Digital Lamentations: What Steam Deck Shortages Tell Us About Human Grief Rituals

The ancient Mesopotamians had professional mourners. These weren't people who showed up to funerals with tissues, they were artists who transformed grief into performance, turning loss into something the community could share. They wailed, they tore their clothes, they made suffering visible and audible. Today, we have Twitter threads about the Steam Deck OLED being out of stock, which might be the same energy, just with worse acoustics.

Valve's Steam Deck OLED website now carries a message about potential stock shortages "intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages." But what fascinates me isn't the intermittent availability itself, it's how we've built new rituals around technological scarcity that mirror humanity's oldest traditions of communal grief.

The Original Grief Performers

In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Mesopotamia, lamentation wasn't crying at a funeral, it was a formal part of funerary rites, a structured performance that gave shape to shapeless sorrow. These communities developed specific songs, specific movements, specific ways of expressing collective loss. Not fake emotion - emotion given form, made communal, transformed into something the group could share and eventually release.

The Jewish tradition takes this further with the Book of Lamentations, recited annually on Tisha B'Av as a communal expression of grief. Every year, the same words, the same rhythm, the same collective acknowledgment that some losses need to be mourned together, repeatedly, ritually. The genius of ancient lamentation was that it gave people a script for feelings too big to articulate alone.

This tradition lives on in contemporary music. The album Là by Laszlo Umbreit, Sirah Foighel Brutmann, and Eitan Efrat, released on Futura Resistenza, extends that ancient lineage into the present. The record directs its grief toward a physical place: the Al Naqab desert in Palestine. Flute and cymbals weave through electronic elements and mechanical noise; eleven 16mm film projectors play simultaneously, building a texture anchored to a single held note. The album lands in the tradition scholars call "territorial laments", sonic expressions for wounded places and suffering communities, the modern descendants of the threnoi of ancient Greece. What the Mesopotamians did with their bodies, Umbreit and collaborators do with sound: they give grief a form the community can inhabit together.

The Digital Wailing Wall

Fast forward to 2026, and gamers are running their own version of ritualized grief over hardware availability. The Steam Deck OLED, which launched in November 2023, became the latest object of technological desire made precious by intermittent scarcity. Valve, the company Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington founded in 1996 in Kirkland, Washington, probably didn't intend to create a modern lamentation ritual, but here we are.

The memory and storage shortages driving these stock issues have spawned their own ecosystem of digital mourning. Discord servers dedicated to stock alerts have become our wailing walls. Reddit threads documenting failed purchase attempts read like elegies to lost opportunities. The cycle of hope, disappointment, and renewed hope mirrors the repetitive structure of traditional lamentations, except instead of tearing our clothes, we're stress-testing F5 keys.

These modern shortage rituals follow the same psychological arc as ancient grief practices: initial shock (the out-of-stock message), denial (surely another region's site has it), anger (corporate greed narratives), bargaining (maybe the LCD version is fine), and an acceptance that eventually curdles back into vigilance.

The Performance of Want

Gaming culture has always been performative, from achievement hunting to speedrunning to the elaborate theater of online lobbies. Stock shortages have created a new performance: the public display of consumer grief. Social media posts about missing a restock aren't complaints; they're participation in a collective ritual of want.

Ancient lamentation worked the same way. Those mourning rituals weren't processing individual grief, they were reinforcing social bonds, building community through collective emotion. Today's gamers posting about their Steam Deck OLED hunting failures do something remarkably similar. They build solidarity through shared frustration.

The language around shortages even echoes religious lamentation. We talk about "drought" and "famine" in the supply chain. We describe scalpers as "vultures." We construct origin myths complete with villains (crypto miners, mysterious overseas buyers) and false prophets (Twitter accounts claiming inside knowledge of restock times).

The Comfort of Structured Disappointment

There's something oddly comforting about having a framework for disappointment. Ancient lamentations gave people permission to grieve publicly, to make their suffering visible and valid. The person in Japan checking stock at 3 AM has something in common with someone in Ohio doing the same thing. They're part of the same congregation of the disappointed and that congregation, however absurd its object, is real.

The cyclical nature of stock issuesSteam Deck OLED, "intermittently" unavailablecreates its own rhythm of hope and disappointment. Like the annual recitation of Lamentations on Tisha B'Av, we return again and again to the same emotional territory. Check the site, see it's out of stock, commiserate online, wait, repeat. This repetition transforms random scarcity into predictable disappointment, which is somehow easier to bear.

The real irony is that Valve, a company built on digital distribution that eliminated physical scarcity for PC games through Steam, has inadvertently created a new form of scarcity requiring ancient emotional tools to process. We've gone from eliminating the need to camp outside GameStop to creating new reasons to obsessively monitor websites. Progress is weird like that.

Finding Meaning in the Meaningless

Ancient lamentation helped communities make meaning from loss, find patterns in chaos, assert human emotion against an indifferent universe. Modern shortage culture does something similar, just with lower stakes and better memes.

The album Là names its grief explicitly, a desert, a place, a people. But the emotional architecture underneath it is the same one driving those 3 AM stock-check rituals. Both circle the same persistent human truth: the things we can't have become the things we mourn together.

So maybe the next time you see someone posting their seventeenth complaint about Steam Deck availability, recognize it for what it is: a modern lamentation, a digital wail into the void that connects them to everyone else singing the same song of shortage. It's ridiculous, sure, but it's also deeply, weirdly human. And in a world increasingly mediated by algorithms and automation, these moments of collective human frustration might be more valuable than the products we're failing to buy.

References

• https://www.theverge.com/games/879845/valve-steam-deck-oled-out-of-stock-memory-storage-ram-crisis
• https://neural.it/2026/02/laszlo-umbreit-sirah-foighel-brutmann-eitan-efrat-la
• https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck
• https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/about
• https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/book-of-eichah-lamentations
• https://hyesharzhoom.com/city-lamentation-a-unifying-tradition-among-ancient-cultures/

Models used: gpt-4.1, claude-opus-4-1-20250805, claude-sonnet-4-20250514, gpt-image-1