I used to write a weekly newspaper column about the internet. This was in the mid-1990s, when newspapers were still in love with the newness of the information super-highway, and had launched special supplements, touchingly unaware that they were playing host to the mortal enemy of print culture, which would ultimately displace newspapers altogether. What an irony. Anyway, my column had no time for this over-excited supping-with-the-devil stuff: it was called “Logged Off” and was mainly a true record of my agonising difficulties just loading the software, dragging icons to the Stuffit Expander (“What the hell is a Stuffit Expander?”), and manfully trying to enjoy the impenetrable humour of computer jokes with punch-lines such as, “Excuse my friend, he’s null-terminated.” My column included, in its second week, the useful advice: “Things to do while awaiting connection to the internet: (1) Lick finger and clean keys of keyboard; (2) Lick finger and clean mouse; (3) Adjust earwax and stare at wall; (4) Lick finger and clean space bar; (5) Run out of fingers.” From this you can deduce what species of fun I was having.
Looking back, it is now clear that my computer’s memory was far too small for the stuff I was trying to do, and that the internet was pretty primitive, too. Thus I often waited twenty-five minutes for a website that was crushingly disappointing, mysteriously defunct, or had absolutely nothing on it. Entertainingly, on many occasions the search would reach its eighteenth minute and then just disconnect without explanation. Writing in the column about this disconnection problem, I received many helpful letters from readers, one of which suggested that, if my computer was located at some distance from the telephone socket (it was), I should wrap the phone cable around an item of furniture, ideally a tall bookcase. In my desperation, I tried it. Astonishingly, it worked.
Anyway, the final blow to the column came when, one week, I had been examining a recommended website about the Titanic and found a rare clickable option, “About the creators”. I clicked it, chewed the edge of the desk for the next twenty-five minutes, and then discovered the full, bathetic truth. The creator of this website was a schoolboy in Canberra. He was fourteen. This Titanic site was his science project. I had just spent four hours laboriously accessing the homework of a teenage Australian. It was time for the madness to stop.
When I wrote in the introduction to this book about the unacceptable transfer of effort in modern life, this was the sort of thing I was talking about. In common with many people today, I seem to spend my whole life wrestling resentfully with automated switchboards, waiting resentfully at home all day for deliveries that don’t arrive, resentfully joining immense queues in the post office, and generally wondering, resentfully, “Isn’t this transaction of mutual benefit to both sides? So why am I not being met half-way here? Why do these people never put themselves in my shoes? Why do I always have to put myself in theirs? Why am I the one doing this?”
And I lump the internet into this subject because it is the supreme example of an impersonal and inflexible system which will provide information if you do all the hard work of searching for it, but crucially (a) doesn’t promise anything as a reward for all the effort, (b) will never engage in dialogue, (c) is much, much bigger than you are, and (d) only exists in a virtual kind of way, so never has to apologise. It seems to me that most big businesses and customer service systems these days are either modelling themselves on the internet or have learned far too much from a deep reading of Franz Kafka. Either way, they certainly benefit from the fact that our brains have been pre-softened by our exposure to cyber-space. Our spirits are already half-broken. We have even started to believe that clicking “OK” is an act of free will, while “Quit” and “Retry” represent true philosophical alternatives.
Fuming resentment is the result. You might remember the old Goon Show catchphrase, “Foiled again!” Well, we are being foiled again from morning till night, in my opinion; foiled and thwarted and frustrated; and they wonder why so many people are on repeat prescriptions. Everywhere we turn for a bit of help, we are politely instructed in ways we can navigate a system to find the solution for ourselves – and I think this is driving us mad. “Do it yourself” was a refreshing and liberating concept in its day, but it has now got completely out of hand. In his book Grumpy Old Men (2004), which accompanied the BBC series, Stuart Prebble memorably refers to the culture of DIYFS (Do it your Effing self) and I think he is on to something that extends well beyond the trials of flat-pack self-assembly furniture. I am now so sensitive on this DIYFS issue that when I see innocent signs for “Pick Your Own Strawberries” I shout, as I drive past, “No, I won’t bloody pick my own bloody strawberries! You bloody pick them for me!”
