When we fear IT, we say something about each other

Is it really IT that drives Americans berserk with violence?
So now we know. A few weeks back, the Net helped inspire young middle-class American kids to don trenchcoats and go killing at Columbine High School, Denver. Now, with the shootings in Atlanta, the Net stands indicted for making stock market traders do the same.

It’s not just the World Wide Web of violence, pornography and Nazi chat rooms that can disturb impressionable teenagers. Today, apparently, a casual glance at a Spread Sheet from Wall Street can make Mark Barton, an innocent 40-something widower run amok. Game Over. At the murderer’s workplace, fellow traders were innocently cutting society’s fuel bills by teleworking at a satellite office; now they too lie dead. It’s another bad day not just for America, but for Information Technology.

In terms of public perceptions, IT today comes more freighted with danger than with potential. Of course, firms such as Colt have begun to spend millions researching the manufacture of guns with electronic security locks. But Colt has already been hit by sceptical reactions to its plans. In this case IT is feared not for its power to induce psychosis, but rather for its flaws: its cryptographic weaknesses, or the delays it might cause when firing in self-defence really is necessary.

No matter how many quack economists now praise IT, it remains vulnerable to society’s fears and to its ridicule. Naturally, when we fear IT, we say something about each other and our sense that human beings in general and men in particular are not easy to control. Nevertheless, it is IT that often takes the flak.

In this still subconscious but ever more popular vision, IT is seen as a disembodied thing which, in the case of the Internet, seems to live a life of its own. How convenient. Because the Net appears to evolve according to the obscure laws of Chaos Theory, it can be blamed for a lot of what Hillary Clinton would call dysfunctional behaviour. Instead of asking questions about society, we prefer to bash the Net.

More and more US cities want to control guns. It cannot be long before they want to restrain the Net. Now, I hesitate to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Charlton Heston of the National Rifle Association. But to restrain technology is not only very difficult, but also a veiled attempt to organise a more mistrustful world.

If we are really serious that people can never be left alone with a ‘day-trading’ PC, we should say so right now. If to go on-line is really to risk making off with people’s lives, then the world’s computers should be switched off for good.

That way, at least, we’ll never have worry to about that boring Millennium Bug.