THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

Few things are quite so ultimately stultifying as grappling with a computer programme. Stultifying, that is, in the literal sense of making one stupid. Whatever you do or say, the computer always gives you the same answers. It does not modify them to make them easier to comprehend, or in order to give you a clue as to where you might look for the answer. Interrogating a computer would have put Torquemada on valium, and got the entire staff of the Lubianka sent for a nice quiet holiday in the Crimea. The experience is not like some adventurous anabasis, during which you work out your position by dead reckoning, the direction of flight of birds and the way the rivers flow, plus sun, moon and stars. There are no landmarks. It is not like Hampton Court Maze – except in so far as you come across the penny bun the child dropped (in this case a drop-down menu) and know that you have been going round in circles for the last quarter of an hour or longer.

If this were happening in the physical world, you would at least see some variation. The Great Detective passes through the scene of the crime repeatedly – and every time sees something different, something missed before, something which can be interpreted afresh. When your computer says that there are too many parameters, or that the device cannot be found, or that what you have just said is a bad command, you are none the wiser – not least because you cannot see any of the other turnings in the maze which you might have taken. To make life easier for the user, these choices have been removed. The only choice you can make is the right one. Unfortunately, you don’t know what that is, and all the computer will do is tell you that all the other choices you do make are the wrong ones. It isn’t twenty questions you’re playing with the computer. It’s around two hundred thousand million ones, and unfortunately you always get exactly the same answer.

Grapple, too, is an accurate word: it’s like that fearful stationary wrestling which survives as a folk-art in various cultures. Infinitely more authentic than the televised kind, and infinitely more boring. You clutch the computer or the mouse with clenched muscles and are in eternal spasm. Consciousness of time ceases. Nothing progresses. (Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence has nothing to do with this at all; he didn’t believe that the Installshield Wizard would get caught in a software loop because of a few dodgy sections on your hard disk – what he said was: Live your life so that you could stand it if it were all repeated again and again – which is a temporal and personal modification of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, whereby you only do those things which you could wish to be general laws – or, as Charles Kingsley invented in The Water Babies, the principle of Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby.)

Inside a computer there is infinity. If you set out to cross a desert, you will reach the other side, or die in the attempt. There is no such boundary to the efforts involved in failing to install certain programmes and making them work. In the rest of life, you don’t have to be a perfectionist. You just have to learn not to look to the left when you go into the dining room. Then you won’t see the single strip of wall-paper behind the door that you hung upside down at three in the morning. If the plaster shattered when you put the nail in the wall, get a bigger picture to conceal it. If you botched the carpet-laying, cut it even smaller and stain the surround. But when the machine tells you that its audio hardware can’t play the file it’s just recorded, and the Sound Troubleshooter admits that it, too, is baffled, then only the iron bar is left.

That is part of my patent kit for dealing with computers: paper and pencil for writing down the crucial instructions that flash across the screen like a shower of Leonid meteors, and an iron bar to show the machine who is master (not mistress – women have far too much sense to get into these macho duels; if they can’t do it flawlessly themselves, they have the sense to hire a professional. Only a man feels he has to be able to do everything, as if it were a test of virility – indeed, a man makes such a mess of so many things he undertakes in this spirit that you might well believe he is trying to do them with his penis.) In the long run, you may feel like taking the iron bar to yourself, in which case the paper and pencil will enable you to leave the obligatory note for survivors, dependants and coroner, Because the parameters was too many or some such – try using the machine to communicate and your nearest and dearest will only discover that the file is hopelessly corrupted and can’t be opened, or has been saved in a format that produces a cross between a Punjabi knitting pattern and a Chinese teletext in a bad reception area.

Time spent on these matters is, frankly, totally wasted. There are no transferable skills to be gained, only a deep sense of the almost deliberate impenetrability of the protocols of programming, to say nothing of the marketing research of the software companies. This particular diatribe was provoked by the discovery that the sound recording facility in Windows 98 had a limit of one whole minute, and could not in fact be played back on my machine. Now, we know that there are many ancient laws embedded in our system (dogs shall not fart on Tuesdays, cheese must not be cut with a bone-handled knife, it is unlawful for a man to marry his uncle’s wife) which it would be too much trouble to remove, but we don’t expect such unwanted remnants of the past to persist in that most modern of environments, our PC’s virtual world. If it’s there, it ought to work! If it says Sound Recording on the box, then there ought to be sound recording in the box! Boot up or shut up, that’s my motto! And if the machine doesn’t like it, then it can lump it.