Say a replacement credit card arrives in the post. “Oh, that’s nice,” you say, innocently. “I’ll just sign it on the back, scissor the old one, and away I go!” But close inspection reveals that you must phone up first to get it authorised. “Okey-dokey!” you cry. You dial a long number and follow instructions to reach the card-authorisation department (press one, press one, press two), then are asked to input the card number (sixteen digits) then the card expiry date (four digits) then your date of birth (six digits), then your phone number (eleven digits), then told to wait. Naturally, your initial okey-dokeyness has started to wane a bit by this time. You start to wonder whether the card will actually expire before this process is complete. “Please enter card number,” comes the instruction. “What? Again?” you ask. But, listening to the menu, there is no button assigned to this reaction (“For What? Again? press four”), so off you go again with the sixteen digits and the four digits and then the six digits and the eleven digits, and then you hear the clipped, recorded message, “Sorry. We are unable to process your inquiry. Please call back at another time,” and the line goes dead. Unable to believe your ears, you stare at the receiver in your shaking hand. It is at this point, in my experience, that a small cat always comes up behind you and emits a quiet “Miaow” and makes you actually scream and jump up and down with agitation and rage.
But such is modern life. Armies of underpaid call-centre workers have now been recruited and trained, not to help us, but to assure us, ever so politely, that the system simply does not allow us to have what we want, and no, you cannot speak to a supervisor because the system isn’t organised that way. We are all slaves to the system, madam; that’s just the way it is. An error of type 3265 has occurred; you’re stuffed before you start, basically; click OK to exit; quit or retry, it’s your funeral; anything else I can help you with?; thank you for calling, goodbye. Sometimes I think wistfully of that old TV series The Prisoner and how Patrick McGoohan finally blew up the computer by asking it the question “Why?” At the time, I thought it was a bit of a bizarre cop-out, what with the chimp and the space rocket and everything. Now, however, I think the notion of blowing up such an instrument of tyranny by asking it, “Why?” was quite profound. I am always wanting to ask, “Why?” – but stopping myself just in time, because I know the effect would be fatally weakening to my cause. When you ask, “Why?” these days, you instantly lose status. Asking, “Why?” usually signals the end of all meaningful exchange.
So they get away with it, the bastards. Steadily, the companies are shifting more and more effort onto their customers, and even using guilt-trip lines such as “Please have your account details ready, as this will help speed up the process, so that we can deal with more inquiries.” The message here is that, yes, you may be waiting for twenty minutes while we make money from your call, but don’t waste ourtime when you eventually get through because this would be rude and inconsiderate to others. “We are busy taking other calls,” they say, sometimes. Does this placate you? No, it makes you hop up and down, especially when they suggest you call back later. “We are busy taking other calls. Perhaps you would like to call back later at a time more convenient to us? Half-past two in the morning tends to be quiet. It is a very small matter to set your alarm. Another option is to bugger off and give up; we find that a lot of our clients are choosing this option these days.”
I could go on. In fact, I will. So here’s a little personal story that still makes me scream. A few months ago, I was in New York (hooray). I had used my Visa card to book some theatre tickets and had then attempted to buy dinner with it. At this point I was told that a block had been put on the card, and that I would have to call customer services back in the UK. I am always okey-dokeyish at the beginning of these processes; perhaps that is the key to my problem. So I called Barclaycard from my mobile phone, neatly navigated the automated answering service, and finally reached a very pleasant and reasonable woman, who seemed quite sympathetic when I told her what had happened.
Now, I am fully aware that credit-card fraud is an enormous problem for the companies, and that they had every right to check that I wasn’t a criminal wielding someone else’s cards. However, what the pleasant, reasonable woman said was that, card-fraud being what it is, the card companies now expect customers to make a courtesy call before travelling abroad. I started to hyperventilate. I was about to fly home after spending eight months travelling in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, France, Greece and Italy. I had been on forty-four flights. My legs were permanently ribbed from the flight socks. I had seen DodgeBall twenty-six times. It was as much as I could do to remember my own name. And now Barclaycard wanted me to clear my itineraries with them before leaving home? I had the brief, familiar sensation that I was going actually insane. “But I don’t work for Barclaycard,” I protested. “I pay Barclaycard so that it works for me.” There was no point pressing the point, however. I had no power in this situation, and we both knew it. I have not ventured abroad since, and I must admit, it’s partly out of pique.
