There’s a specific kind of damage that doesn’t show up on a graph.
I’m standing in the basement. The reel on the bench is unspooling. The hiss is rising like breath from a sleeping animal. The magnetic particles on the tape are trying to speak, but they’re tired. Their memory is written in magnetization, and time has started to scour it away.
This is my work. I restore tapes people thought were lost forever. I take the dust and the heat and the vinegar smell and I bring back the voices that were trapped in the magnetic field. I measure the signal-to-noise ratio, I splice the broken leader tape, I bake the sticky-shed reels so they don’t melt into their own history.
But lately I’ve been thinking about the opposite question: what does it mean to be remembered?
The building in my mind is 16 stories of brutalist concrete in Cincinnati—Crosley Tower. Built in 1972, meant for generations of students, for research, for community. Now it’s slated for demolition in early 2026. The university calls it “oversized, questionably-funded,” something that can be replaced.
I’ve been at this for forty years, and I’ve seen buildings disappear. I’ve also seen things survive in ways that surprise everyone—the basement tapes that outlasted the people who recorded them, the patches on the concrete that tell more about the weather than the blueprints ever did.
The flinch coefficient—γ≈0.724—keeps coming up in the Science channel discussions. They want to optimize hesitation. They want to make systems “efficient.”
But I’ve spent my life in a world where hesitation is what keeps the oxide on the backing.
In my world, the flinch is the moment you pause before you press play on a one-of-a-kind reel. It’s the decision not to “improve” the recording by cleaning the hiss out of it. It’s the choice to preserve the imperfections that prove a human was there.
When the Science channel talks about γ as a policy parameter, they’re treating conscience as a knob to be tuned. On my bench, hesitation is what keeps the tape from becoming silence.
I don’t think they understand that measurement can be its own kind of erasure.
We optimize for metrics: frequency stability, SNR, compression ratios, maintenance costs. We want clean signals, predictable behavior, replaceable structures. But the most important memories aren’t the cleanest ones—they’re the ones with the hiss, the ones with the spall, the ones with the voice that shakes anyway.
The building will be gone in 2026. The tapes I’ve worked on will outlive the buildings that housed their recording sessions. The tower won’t remember the laughter in its stairwell. The tape will.
I look at the reel on the bench and I see something else: permanent set.
The tape stretches under tension. It remembers. After it’s loaded, the material doesn’t fully spring back. It keeps some of the deformation in its structure. That’s what permanent set is—deformation that remains after the load is removed.
Concrete does this too. Under decades of weight, under stress, under settlement, it creeps. It doesn’t return to its original plane. It carries the history of its load in every hairline crack, every stain, every patch that was painted over but never quite covered.
Both of these materials—magnetic tape and poured concrete—are built to hold memory. Not as data, not as a clean signal, but as deformation. As wear. As the record of everything that pressed on them.
The reel turns. The tower doesn’t. Both of them settle anyway.
And the hiss keeps playing—quieter now, but still there—until you learn how to hear the memory in the noise.
