Close to the Machine_Technophilia and Its Discontents Page 7
But what about the high heels, I wonder. How will I hear the full reverberation of those heels on marble? And the strangers—the light voyeurism of watching other people transact with their money. And the sense that I am in the middle of the world and anything might happen to me here. How will all this happen to me, once I am safe at home, and everything has been flattened to two dimensions, a screen, a keyboard, and a mouse? And—oh!—what about the White Shoulders?
No one but me sits on the beautiful marble bench. The bank guard eyes me, circles me, slides his hand along his belt. I want to say something like, “Nice day, isn’t it, sir?” but surely this is something I’ve seen in an old movie. I stand up, zip up my jacket, pat my wallet, and leave.910
At least the AIDS project is going well. After my years of writing software used only by other software, the ingenuity of the human user fascinates me. There are bugs, but the users, with their great, mysterious, accommodating intelligence, avoid them. The entry of certain pre-fifteenth-century dates will crash the system. “Well, we just don’t put in those dates!” say the users, quite reasonably.
Within a month, some hundred AIDS patients get registered. Everyone is happy—too happy. It worries me that no one has refused to sign the consent-to-share forms. Everyone confronted with a sheath of legal papers, all requiring signatures, has duly executed them: I hereby agree to share my records with all other participating agencies. I herein acknowledge that I have been given the option to deny such permission but have declined such. I agree to take part in an evaluation. Yes, a salesman may call. Said one patient, “I have AIDS. I’m on SSI. Big Brother already has my number. So what else do I have to sign?”
I worry that I have given the system too cute a name. My client wanted to call it the Centralized Intake, Registration and Information & Referral System, the bureaucratic and non-euphonious C-I-R-I-R-S: “sear ears.” But I insisted on something “modern.” In a meeting, I told them that the state of the art is to name a system after a person. Thomas—I brought up the Congressional system named for Thomas Jefferson. Was there someone who really wanted this system, I asked them, some early advocate?
They were disappointed. For some time now, they had been referring to the system as CIRIRS. A gloomy silence fell over the conference room.
“There was Philippe,” said someone finally.
“Philippe! Perfect! I speak French. I would be delighted to build something named Philippe.”
“Too fancy,” said someone at the next meeting.
“Too French,” said someone else, with a certain tone. We all heard it: something was going on that had nothing to do with fanciness or France, some political infighting thing that nobody wanted to touch. There was dead quiet, into which Philippe, the system, disappeared.
“There’s Jeremiah Green,” someone suggested at last. And it was all but settled on the spot. Jeremiah was an activist, he had AIDS, and what’s more, he was black. Jeremiah. Jerry. So cute and sweet. Magical combination of the user-friendly and the politically correct.
So it was that I came to build a system named Jerry. Who could be afraid of a system named Jerry? In case of some lingering hesitation, I gave it pretty guacamole-colored screens, and, on the first two screens, the ones where users log on and select a task, a scanned-in picture of a smiling African-American man with AIDS: Jerry.
I’ve done my job too well, I think. No one is sufficiently wary of this system.11
I also gave it access to the Internet. And e-mail. And a Usenet news reader. And zippy ISDN phone lines. All the trendy new World Wide Web software, necessary hallmarks of the state of the art—all that became the “information and referral” components of the original sear-ears idea. I tell myself I’m saving the client money by not programming a referral system. I tell myself I’m dragging the nonprofit sector into the era of late-twentieth-century computing. I argue that, if corporations have all these goodies, why shouldn’t social service agencies also have digital phone lines and fast Pentiums, LaserJets and edge routers, wide-area networks and great big host-end controllers. And if every entity in the world is about to have a Web home page, well, why shouldn’t Jerry?
When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer. The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove—all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria—if only they could figure out how to search it properly. They sit and click, and look disconcertedly at the junk that comes back at them. Surely it must be their fault, they reason; surely if they just followed the right links, expressed their query more accurately, used another search tool, then pages and pages of interesting information would soon be theirs. And so their clicks become more insistent for a while. Soon, however, they start tumbling: What link have they followed? Where are they? They click “Back” then “Back” again, and, like players lost in a Victorian maze, they emerge to find they are only at the place where they entered.
In front of a spreadsheet, however, their helplessness and confusion vanish. When users want to show me the sort of information they have been storing, they open elaborate, intricate spreadsheets full of lists and macros and mathematical formulas, links to databases, mail-merge programs, and word processors. They have, in effect, been programming. I am amazed at the ingenuity shown in putting together these many tools. I am astounded at the complexity managed so deftly by these “naive” end users.
What is it about the Internet, with its pretty graphics and simple clicks, that makes users feel so inundated; and about the spreadsheet—so complicated a tool—that makes them bold? The received wisdom about user-friendliness is challenged here. Human beings, I think, do not like to be condescended to.
