END OF AN ERA

Dick Pountain/Fri 5 September 2003/3:27 pm/Idealog 110

Eventually the signs that an era is over become so plain that not even the dimmest social observer can miss them. While I was recently sunning myself on vacation, during the same two week period BA announced the final flight of Concorde, the north-eastern USA lost its electricity supply for 48 hours, London lost all electricity for 8 hours and the Internet was jammed up to an unprecedented degree by the Sobig.F and Blaster worms. As it happens, my holiday reading was a biography of an American essayist who, perhaps luckily, died in 1975: his last works were all about the stupendous implications of space exploration, and the expanding effect it would have on the human psyche. Remember space exploration?

I believe the Sobig worm marks a special milestone in the crumbling of our technological infrastructure. It barely affected me in a technical sense - my PC wasn't infected, and filtering out copies and bounces costs me barely a minute per hour in bandwidth. But Sobig's diabolical trick of spoofing addresses means that there are hundreds of copies of Sobig whizzing around the world that *purport* to come from me even though they didn't, because people who had my address in their address books got infected. Hence it looks as though I was infected and *there's nothing at all I can do about that*, which injures my self-esteem far more than having my computer trashed would have done. (Contrary to much popular opinion, our epoch isn't characterised by greed for money per se but by two deeper needs - for self-esteem and autonomy - which people believe, and not without reason, money can buy for them). Sobig.F pricks us all in both these extremely tender areas.

Mustn't grumble though, because the volume of Sobig traffic directed at you is a direct reflection of how many other people had you in their address books, and so - whoopee! - it's an objective index of your popularity and social cachet. Just count 'em up and let's publish the numbers as yet another league table. I reckon around 400, our esteemed Editor's had over 2000, but colleague Cassidy estimates 20,000 odd. Oh well. 

There's a feeling in the air that technical progress has not merely stopped but is going into reverse. The IT business is not the best place to feel it, because here a superficial sort of progress continues at an alarming pace - faster graphics chips, wider CPUs, bigger MS Service Packs and so on. Always keep in mind though that computers only deal with representations of the world, not with the world itself. I've said ad nauseam in this column that you can sure order a pizza over the Web but you can't eat it over the Web (and if the power's off because some nutty ideologue deregulated the generators and allowed them to forget about maintenance in favour of profits, well then you can't do either - unless your local pizzeria has a wood-fired oven as mine has). What about genetic engineering you say? Well, so far it seems rather better at creating press coverage than cures.

This odour of decay pervades other sectors of society beyond the technology sector. The Blessed Julie Burchill devoted one of her recent columns to explaining why TV's Pop Idol show represents the ultimate triumph of democracy: fresh-faced working class lads and lasses given their only chance to escape into celebrityhood through pure talent. That's certainly one way way of looking at it, but I'm afraid to my jaundiced eye it looks rather more like an 18th-century slave auction with pretty young things up on the block to be purchased for their visible attributes - Simon Cowell has so far refrained from lifting their lips to inspect the teeth, like horses, but only barely. On a related theme, I was just reading a magazine article about the fees that successful rock stars can command from billionaires for private performances - it appears that *all*, repeat *all* of them, from Bob Dylan downwards are available for such events if the price is right.

What we seem to be witnessing is not quite the death, but certainly a severe wasting illness of the public realm. In this brave new world, on top of your private medical insurance and private pension you'll need your own electricity generator if you want the Rolling Stones to play at your summer party. For much of the 20th century public provision of transport, power, medicine and housing was the mission of government throughout the world, of all political persuasions (albeit with wildly varying effectiveness). That's no longer the case. The Internet may well have been the last great public utility, and now it's all bunged up by people crapping in their own nests.

Such progress as still occurs seems confined to excessive and redundant automobile performance and scientific marketing and retailing (enabled by ever-more powerful IT), to ensure that we get what we want, when we want it. Long ago an ordinary person might have felt impelled to run, say, a baker's shop making good bread and cakes for their fellow citizens, with pride as important as profit among their motives. Now we're now all such discerning consumers, defined by our exquisite taste, that we don't want the same old loaf as everyone else. We're used to taking our pick of the world's produce via chains of near-identical supermarkets exploiting economy of scale. But the basics, like keeping electricity and water flowing, start to look like boring, low-profit activities with little opportunity for 'brand extension'. If only electricity came in different flavours...