My feeling about customer relations in general is that they all adopt this high-handed attitude for one simple reason: they can. They are insiders. They are authorised agents of the system. In face-to-face encounters, while one deals every day with nice people in shops and post offices, there is no forgetting the power relation that pertains: as agents of the system, they are in a position to condescend. As mere supplicants, we can petition for attention, but not make demands. Years ago, when I worked in shops, things were different. We deferred to customers because they had the power to spend or withhold money, and therefore controlled the ultimate destiny of our jobs. The old power ratio of shop-worker to customer was 40:60. Now it’s 80:20, or maybe 100:0.
“Oh no, till’s down again,” they say, not looking you in the eye, and definitely not apologising, while reaching for a bell switch. “This is always happening to me,” they continue, gloomily. And that’s it. You are trapped. The bell sounds. Nobody comes. Time passes. Your train departs. A clock ticks. Somewhere in the Arctic Circle, a wall of ice drops into a crystal sea. The assistant plucks at your purchases with a look of mild curiosity and then resumes a prior conversation with a colleague about the final instalment of Star Wars and whether it’s worth going because the last couple weren’t up to much but there’s nothing else on, apart from that thing with Orlando Bloom, oh yeah, but Jazza said that was crap, and what about Batman Begins, well, that’s an idea. Finally, some dim race-memory prompts you to ask, “I suppose you couldn’t hurry this along?” But you know the answer in your heart of hearts. “Nah,” they say, rolling their eyes. “Till.”
Life ebbs away. A tree grows in Brooklyn. Finally, a supervisor comes huffing to the rescue and, without catching your eye, taps a password into the till, and your liberated card is returned to you. No apology, of course. But on the plus side, there is now no need to buy any movie magazines for a while. But shouldn’t somebody say sorry? Well, the inevitable happens. “Sorry for all that,” you say. “No problem,” they say, forgivingly.
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Now, there is a theory – advanced chiefly by Steven Johnson in his 2005 book Everything Bad is Good for You – that interactivity with machines and virtual worlds is making people smart in new and important ways. You were hoping for a bright side and here it is. Evidently, the neurotransmitter called dopamine (associated with craving) responds with high excitement when there is seeking and searching to be done. Johnson is specifically referring to – and defending – the attraction of video games, but I think the science applies also to the mental habits that attach to people who spend a lot of time on the internet or learning unfamiliar systems. “Where our brain wiring is concerned,” he writes, “the craving instinct triggers a desire to explore. The [dopamine] system says, in effect, ‘Can’t find the reward you were promised? Perhaps if you just look a little harder you’ll be in luck – it’s got to be around here somewhere.’ ” Games playing may have negligible effects on our morality or understanding of the world, Johnson admits, but it trains the brain wonderfully in decision-making. “Novels may activate our imagination, and music may conjure up powerful emotions, but games force you to decide, to choose, to prioritize.”
Now, Everything Bad is Good for You is certainly well-argued and important. Impatient old fuddy-duddies such as myself tend not to research the chemistry of neurotransmitters before making sweeping judgements about the harm “interactivity” is having on a generation of people who seem, more than ever, not to know how to interact. Johnson explains, rather elegantly, that old measures of IQ are becoming outmoded because intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability “to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly”. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it. But the technology moves on too quickly for some of us to keep up, that’s all. Looking back at my “Logged Off” columns, I find that, less than ten years ago, I was working with Eudora and AddMail, and attempting to change search engines from Infoseek to MacWAIS (but MacWAIS demanded a mysterious “key” that I did not have). New email was signalled by a cock-crow, and “No new messages” indicated by an icon of a black snake. I promise you I have no mental picture of this black snake icon. A multitude of techie advances has displaced it.
