Preach about the primitive stupidity of wasteful industrial technology and the stone age of silicon. Biology is the ultimate technology. The Neolithic is to us what we are to the age when the age of discovery is over and all of science is a fully constrained engineering corpus. This is the age of biology. At this technological stage, civilization is possible at stellar lifetimes and beyond, unlike the present where critical scarce resources are fully commercially depleted within a century. The ultimate technology is fully integrated into the elemental cycles it exists within.
The only thing holding us back is investment into discovery within a social framework of meritocratic hierarchy. Gross inherited wealth is the terminal cancer of civilizations. Intelligence is not hereditary and the impotence is incapable of managing or filtering innovation and progress. Anything beyond a trust fund for an upper middle-class lifestyle is treason against country and future.
Take for instance space exploration. All of the missions are about military engineering and have little to no basis in science altruism, or progressing the future. If anyone had even a tiny fraction of sense, we would be putting everything into the recovery of a single m-type asteroid. Any of these fragments of differentiated planetesimal cores contains more rare mineral wealth than all of what humans have accessed in the Holocene. We live on the flux, the dross, the garbage that floats to the top when gravity has pulled everything we value within this gravity prison of resource scarcity. Everything we have is the result of the sparse junk that fell to the surface later than the last phase of molten Earth; those outer objects that still contain diverse wealth. We could go right out there and pick one of our choosing. We are the Neolithic fools that never travel one valley over and discover all the resources and technology of the Han Chinese. That one objective eclipses all human wealth in a decade. Instead, we are territorial toddlers bedazzled by the colors on our toy stick's fabric, and no better than chimpanzees mobbing to rape and pillage, with the mass mytho disorder of collective imaginary friends. The biggest businesses in our world of the present are no more that prophets selling technological singularity and infinite energy scams the same as the ancients pedaling Zeus and Apollo. There is nowhere to go down in truth; only to peek behind a façade to see nothing has changed.
The cheapest fans available often have a lot of injection molded plastic that squeezes out of the gaps of the metal mold when the plastic parts are formed. Removing this may help some.
The cheapest fans now come with the small motor shaft embedded into the frame with a tiny ball of metal formed at the end of the shaft. The ball is what prevents the shaft and fan blade portion from coming out of the housing. This type of bearing and retention cause more friction than a design that uses a bushing and a small plastic retainer ring. They type with the retainer ring are usually floating in the magnetic field. The little plastic retainer ring on the shaft end is only present in cases where the fan is dropped causing more force than the magnetic field will hold onto. If a person such as yourself, presses on this type of fan at the fan blade hub, you will feel the magnetic field and see the hub deflect and then return to the center of the field. Spinning it will feel frictionless. With the ball shaft type, there is little deflection and it feels like a bit more friction when comparing two side by side.
With the ball shaft type, most of the noise will be coming from the friction and transmitted through the body of the enclosure. If you isolate the fan with some damping between it and the enclosure it will reduce the noise considerably. Damping the enclosure, and adding rubber feet between any table or surface may also help.