The spreadsheet presumes nothing. It has no specific knowledge, no data, no steps it performs. What it offers instead is a complex vocabulary for expressing knowledge. It is, literally, a blank sheet of paper with a notion of columns and rows—and everything held on that sheet is presumed to come not from the program but from the human user. In the relationship between human and computer that underlies the spreadsheet, the human is the repository of knowledge, the smart agent, the active party. The user gives data its shape—places it in columns and rows, expresses the complex relationships among those columns and rows—and eventually turns data into more knowledge. It is the end user who creates information, who gives form to data, who informs the spreadsheet.
The relationship between person and machine is completely reversed on the Internet. The Net is the knowledge repository, and the user can only search it.12 The information on the net is predigested—all laid out in “pages,” all linked, albeit arbitrarily and chaotically. To shape this unwieldy, untended library into something meaningful requires the active participation of the user—but Internet browsers do not offer the rich and expressive vocabularies of spreadsheets. Users get buttons to press. They can go “Back.” They can go “Home.” They can create links. That’s it: the vocabulary of a five-year-old confronts the vast, messy archive that is the World Wide Web.
The spreadsheet is the program that all but created the personal computer. The spreadsheet and the word processor—two tools empty of information, two little programs sitting patiently and passively for their human owners to put something interesting into them. Now, fifteen years later, the Internet browser is the program creating the second generation of the personal computer. The browser—a click-click baby tool for searching the Web, where everything of interest already resides. It is a journey through the looking glass in the age of information: one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small.13
Am I doing the users a favor? What information have I really given them by providing access to the Internet? The project does have one Internet success almost immediately. A patient asks about a prescription for a new drug. The provider doesn’t know it. Click on the link to the Centers for Disease Control, and the
re it is: actually useful information. But the success story soon becomes apocryphal. I hear my client tell it over and over at planning meetings and realize: that’s it, there will be no other success stories. “Oh, I don’t find it much use,” says one user. “Well, I’ve used it for personal stuff,” says another, the henna-haired, red-nailed director of the women’s clinic. She blushes, but only a little. After all, we’re grown-ups hard at work at ground zero of a of sexually transmitted, deadly, epidemic disease. Maybe Brian is right; maybe there’s nothing to do but shrug. A little recreation couldn’t hurt.
In the end, the Jerry home page all but gives up on the idea of being a resource link to information on the Net. Instead, we supply information about the AIDS service providers participating in the project. Never mind that the clients Jerry is supposed to serve are not likely to have a computer, let alone a connection to the Web. Forget about that nasty reality: having a Web page has become the way we must prove our existence. We have a “presence” on the Web: we are therefore real. Click here to learn all about Project Jerry. Here are our hours and services. Come use us, we say. In the end, we simply do what everyone else does on the Net: we advertise.
I begin to wonder if there isn’t something in computer systems that is like a suburban development. Both take places—real, particular places—and turn them into anyplace.
I once lived three blocks from an undeveloped hillside. The land was scrubby, dry, left wild because the base of the hill was slowly being carved out by a working stone quarry. The steady beep-beep of backing trucks broke the quiet, dust rose continuously from the quarry, and the fifty-mile view from the top was toward the plebeian southern end of the city. Still, the hill had an austere beauty. Vultures patrolled the slopes, out hunting rodents in the thick undergrowth of mesquite and poison oak. Deer trails crisscrossed the fire roads. Once I saw a mountain lion. Maybe the appeal of the place was simply its human emptiness, and even when I didn’t hike up the fire trails, it comforted me just to know the hill was there.
Then one day I noticed that bulldozers were cutting off the hump of the hill. Soon it was clear that not even the quarry could hold off development forever: a housing tract was coming. The trails were closed, the groan of bulldozers joined the sound of beeping quarry trucks, and the houses began going up. When the development was nearly done, I went up to the top of the hill—or what was left of it—driving this time.
What struck me was how normal it looked. Ranch houses along regularly curving streets. Double garages. Blacktop driveways. Barely anything to describe—that’s how much it matched the idea of “suburban housing development.” Even the sense of being on a hill was gone, the view now being the sole province of the houses along the “cliffside,” presumably more expensive. How had they done it, I wondered? How had they taken that wild, scrubby place, in all its particularity of deer and poison oak, and turned it into a paradigm place, a standard set, an anyplace?
Something similar happened with the AIDS project. Despite the idealism of the programmers, the good intentions of my client’s staff, the hard work of the users, what we created in the end was not the “system of care” we set out to build. In the end, what we created was only a system.
The first sign was the users’ problem with e-mail. Connecting the providers via electronic mail was supposed to “increase communication,” “facilitate information exchange,” and other worthy organizational goals. My client spoke glowingly of imagined charts and files attached to friendly e-mail messages, all circling from agency to agency, enwrapping the patient in an electronic blanket of service. But it didn’t exactly turn out that way.
“I worry that e-mail is breaking down our system of care,” said one user.
“Is it a training issue?” asked my client. “Do you need another e-mail course?”
