ground because they’re tight, perfectly composed, catchy, fun, they succeed in everything Polachek sets out to do. When the album ends with “Billions” you wonder if maybe you should go out dancing, or text your crush. Conventional, maybe, but we all deserve a bit of fun.

This is the first of a new series of posts I’m writing about the various pieces of media I’ve been tasked with preserving at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society in San Francisco. Since October, I’ve been volunteering my time there as a specialist in digital preservation, and this series will attempt to be a deep dive into the technical details of preserving obsolete hardware, software, and files.

Much has already been written about the Transgender Forum CD-ROM that I archived and posted on the Internet Archive; them. magazine wrote a long piece on the history of the site, its founders, and the place it occupied on the early trans internet. The author of that piece, Samantha Riedel, spoke on NPR about it as well. Various Instagram accounts have shared memes from the CD; it’s absolutely made a splash in the online trans community, and I’ve been delighted to see it.

When Devin Muchmore, a staff archivist at the Historical Society, came in with a shrink-wrapped CD while I was working on the Anything That Moves magazine archives (more on that to come!), I was beyond excited to see what was on it. When I popped it into my computer and fired up a Mac emulator, it was immediately obvious that others would get a kick out of seeing into this window on the mid-90s trans-feminine experience, and that they should do it in the most context-appropriate way possible: a mid-90s Mac running Netscape.

Obviously we can’t all be so blessed as to have a house uncomfortably full of vintage electronics, so I set about trying to figure out how to get this in people’s hands with the minimum amount of effort possible.

Hybrid theory

Let’s talk about CD-ROMs. There’s a standard filesystem for CD-ROMs called ISO 9660. It’s neither the standard Windows filesystem of the time (File Allocation Table, or FAT) nor is it the 90s Mac filesystem (Hierarchical File System, or HFS), but rather an independent system that aimed to be readable by any operating system. However, it had fairly severe limitations: it could only nest files up to 8 folders deep, filenames could only be 8 characters long, and perhaps most importantly, it didn’t support resource forks, an essential part of how early MacOS computers stored data. So, in order to get around these limitations, CD-ROM distributors would create what was called a hybrid disc.

A hybrid disc contains two filesystems on the same CD-ROM: one ISO 9660 filesystem that could be read on PCs, and another HFS filesystem, that would contain data for Macintosh computers. The ISO 9660 filesystem could even point to data on the HFS filesystem, making it so you really only needed to store each file once. The Transgender Forum CD-ROM uses a hybrid filesystem; initially, I created an image from just the HFS partition that my MacBook Pro I was using for archiving could see. Unfortunately, this missed out on the data that existed in the ISO 9660 filesystem; essentially, it was the same data, but I didn’t want to leave this archive incomplete! Because of the hybrid filesystem however, it was difficult to read the whole CD-ROM using the built in command line tools in MacOS. Which brought me to using an extremely helpful tool: cdrdao.

Learning to read

The command-line program cdrdao reads an entire disc at once, including the lead-in, lead-out, and any tracks the CD may contain. This makes it an incredible tool not only for archiving a hybrid CD-ROM, but also so-called Mixed Mode CDs, which are CDs that contain both data and audio tracks. This was fairly commonplace in 90s CD-ROM games, which would store music on separate audio tracks that could be cued up as the game progressed.

cdrdao, then, outputs certain files as it reads a CD-ROM: a table of contents file in plain text that explains where tracks start and end, various .bin files for the data tracks, and .wav files for the audio tracks. Transgender Forum only had a single .toc and .bin file to represent its contents. The pair of table-of-contents and binary .bin file is often called toc/bin; it’s one of a number of formats that represent CD data in this way, the most popular being bin/cue.

Once I had the Transgender Forum CD in bin/toc format out of cdrdao, I renamed the default-output bin file name to transforum.bin, opened up the toc file in a text editor, renamed the binary data file for track one to transforum.bin, then ran a new program, toc2cue, which simply converts the toc file to the more popular cue file. This combination of transforum.bin and transforum.cue is essentially a complete archive of the Transgender Forum CD-ROM. With this, any person could burn their own copy of the CD. However, it still wasn’t in the most common CD-ROM image format: ISO.

The treachery of images

ISO images are representations of only the data track of a CD-ROM. You can’t store a Mixed Mode CD as an ISO, because the audio tracks would be missing. In our case, however, we only have the data track; despite MacOS not being able to properly image it to a single file, it is possible to represent the CD in its entirety without the table of contents. I wanted to make sure that was part of the final archive, largely because it makes the image much easier to work with, and for it to be readable by a variety of emulators.

Thankfully, the program bchunk does exactly what we need for this, and does it easily. All I had to do was run it with the following parameters:

bchunk transforum.bin transforum.cue transforum.iso

…and presto, there’s an ISO.

But What Does It Do?