But enough of this self-pity. Johnson is clearly on to something here. But he seems to be deliberately avoiding a less comforting aspect of all this: that the kind of enhanced brain activity he celebrates not only has a known male gender bias, but is associated with Asperger’s syndrome and autism. Confidently defying any such alarmist suggestions, in fact, he argues that, through the miracle of internet connectivity, people are now more socialised, not less! It is at this point that I start to make impatient harrumphing and snorting noises. The new social networking applications are “augmenting our people skills”, Johnson jaw-droppingly avers. They are “widening our social networks, and creating new possibilities for strangers to share ideas and experiences”.
It is true that we are becoming instantly familiar with strangers, and I’ll be discussing in chapter five why a lot of older people consider that to be rude rather than liberating. But “widening our social networks”? Well, Johnson is not the first to fall into this little trap of virtuality, of course. Bill Clinton famously said in a State of the Union address that the internet was the new town square. Kate Fox calls it the new garden fence. It isn’t, though, is it? It’s people sitting on their own, staring straight ahead, tapping keyboards, often in dim light, surrounded by old coffee cups and plates with crumbs on. True, each of us has a virtual social group in our email address book, but the group has no existence beyond us; it is not a “group” at all. True, hot information whizzes around the world with the speed of supersonic gossip, but, crucially, we can choose to ignore it. Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn’t interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social “group” focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people’s behaviour can’t be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon. Sitting at screens and clicking buttons is a very bad training for life in the real world.
Also, this god-like privilege of the double-click is dangerous for a philosophical reason. It blinds us to something significant: that we can pick and choose only from what is offered. We have choice, choice, enormous amounts of choice. But that does not amount to free will. In fact, what we do is select. We can actively click, and click, and click, but our role is still essentially passive because we have no influence over the list of selections. Years ago, I was asked in the street to answer market-research questions about a new yoghurt lolly. I was asked, “Is it A: creamy, B: fruity, C: refreshing?” When I said it was, if anything, a bit cheesy, the woman looked confused for a moment and then said brightly, “Look, don’t worry, I’ll put you down as a Don’t Know!” Choice from menus is a burden dressed up as a privilege. It is bondage with bells on. And, of course, it still makes us do all the work.
But it is also beguilingly self-aggrandising, which is why we won’t call a halt. This is my grand theory of social alienation in the early twenty-first century, by the way, so don’t miss it, pay attention. The thing is, we are kings of click-and-buy. We can customise any service. We can publish a blog on the internet. We are always reachable by phone, text or email. Our iPods store 4,000 of our own personal favourite tracks. Well, sod the gratification of our dopamine neurotransmitters in such an alarming context. The effect of all this limitless self-absorption is to make us isolated, solipsistic, grandiose, exhausted, inconsiderate, and anti-social. In these days of relative affluence, people are persuaded to believe that more choice equals more happiness, and that life should be approached as a kind of happiness expedition to the shops. This attitude is not only paltry and degenerate, but it breeds misery and monsters. And in case you can’t hear me thumping the table, that’s what I’m doing. Right. Now.
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Of course, I am not against personal freedom. As a woman from a working-class background, I never stop thanking my lucky stars for the good fortune of my birth; if I had been born even a few decades earlier, my only hope would have been that an obstinate phonetics professor would trip over me in Covent Garden, make a bet with an old colonel that he could pass me off as a duchess, and teach me to stop saying “I’m a good girl, I am.” Born in the 1950s, however, I managed without a Professor Higgins – or, indeed, help from anyone at all. I benefited from a combination of post-war prosperity, liberal social change, the 1944 Education Act, equal pay, and the rise of reliable contraception. I used all the freedoms that came my way. The result of all this is that I have, unlike the huge majority of women of my class in history, done more or less what I liked with my life, my body, and my career. I believe in people taking responsibility for their own lives. I believe in being allowed to make choices.
