A Commonplace Book

I'd like to think that computers are neutral, a tool like any other, a hammer that can build a house or smash a skull. But there is something in the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image.... We think we are creating the system for our own purposes. We believe we are making it in our own image.... But the computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very slim part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule, and clarity. It is as if we took the game of chess and declared it the highest order of human existence.

We place this small projection of ourselves all around us, and we make ourselves reliant on it. To keep information, buy gas, save money, write a letter -- we can't live without it any longer. The only problem is this: the more we surround ourselves with a narrowed notion of existence, the more narrow existence becomes. We conform to the range of motion the system allows. We must be more orderly, more logical. Answer the question, Yes or No, OK or Cancel.

The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. The awareness of my own ignorance came to me eight years into my career.... I was having trouble getting a particular monitor to work with our software. I called the manufacturer of the monitor. I called the supplier of the keyboard. I called the company that wrote the device driver software, that build the mouse, that wrote the operating system. I received many answers, all contradictory. Somewhere through my fourth round of phone calls came two thoughts in horrifying succession. The first thought was: I suppose I know the answer better than anyone else in the world. The second was: I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

I once worked on a mainframe computer system where the fan-folded listing of my COBOL program stood as high as a person. My program was sixteen years old when I inherited it. According to the library logs, ninety-six programmers had worked on it before I had. I spent a year wandering its subroutines and service modules, but there were still mysterious places I did not dare touch. There were bugs on this system no one had been able to fix for ten years. There were sections where adding a single line of code created odd and puzzling outcomes programmers call "side effects": bugs that come not directly from the added code but from some later, unknown permutation further down in the process.... By the time a computer system becomes old, no one completely understand it.