The oxcart blocking the superhighway

DON'T think I'm writing this with a quill pen and a bottle of ink, I'm doing it with the reluctant cooper-ation of a bunch of arthritic microchips.

As usual you hear them groaning and wheezing as you press the buttons, and they get up off their fat backsides, cackling with annoyance, to link hands in an electronic version of the Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance, and like spiteful caretakers who hate their jobs, open the creaking door to cyber space when their surly rituals are complete.

No, no, I'm no Luddite here, I'm not saying get rid of the internet and bring back the running footman who carried messages in a cleft stick. All I'm saying is don't be fooled - since speed is relative, all that electronics has done is reinvent the oxcart using microchips.

What is the expectation when you press a button?

Right - that you'll hear a machine telling you to press another. But what was the expectation - in the age of simple electricity? Why, that whatever was going to happen would happen instantaneously: you pressed the button and the doorbell rang, you clicked the switch and the light came on. That's what buttons were for - instant effect.

What you didn't have to do was wait while whatever was inside the button went through a series of manoeuvres to avoid doing all the things you didn't want it to do - like book you a double-room in Win- canton, list all the motob"can-nistes in the port area of Marseille, or put you in touch with a cake shop in Seattle.

But now the button has to discount all these possibilities before it gets round to letting you have what you once got instantly. Oh Lord, I know why - don't tell me - it's because you might have wanted one of these other things, and isn't Mr Gates up there with Einstein through making them all available?

But Gates used the button, and since the button signals instant delivery, the man is a con artist.

You know when you drive to York it'll take a few hours, buying a newspaper takes a minute or two. You know it, so there's no frustration. But a button means now, and if you have to learn Nerdish and get fluent in Anorak before it will do its trick, there's no now in it.

And the insufferable preliminaries. The button labelled "Instant internet" is the most deceitful of them all, since it is like some Kafka-esque frontier-post where you have to produce your papers umpteen times a day, and sometimes the guards let you through and sometimes they don't, and when they hold you up they never say exactly why but (Kafka again) they say: "Your machine has performed an illegal act and will be shut down" or: "You have committed Error 653".

And if you do get past them, and you start thinking Good, now we're on the open road, you aren't on any such thing, you're up a cul- de-sac. You were wanting to find out about Samuel van Hoog-straten, and what do you find? Why, that you are being directed to every high street in Belgium, since Hoog-straten also means "high street", and you're being offered mussels and chips with or without mayonnaise when what you wanted was information about a Dutch 17th-century painter.

Nothing for it but to trudge back to the border and ask for directions from the guards who, of course, speak no English.

OF course, the other buttons that dissemble are on the telephone. I don't mind the one that produces the response, "All our staff are busy at the moment", which is probably true, but when the voice comes back and says, "We are doing everything we can to take your call", they aren't, they can't be; the words "doing everything we can" conjure up some ceaseless struggle, as of firefighters dragging people out of burning buildings.

Then the lady at directory enquiries tells you the number you want, and adds primly "I repeat" as though suppressing a belch and using "I repeat" as the contemporary version of the ancient cry of "Manners!"

Wishful thinking on my part, alas, as I try to conjure a human being out of the electronic labyrinth, when all there are are robot voices, distant and remorseless.

But back to the internet (or thy bitch of a mother). Gates - what a soulful face the man has - supplies us with all the options in the universe, every time a new computer comes out (every other afternoon, I mean). It's loaded with new options, but options breed like rabbits yet have nowhere near the agility - the more there are, the slower they go. The options proliferate, but it's only about once every two years that the actual apparatus is speeded up.

So I'd say the speed of the computer is in inverse proportion to what it can do the more it can do, the slower it goes, even if it is not as slow as it used to be. And I worked all that out on my abacus.

SO what's to do?

Nothing. It's all here to stay - you can't stuff gas back into an explosion.

But it's important not to be fooled. Mostly the internet is offering to knit you an unlimited number of pullovers that you don't want, and it's only after you've beaten the electronics into submission that it reluctantly lets you get your hands on what you're after.

When Gates says "faster" he only means "less slow", and don't be deceived by the screen, the coloured lights and those little pictures they call icons.

You are not going to be beamed-up in an instant, like Scotty. You're still just trundling along an unmade road in the forest sauvage, sitting uncomfortably in an oxcart you have to remember a password to climb into.

Copyright 2000
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