Misanthrope's Corner - the complications of making the transition from P.O. box to e-mail address - Brief Article

National Review, April 16, 2001 by Florence King

From time to time over the past few years, I have heard from people who wrote to congratulate me for providing a mailing address instead of an e-mail address at the bottom of this page.

Their letters invariably gave off a tone composed of equal parts of "we happy few," "us against the world," and "hold the fort," and slipped easily into a cantankerous grumble that instantly identified them as the work of a type familiar to anyone who writes for a conservative audience: Luddites, who hate anything and everything new simply because it's new.

Judging by my latest trip to the post office the other day, a new mood has taken hold. This time I got three letters in a single batch of mail, each thanking me for the mailing address in almost plangent terms, without a trace of Luddite grumbling. In fact, all three letters fairly throbbed with weary gratitude.

One correspondent got carried away, taking my P.O. Box as evidence of an exalted level of virtue on my part, saying, "I'll bet you don't even have e-mail." It reminded me of an incident in my teens when a man silenced the audible cussing of his buddies for my benefit, explaining, "I can tell you're not that kind of girl."

Actually I was, I just didn't look it. By the same token, I do have e- mail, but I save it for marriage-i.e., National Review. It's how I get this column into their computer, bicker with my editor over commas, and nag him for a galley.

The three mailing-address letters stuck in my mind and got me to wondering why my P.O. Box came to be transformed into an Edenic niche. As any writer will confirm, getting three letters on the same subject on the same day means you have struck a nerve worth writing about. I told myself there had to be a column in it somewhere and, lo and behold, here it is.

High-tech living has thrust us all into an inescapable state of terror and revulsion that is wearing us out. The ease of computers and the instantaneous reach of fax machines are all well and good, but they are so sensitive and complex that each time we turn them on we brace ourselves, heads cocked like paranoid maniacs, listening for the various hums and buzzes and ding-a-lings to judge whether they sound the way they usually do. If they don't, we go into instant nervous prostration and give vent to the cri de coeur of the helpless, cringing souls we have become: "It's doing something different!"

At such times we get an Error Message, which is much worse than hearing a good honest clunk or snap, or even an explosion. At least back when things simply "broke," as it was called, you could understand what happened and why. During the typewriter era when I wrote for Cosmopolitan, I used so many italics that one day the underline key broke. It just fell right off. I heard the metallic clatter and saw it lying in the bottom of the machine and fished it out. If I had had the right tools I could have put it back on myself, but nowadays eyesight and common sense will get you nowhere, and the occasional successful poke with nail files and bobby pins is a thing of the past. The very concept of brokenness is gone. The computers our lives depend on "freeze" or "crash" but they never break.

We do. The psychological wounds inflicted by high-tech are the stuff of daily life now.

1. Whenever we have a technical problem, we always assume that our own equipment is at fault. It never occurs to us that the other infernal machine we are trying to connect with might be doing something different, or that the billions of tiny wires and chips in the telecom center might be doing something different as well. Thus, self-blame, followed by self-pity, are the personality traits most likely to develop in low-tech people in high-tech times. Poe had his raven, Coleridge had his albatross, and Thompson had his Hound of Heaven. At least they got some immortal lines out of their agony, but all we can show for ours is "It's doing something different!"

2. Conservatives like to think that the old republican virtues will return if only we make government small and unobtrusive, but in truth, self-reliance and Yankee ingenuity don't have a chance when people no longer have the confidence to snarl, "What the hell is wrong with this goddamn thing!" The respect accorded computers is so total you can almost hear the hush. They are the first invention Americans have been afraid to tinker with; the adventurous experiment on-screen and become proficient hackers, but taking a computer apart "to see how it works" is an idea whose time has gone. As a result, we are becoming a people who are losing sight of what tinkerers used to call the "big picture," voluntarily arranging ourselves into a majority class of computerized helots in thrall to a small priestly class of techno-snot Druids.

3. High-tech is hell on women, forcing us into the worst kind of regression. We used to play dumb when the subject turned to cars and football, but computers have saved us from the need to pretend. Now we really are dumb, and more dependent on men than ever because high-tech has put us at the mercy of all those Customer Support misogynists lurking behind their 800 numbers, who make the sadistic plumbers and TV repairmen castigated by early feminism look positively supportive.