Before There Were Voices in the Dark

Some nights I fall asleep to Twitch. Not for the games—I rarely know what’s being played—but for the voices. There’s something about a busty woman calmly narrating her way through a dungeon at 1am that works on the nervous system the way white noise never quite does. Miss Rage. Tara Babcock. Kelly Jean, my absolute favorite. I’ve donated money. Not much, but some.

The YouTuber Squirrel Monkey once put together a video imagining what Twitch would have looked like had it launched in the 1980s—green-screen interfaces, VHS static, the full anachronistic package. Technically impossible, obviously, but fun to sit with. A streaming platform before broadband, before stable internet, before cameras capable of rendering a person as anything other than a smear of phosphorescent pixels. Just you and a cathode ray tube, buzzing through a phone line.

The whole thing makes me oddly grateful for the present. The 80s version would’ve been unwatchable—the resolution alone would’ve killed it, and Minecraft aside, the games weren’t much to look at either. More to the point: I wouldn’t have found whatever this is I’ve found. The specific low-frequency comfort of watching someone competent do something you don’t understand, at midnight, until you stop watching anything at all. That requires 2018’s infrastructure. Crisp audio. A stable connection. A woman’s voice explaining item durability while you drift.

Good that Twitch exists now. Not then.