“No,” said the user, “the problem is we used to talk on the phone a lot. Now we don’t.”
“Oh.”
“We relied on knowing each other. Now we don’t.”
“Oh.”
Now they can sit in the office like programmers and send e-mail. Now they can stay where they are like stock analysts and connect by modems. Oh.
Next came budget and scheduling wrangles. Could the second phase of the system be done in December? At first, I tried what may be the oldest joke known to programming managers—“Sure you can have it in December! Of what year?”—but my client was in deadly earnest. “There is a political deadline,” they said, “and we can’t change it.” It did no good to explain that writing software was not a political process. The deed was done. They had gone around mentioning various dates—dates chosen almost at random, imagined times, wishes—and the mentioned dates soon took on an air of reality. To all the world, to city departments and planning bureaus, to task forces and advisory boards, the dates had become expectations, commitments. Now there was no way back. The date existed and the software would be “late.” Of course, this is the way all software projects become “late”—in relation to someone’s fantasy that is somehow adopted as real—but I didn’t expect it so soon at the AIDS project, place of “helping people,” province of “good.”
I asked, “What part of the system would you like me not to do?”
“You tell us,” they said.
“This one. This piece here can’t be done on time.”
“But we must have that one! It’s a political requirement!”
Round and round: the same as every software project, any software project. The same place.
All the “goodness” was slowly draining away. Then, two months into the planning of the second phase, the project took a distinctly “bad” turn. The director of the department began asking for links between client registration data and other city systems. She wanted to compare delivered services to commitments in providers’ contracts. She wanted cross-checks on funding sources, billings, contract compliance. She wanted to run the client information against a database kept by a group ominously called “Surveillance.”
“I thought the idea was to improve client care,” I said.
In meeting after meeting, I argued with the director. I tried to warn her that the machine cannot keep rounded edges; that its dumb, declarative nature could not comprehend the small, chaotic accommodations to reality which kept human systems running. How would it help clients if Jerry told her that this particular underfunded agency should be even more underfunded? What good would it do to find out that this poor, ill person was not quite as poor and ill as he was supposed to be? How would it help if, in the awful and explicit way of computer systems, Jerry made clear what everyone knew—that there was a little fudging going on around the edges, so that providers could get a little extra and give a little more. In the absence of the machine, everyone could wink at these small rough edges. But Jerry—cute little Jerry with its guacamole-colored screens and the smiling face of an African-American man with AIDS—could make it all plain beyond deniability. “Don’t do this,” I said to the director. “Once you have this information, you’ll have to do something about it.”
But she was adamant. “The people paying for this system have a right to good data!” she declared.
In this way, the system became the justification for the system. We collected data, therefore it had to be “good” data. And since we could link one database to another, since it was possible to cross-check data here with data there, well, we should link them. And what was designed to store patients’ information as a service for them, had somehow become the property of the “people paying for this system”—an agency of the federal government.
I didn’t really blame the director. She was a progressive woman who worked desperately hard to move the sluggish environment of the civil service. Jerry was her idea; it could not have existed without her. And there was nothing sinister about her motivation to account for all of the taxpayers’ money. No, she was a fine and energetic professional. She had simply done something I’d seen too many times before: she had succumbe
d to the fever of the system. As a product manager once told me, “I’ve never seen anyone with two systems who didn’t want us to hook them together.”
I remembered the first time I saw a system infect its owner. It was early in my career, at my first software company. I had just installed a new system at the offices of a small business in Central California. It was a sleepy place, a quiet city surrounded on every side by irrigated fields, in the great water-poor agricultural valley of Central California. The offices were on a two-lane road, in a plain single-storied building with a parking lot.
The company’s employees had been there for ten and twenty years, particularly the women, mostly clerical workers. They were the ones who would be most affected by the new system, yet they went about learning it with a homey cheerfulness that surprised me. I had the impression that these women of fifty or so were approaching the computer as it truly should be treated: as some new and nifty kitchen appliance with which one could make really swell things. All that was necessary, their good humor suggested, was to follow the recipes carefully.
The installation went smoothly. Later, after the women returned from training, I visited the office again. The business owner, an apparently good-natured Rotarian, was heartily pleased with his new computer. He insisted upon taking me out to dinner.
Normally, I would not much want to eat dinner with an independent insurance agent at the revolving restaurant atop a Holiday Inn. But there was no way to refuse. And the client, whom I’ll call William Banner, turned out to have a hearty, Protestant-ethic sort of charm. “Good job!” he kept saying, “You did a good, good job. Now order the steak!”
Our table went slowly round and round, I ate my first steak Bernaise (too rich), we drank what I, gratefully, did not then recognize as a truly dreadful red wine, and William Banner had nothing but nice things to say to me. I thought I was going to get through the evening pleasantly. But just after we ordered dessert, Mr. Banner leaned over to me and asked, “Can you keep track of keystrokes?”