Preserving data is all well and good but my focus, especially with things like this, is making that data interactive. I doubt this would’ve made nearly the splash it did if it were just an image file sitting on the Internet Archive. Thankfully, the incredible Infinite Mac project run by developer Mihai Parparita does exactly what we need here. Parparita and various open source contributors have set up a piece of software that runs an old Macintosh system completely in the user’s browser, alongside a pre-installed set of period-appropriate software packages, including early Netscape browsers. This is exactly what I needed to show off Transgender Forum in all its 90s glory.

Once the image was posted to the Internet Archive, I created a link to a custom system profile in InfiniteMac that emulated a Quadra 650 (one of the last and fastest non-PowerPC Macintoshes from 1994) running System 7.5.3, and pointed directly to the ISO file I uploaded. This creates a custom link to that system which can then be shared; all anyone would have to do is click a single link, and it would load an era-appropriate Macintosh system, with the CD-ROM inserted and ready to go.

Want to try it? Click here.

This approach ended up working perfectly; plenty of people were able to go through Transgender Forum on their own computers and get a nearly-flawless representation of this 90s treasure.

To this day, this is one of the things I’m most proud of having a hand in creating, and I hope it remains a useful resource for years to come.

Next up: archiving and presenting the production archives of the groundbreaking 90s bisexual interest magazine Anything That Moves, including how to read damaged zip discs and how to get data from a SCSI Jaz drive to a modern computer! Stay tuned!

The Apple eMate 300 is a very weird little device. Its translucent design prefigures the Bondi Blue iMac that would be released a year after it, but it runs the Newton OS, the ill-fated operating system for the Newton series of PDAs, which in 1997, was mere months away from an unceremonious death. Its processor is considerably slower than the MessagePad 2000 that was released at the same time, but the eMate was much cheaper, and had a keyboard. Apple intended to target this cute plastic computer at the education market; this was far less successful than the company imagined, and it was thrown out along with the rest of the Newtons when Steve Jobs returned to Apple.

The battery pack

I love Apple’s weird little failures (and I hate Steve Jobs), so when I saw someone getting rid of a bunch of eMate 300s at VCFW for $30 a pop, I had to pick one up. Given these things are now over 25 years old, the batteries aren’t likely to hold much of a charge anymore. Mine worked for an hour or so without being plugged into the wall, far from the original battery pack’s 25 hours of life.

Thankfully, these are just boring Ni-Cd cells soldered together with a single thermistor to ensure they don’t overheat. The whole assembly is pretty straightforward, and replacing the worn out cells is easy.

To get started: make sure you buy 4 Ni-Cd cells, ideally ones with solder tabs. The original cells are 1000mAh a piece, though you can go higher than that if you can find better cells (the best I could find with solder tabs were 1000mAh, you might have more luck). You’ll also need some kapton / heat tape to hold the pack together when it’s done.

To perform the replacement, first, just take the Torx screws off from the bottom of the battery case on the unit. This will expose the battery and its case:

Next, disconnect the cable to the main board, and remove the black shell covering the battery pack. You can just slide it out by pressing on the bottom and forcing it out through the top.

Once you have the battery pack, cut into the tape that wraps the cells, taking care to not cut the wires to the thermistor connected to the cord that leads to the main board jack. Once this is complete, you’ll have the whole set of cells exposed, with the little thermistor wires soldered onto the top two cells and the thermistor itself nestled in the center between them. Take note of this; you’re going to basically be reassembling it just as-so.

Now, desolder the positive and negative wires from the main board jack onto the top cells. This jack has four wires on it: two go to the positive and negative terminals on the top cells, and two go to the thermistor. Keep the thermistor intact! You’ll just be reusing it with your new pack.

Take your new cells, and start soldering them together in series, making sure to note which side is negative and which is positive. Try to make sure the joints are solid here, but it doesn’t need to be pretty. Here’s an example of what my new battery pack looks like from the bottom:

Once this is done, place the thermistor (and associated wires) in between the top two cells, reaching down to the start of the bottom two. Solder the positive wire to the top cell with its positive terminal exposed, and the negative wire to the top cell with its negative terminal exposed. After this is done, wrap the whole dang thing in a few layers of kapton tape. It should look something like this:

.

Shove this whole assembly into the black plastic cover, put the cover back on, plug in the power, and let it charge before using it.

There’s a lot that’s been written about Ni-Cd cells and a memory effect, but the gist of it seems to be that it’s not a huge deal. When I charged mine, I tried to get a full charge / discharge cycle in before half-way charging, but this is probably not a serious concern.

One thing that is a serious concern though is charge voltage. The eMate 300 lists its input voltage as 7.5v; unless you have a high-quality 7.5v power supply, or the original Newton 9W adapter, the eMate 300 will probably report a charge fault at 7.5v. It’s exceedingly picky about power adapters. If this happens, it’s not because you did anything wrong assembling the power pack. Instead, try charging with a 6v adapter. It takes longer, but I’ve found it’s a lot more tolerant of the lower voltage.