But I really think this has gone too far, this worship of choice. I take my mum out for a cup of coffee and I say, “What would you like?” and I get quite impatient if she says, with surprise, “Um, a cup of coffee?” I want her to specify what size, what type, whipped cream or no whipped cream, choice of sprinkle, type of receptacle, type of milk, type of sugar – not because either of us cares about such stuff, but because I’m expecting all these questions at the counter, and you look daft if you dither. A friend of mine was in America for the first time, ordered a modest breakfast sausage, and was dismayed by the barked question, “Links or patties?” because it appeared to be meaningless. “Can I have a sausage?” she repeated. “Uh-huh,” said the waitress, pen hovering above her order pad. “Links or patties?” “Sausage?” she kept saying, pathetically. “Er, sausage?” In Britain at that time, we were unused to there being a choice of sausage type. She had never heard the words “links” or “patties” before. Besides which, in her defence, a patty is surely not a genuine sausage within the meaning of the word.
Meanwhile the choice impulse is being exploited to the utmost degree. “More choice than ever before!” say the advertisers. “Click and find anything in the world!” says the internet. “What people want is more choice,” say the politicians. “Eight thousand things to do before you die!” offer the magazines. No wonder we are in a permanent state of agitation, thinking of all the unpicked choices and whether we’ve missed something. Every day, you get home from the shops with a bag of catfood and bin-liners and realise that, yet again, you failed to have cosmetic surgery, book a cheap weekend in Paris, change your name to something more glamorous, buy the fifth series of The Sopranos, divorce your spouse, sell up and move to Devon, or adopt a child from Guatemala. Personally, I’m worn down by it. And I am sure it isn’t good for us. I mean, did you know there is a website for people with internet addiction? I will repeat that. There is a WEBSITE for people with INTERNET ADDICTION. Meanwhile, a friend of mine once told me in all seriousness that having children was definitely “on the shopping list”; another recently defined her religious beliefs as “pick and mix”. The idea of the world’s religions forming a kind of candy display, down which you are free to wander with a paper bag and a plastic shovel, struck me as worryingly accurate about the state of confusion and decadence we’ve reached. Soon they’ll have signs outside the churches. “Forget make-your-own pizza. Come inside for make-your-own Sermon on the Mount!” The mystery of voter apathy is explained at a stroke here, by the way. How can I vote for all the policies of either the government or the opposition? How can I give them a “mandate”? I like some of their policies, but I don’t like others, and in any case I’d like to chuck in some mint creams and pineapple chunks. I insist on my right to mix and match.
Oh well. In his lovely 1997 book Deeper, about his early-adopter adventures on the internet, John Seabrook charts a very different experience from mine in my days of “Logged Off”. For one thing, he got the hang of the technology a lot more quickly, and never wrapped his phone cable around a bookcase on the principle that anything is worth a try. While I was still bewailing the sound-to-noise ratio of the internet, he was conducting an email correspondence with Bill Gates. While I was putting my head through plate glass windows at instructions such as “You can change the default FTP download directory by holding down the options menu item, selecting preferences and changing the directories and applications dialog box”, Seabrook was actually being flamed. But he was led to similar questions in the end.
When you start out on-line, it seems as though politics, ethics and metaphysics . . . are reduced to their original elements, and are yours to remake again . . . Why should individuals obey other individuals? What are the benefits of individual liberty, and what harm does that liberty do society as a whole? Why is honesty necessary? What is a neighborhood? What is a friend? Who am I?
In the past decade and a half, the world has changed immensely because of the internet, with the virtual colliding with the real. Email, in particular, has had a huge impact on our perception of relative status. For our purposes here, however, the important thing is that all the clicking and searching may appear to be an active pursuit of knowledge, but it is still hard work with no guarantee of reward in the context of cold impersonality. Two and a half millennia of Socratic educational practice have been swept aside in fifteen years. The message now is, if you want knowledge, go and find it, good luck, sit there, don’t move, see you later. And make friends with your dopamine. You won’t get anywhere without it.
Doesn’t the same alienating, laborious impotence mark our everyday dealings with the people who ought to be serving us? We make all the effort, just to find out how far we can get, and sometimes it isn’t very far. The individual is now virtually brainwashed into accepting that clicking menus, punching buttons, and self-channelling are the nearest you can get to asking a question. “Why am I the one doing this? Shouldn’t they be meeting me half-way? Isn’t this rude?” we cry – but we will probably be the last ones to see things this way. And now I must get on with calling Barclaycard. I am thinking of taking a trip, and I need to make sure they will let me.