Not All Things Compute

OAKLAND —  We program computers, but the computers also program us.

--From “Silicon Snake Oil,” by Clifford Stoll

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I don’t surf the Internet. I haven’t read “The Road Ahead.” While these columns in fact are written on a computer, I have brainwashed myself to regard the machine as nothing more than a fancy typewriter. It helps keep things simple in my mind--admittedly, a comfortable fit.

This wariness toward computers dates back 20 years, to my rookie days with the Associated Press in San Francisco. The bureau was among the first to craft stories on computers, and the system was crude. About once a shift, the computers would freeze up. Within minutes whatever prose was on the screen would vanish to . . . where?

One old bureau hand--wretchedly ink-stained, of course--had developed a theory.

“There goes another one,” he’d shout at his suddenly empty screen. “It’s printing out right now in the men’s room of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.”

We’d laugh until we’d cry. Or cry until we laughed. Then we’d shrug and again face the green void, rewriting from scratch as we put aside our baser instinct--which was to knock some sense into the computer with a hammer.

*

Now, I am not proud of what I don’t know. A week ago I might have been too embarrassed to admit that I have no e-mail address, that my 4-year-old knows more about our home computer than I do. In the last couple of days, however, I have been immersed in the thinking of one Clifford Stoll, a 46-year-old astronomer who describes himself as a “propeller head” and “computer jock.”

Stoll was riding the information highway when it was just a dirt road. In the 1980s he made a name tracking down computer hackers. He wrote a bestseller about the adventure. Now he has another book out, with the not-so-subtle title of “Silicon Snake Oil.”

“Understand, I love computers,” Stoll began Monday afternoon, seated in the backyard of his little bungalow here. As he spoke, he brushed flower petals from the long, wiry hair he wears in the style of Einstein. “It’s the whole culture of computers that gives me the heebie-jeebies. It’s the attitude that if you are not online, if you don’t have e-mail, if you don’t have a Web site, that you are hopeless, that the train has left the station and you are being left behind with feet planted on the platform.

“It’s the mind-set that in the future only the computer-literate will have jobs. Huh? I don’t buy it. . . . We are still going to need truck drivers, and schoolteachers, and bartenders, and plumbers, and doctors, and dentists. What do I want in a dentist? Someone who is competent with computers? No, I want someone who can drill teeth”--he held his finger to his jaw--”whhrrrrrrrrr. Like that. What does that have to do with computers?”

*

This iconoclastic outlook toward the new religion of computers has made Stoll a hot property among op-ed editors and speakers bureaus, but a bad boy in e-land. A Times review called him a “techno-traitor.” Not everyone grasps that he distrusts, not computers, but the glossy promises of their promoters. He often apologizes for raising what he sees as fairly obvious questions.

For people like myself, however, Stoll’s is the voice in the wilderness we’ve longed to hear: Maybe it wasn’t so wrongheaded, after all, to balk at going online, to wish secretly that the Internet would come to be seen as merely a ‘90s version of Betas and eight-tracks. He can be wickedly funny.

“No doubt,” Stoll writes, “the networks are certainly great places to meet men. There are several guys online for every woman. But, like the outlook for women in Alaska, the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

And, “Being online conveys a strange type of prestige. Those with modems display their network addresses on business cards and letterheads. What was once as geeky as pocket protectors has become a status symbol. It’s the ultimate revenge of the nerds.”

And, “What are you telling a child when you set him down before a computer? One unspoken message is, ‘Go interact someplace else’ . . . “

More seriously, Stoll deplores how a “slavish infatuation” with computers can disrupt schools and libraries, putting machines between students and teachers, wasting money on CD-ROMs that might otherwise be spent on books. He accuses computer boosters of blurring the distinctions between information and knowledge and wisdom. Many will disagree, of course, and they know how to track down Stoll via e-mail. To reach me, I’m afraid, will require a 32-cent stamp.