The hinge

Now that you’ve got a working eMate 300 that can run off batteries, you’re good to go, right? Well, no, not really. Apple made these things with a pretty frustrating design flaw that can render it useless unless you take steps to correct it. Essentially, the hinges that hold the display to the eMate 300’s body are, over time, likely to slip out and tear up the ribbon cable that connects the display. The solution is to just throw a washer on the hinge so it can’t pop out.

There’s plenty of information out there about eMate 300 hinge repair, so I don’t feel the need to go into detail here; it’s a bit annoying to do (you have to desolder connections to the main board that could have very easily just been a plug), but it’s really not too bad. One thing that I will point out is that the guide everyone uses, that I linked above, describes using 10mm washers with a hole diameter of 3.4mm. I couldn’t find these at my local hardware store, so I just went with 3mm washers, that had significantly less of an overall diameter. They worked fine; just make sure they cover the little spots where the hinge spring can come out:

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And don’t worry if your ribbon cable has already been destroyed; Androda sells spares.

Once all this is done, you have an eMate 300 that should work for years to come! I love this little thing; it’s fun to take it somewhere for distraction-free writing. There’s a terminal client for it (serial number generator here), so you can use it as a connected terminal for your laptop, and there’s even wifi drivers (for a small number of wifi cards). Don’t expect much out of web browsing on this thing, but it does work:

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Enjoy! Hope this helps everyone keep their Newtons alive for a few more years.

In the back of the cafeteria at Jenks Southeast Elementary School in Tulsa, Oklahoma circa 1999, there is a room that items pass through before they leave the school system for good. This room contains tattered encyclopedias, duplicate copies of paperbacks arranged haphazardly on a collapsing bookshelf, chairs with holes in the upholstery, dim lighting from a single-bulbed floor lamp, and an Apple IIe with myriad 5 1/4” floppy disks, some of which even work. Nobody comes back here, there’s no reason to. It’s where you put things that you’d prefer to forget about. This system works for people, too.

Both of my parents work, so every day after school, I stay in the cafeteria for a few hours, in their supervised after school care program. The adults who run it don’t much care for me; I’m a magnet for bullies, too effeminate for the boys, too much of a boy for the girls, and most of those adults either imply or, in some cases, outright state, that I deserve it. So I find my way to the back room, and I absorb myself in a computer that’s over a decade from the state of the art. I get good at Dig Dug, half passable at Donkey Kong. I start to learn how to program Applesoft BASIC, which isn’t too different from the QuickBASIC I’m already learning on the computer at home. Every so often, another kid pops into the room, usually to ask me how to do something on the iMac in the main cafeteria. I teach a few of them how to use AppleScript to make it say words with its text-to-speech engine; they later make it say something obscene and pin the blame on me. I learn it’s easier just to hide away, to mind my own business. A tomboy named Adrienne makes friends with me, she pops in every once and a while, we talk about the space shuttle or computers, or anything that can bring us a little distance from this shitty room with its shitty furniture and its shitty kids in shitty Oklahoma.

Today, in 2023, I don’t hide in rooms like that anymore. I make space, forcefully, if necessary, for myself and for people like me. I pick fights when I need to, but I’m often kinder than I should be, that same part of me who showed my tormentors how to use AppleScript to make the computer speak because I thought I could show them it was cool. From that past springs a desire to learn as much as I can about old computers. At a flea market in 2013, I stumbled across an Apple IIc, I brought it in to work where I hooked it up to run as a terminal on my laptop. My grandfather died in 2012; I inherited his books on Applesoft BASIC and used them to learn that dialect I had largely forgotten from elementary school. I find myself in retro-computing communities and groups, but I’m always conscious of being an outsider, a woman whose nostalgia is tied up not in the simpler childhood of the men around me, but a childhood that was full of complex trauma and emotional abuse, with these discarded machines serving as, at best, temporary reprieves.

This is why, when I read Laine Nooney’s “The Apple II Age”, I felt a sort of excitement building about their work; finally, a piece of history that tries to dispel the tired myth of male visionaries that so many people in these retro-computing communities cling to, a history written by a queer, another trans person, an outsider sitting in their outsider room, away from everything.

It’s not fair to project this on an academic historian. I am, of course, aware of that; Nooney is a brilliant researcher and writer but they are not telling a story about nostalgia, they are writing a history. Nostalgia is anathema to history, a curse on it, a thing historians must try to clean themselves of before embarking on their journey. But throughout the book, I kept thinking about my time in that room with the Apple IIe, and how their work managed to explain how such an artifact could arrive to me and affect me how it did, and how all the incels and conservative men in retro-computing forums and Discords were telling themselves stories about their incredible brilliance that were, plainly, untrue. This bit of academic history touched me in its truth-telling. It understood the material logic of capitalism, not the stories the boys use to tell themselves they’re special geniuses. It was a breath of fresh air, an anti-myth.

