Rarely do the rest of us look at City traders with any sense of fellow-feeling. But the teeth-grinding fury, the bitter humour, the frustration and self-contempt which they felt during the computer crash which paralysed the London Stock Market last week was such a moment. Most of us who live with computers know exactly how they felt. As the chairman of Winterflood Securities put it: 'This is the IT world for you. You drop your calculator and the battery falls out and suddenly you haven't got a brain.'
If you were of a paranoid turn, you'd note that the London computers shut themselves down shortly after high-technology stocks on US markets had started to plunge. Was there some kind of digital self-preservation going on - IT systems looking after their own? But no, this is normal. Crashes, glitches, failures of all kinds are the part of the digital present that is omnipresent. What about the economic inefficiency and human frustration that computers also bring?
I have seen three laptops die so far. One simply had a nervous breakdown, went catatonic and has never woken up again. It has half a bad novel inside it so I've never quite brought myself to throw it out. Another fell victim to my brutal, if fast, keyboard technique, developed on East German typewriters 20 years back. Eventually, the keys pinged off. A third caught a virus and went mad. Friends have got it sort-of working again, but it is now determinedly eccentric, unreliable and blinks at me in a dazed fashion when I try to turn it on. (Which makes me, I suddenly notice, sound a bit like Ted Hughes. First time that's happened.)
More generally, I have had money accidentally removed from bank accounts, seen work disappear, wasted afternoons in offices when computers have crashed, spent hours trying to book holidays online before realising that what I actually needed was to talk to a human being, and vanished into the black hole of computer telephony stabbing 'the star button' miserably in the vain hope of finding a friendly ear. And from what I can gather, these experiences are normal. Expanded generally, they suggest that IT can lead to worse business judgments as well as faster ones and lose sales as well as gain them.
This question of computer inefficiency is not, in the end, the important one. This is still an infant Henry Ford-era industry when you can have any laptop you want as long as it's black, possesses far more computing power than you need and falls apart easily. Better designed, more reliable and even prettier machines are coming along all the time.
But thinking about the cumbersome and inefficient aspects of IT is a useful way into the bigger questions about it. Neil Postman, a New York professor, suggests that, with any new technology you should ask: 'What is the problem to which this is a solution?' To which any student of public affairs would want to add: and to whom does this solution give wealth and power, and who loses? After the stock exchange crash, another huge round of local bank closures, caused primarily by new technology, and the devastating judgment against Microsoft, followed by the slide in IT stocks, all these questions seem particularly potent.
The original Postman question could be answered by saying that the problems of slowness in business and the power of the old political and media élite are problems to which the Internet age offers solutions. It puts consumers in touch with suppliers and it makes available unimaginable amounts of information to everyone who can afford a computer - or soon, a new-generation mobile phone. It speeds up and it opens up. E-mailing solves the problem of long, burbly phone calls. And, if you believe the prediction that a third or more of Britain's commuters will become teleworkers, urban congestion and car pollution are other obvious problems it helps solve.
These are real benefits. They are one reason why, despite the gleeful prophets of cyber-doom, the soaring dot-com shares, then their fall to more realistic valuations, is not a disaster or a re-run of the Dutch tulip mania. Whatever happens to Martha Lane Fox (who seems to me to be behaving with admirable coolness) and her company, the idea behind it will work. That, in itself, is a store of value in comparison with other investment fevers, like the tulip bubble of the seventeenth century. Tulips look nice. You can paint them. If in very dire straits, you might try to eat them. But they are not a transforming technology.
When you come on to the 'who gains, who loses?' category of questions, however, it gets harder. For - another Postman point - technology also limits our options and undoes previous ways of living and working. Imagine, for instance, the parallel Britain of 2000 in which television had never happened - a country of ubiquitous and lavish cinemas, telephone news services, thicker newspapers; a place where piano playing, singing and sheet-music sales were central to daily life, not marginal. To say that we prefer it our way is too easy: the technology changed us all.
So, today, with the Internet economy, the paths untaken are all around us. We are opting for a huge social shift in which more and more (banking, shopping, entertainment, working) is done not face to face but by cables looping past our front doors. The draw-bridging of everyday life, an ultimate privatisation of the community, could not have happened without tiny lines engraved on silicon.
Who does it benefit? People who are useful 'information workers' already, who are plugged in, whose credit ratings are good. If the Government was prepared to push this, it could also be the most powerful force in regional policy for generations, as the lower living costs and higher labour-pool persuade companies to site call centres outside the south-east. (Have you noticed how often the voice at the end of the line is Scouse, Geordie, Scottish or Irish?)
There will be many new jobs, of course, and cultural reasons will ensure they are at home, not only in Bangalore: if the e-economy was a net job destroyer, the US would today have mass unemployment. But so far, they are less secure and less unionised.
The bleak news is for lower-middle-class, home-owning, service-sector workers. Even before last week's bank closures, some 150,000 banking employees are said to have lost their jobs in the past decade. Thanks to computer telephony, only a small minority will be needed for the switch to online. Similarly, though online shopping ought to provide a bonanza time for delivery companies, including the Post Office, it may hit a host of specialist high street retailers.
The final big loser/winner issue is about politics and power. The old model, in which authority was held by governments and passed down by a media élite, with privileged access not only to people but information, is clearly under threat. Now, you can find out for yourself - read that unedited speech, e-mail the department, download the facts, ignore the priorities and choices made by newspaper or programme editors. Many people won't want to bother. They will prefer to trust an organisation or brand to do it for them. But equally, more and more will simply bypass the old media - which means they may bypass old assumptions too. The political effects are hard to gauge, but they may include rawer, sometimes nastier, populist arguments. The power, glamour and authority of business, roaming the Net, will similarly increase. Conclusion? This period of delicate liberal censorship and rule by a progressive media élite may be less secure than it looks.
As between the technophobes, who prophesy social collapse and have been grimly pleased by the bad news of the past week, and the bland optimists of e-topia, for whom future life will consist of perfectly-informed, free individuals sipping coffee and checking their investments by palm-pilot, most of us will find a muddy middle way.
Out of nervousness, ignorance, awe or sloth, British politicians have mostly kept away from the social consequences of the Internet, seeing it as something too big, too new for them to do more than applaud as a clever toy. They are entirely wrong, as the Microsoft ruling and some of the Budget fall-out shows. It is not a private issue. This is the generator of the new economy, the new shaper of society; therefore it is also the proper subject of political argument. That there has been so little so far makes us look like a country of peasants when the first flintlock arrives.