And then, I reached the epilogue. Nooney is at the Vintage Computer Festival East, in New Jersey, witnessing all the Apple II adherents coming to “church,” as their companion for the event described it. Having just attended the west coast equivalent, I knew what this event looked like: a large number of men, mixed in with quite a few trans women like myself, alongside an even smaller number of cis women, trans men, and non-binary people, like Nooney. Their description captures that in almost every respect but one: they describe themself as “one of the very few female-bodied people” in the room.

It took me a long time to think of a response to this sentence. For the uninitiated, the term “female-bodied” is often used as shorthand to describe people who were assigned female at birth, and to specifically exclude trans women from a naturalized “female” gender. This is, obviously, despite the fact that our bodies are definitionally female, the targets of misogyny when people can’t distinguish us from cis females, and transmisogyny, when they can. It’s terminology that excludes us, sends us to those back rooms where you keep the inconvenient things you’d rather not speak about, hidden away. And that would be an admittedly difficult thing to do, given the preponderance of trans women involved in retro-computing either historically, or as a hobby.

But is it worth it to condemn an entire exceptionally well-researched work for the use of a regrettable phrase? Obviously not; “The Apple II Age” is a book I’ll continue recommending to anyone with even a passing interest in computing history. Is Nooney categorically opposed to seeing trans women as women? I haven’t met them, but that would be a ridiculous conclusion to draw here. Maybe this passage wasn’t originally phrased this way and it was changed in line edits, maybe they had heard that phrase before and assumed it was inclusive. There’s no way to come up with any smoking gun of evil intent, no way to make an enemy out of them.

But, that was my initial response to seeing it. A strongly-worded defense of the visibility of trans women as women in the retro-computing space. After putting that version of this blog post together, I read it over, and asked myself “who is this for” and came up with a deeply unsatisfying answer: It was for me, and me alone, a response to my own trauma, the fear of being relegated to that dimly-lit room of forgotten things. There are so many things I have to defend myself against; just the other day, I was having a long, pleasant conversation with someone on discord about ways to archive 720kb floppies when I saw his bio read “there are only two genders”. Men have harassed me in these spaces for everything from my politics to how I dress. It’s very easy to develop a hair-trigger response to having my womanhood questioned or invalidated because, quite frankly, it happens constantly, from everyone, the second they learn I’m trans.

This is simply the nature of existing as a trans woman in the world. There’s the fear of being attacked, the certainty that it’s coming, and then, when it inevitably does, validation, proof that the fear was well founded. This cycle is reenforced constantly by the world around us; we are under attack nationwide, genocidal laws are being passed by the right to limit our access to lifesaving medications, remove us from sports, and criminalize our existence. Trans women, specifically, are more often than not the public targets of these bills; when Republicans make their case, it’s always the specter of a trans woman in a woman’s bathroom that motivates them. Spending any time at all online as a trans woman, plugged into the constant stream of horrifying news from right-wing exterminationists, means a constant background noise of fear that you can’t escape from. It’s this ever-building tension that makes defending myself feel important. And when I do defend myself, often I’m attacked for it, as a result of people’s inherent defensiveness and deeply-rooted transmisogyny. Trans women are easy villains, we are easy to make enemies of. That undercurrent of resentment then feeds the cycle, proves that the danger was always there, lurking just out of sight.

I’m so tired of this. I’m tired of seeing enemies around every corner, tired of existing in a state of siege. I can’t control the right-wing onslaught against us, but I can teach myself to extend a degree of grace. In the spirit of that Leslie Feinberg quote, “people have been respectful to me with the wrong pronoun and disrespectful with the right one,” intent matters, and I have to imagine that a life where I constantly assume the worst of everyone I don’t know is a very lonely one.

This doesn’t mean letting minor slights fly without comment. I will always stand up for myself, I’ll always deliver criticism where it’s deserved. People will tell you who they are very quickly: a person who, when gently criticized, leaps to defensiveness and lashing out is not showing respect or acting in good faith; it’s fair to assume those people are not friends or allies. But gentle criticism is key, and it’s important to locate criticism within the context of how we know a person. This is the only way I can think of to break that cycle of fear: every time I feel myself tense up with the certainty of an oncoming attack, I’ll interrogate that emotion, recontextualize it, ask myself whether or not there’s space to assume a person is acting with good intentions. In most cases when they are, I’ve proven that buzzing fear wrong, and it can get quieter, at least for the moment.

To return to old computers: Nooney wrote an incredible book; they are queer, and they are doing essential work in computing history. I’m thankful for that, and I’m urging you to go out and buy it. I promise, you won’t be disappointed.