Title: Thinking Aloud

The bursting of the dot com bubble is far enough away now that it is easier to look at the whole thing dispassionately. One of the curses (or advantages) of being trained as a sociologist is that I tend to look past the techie aspects of issues to the social aspect.

The whole frenzy reminds me a little of a university course case study I was involved in of the Melanesian Cargo Cults. For those of you whose geography is a little hazy, the Melanesian islands are in the southern part of the Pacific.

Since most of you will not have studied anthropology, I will explain.

Towards the end of the 19th Century there were outbreaks of religious fervour lead by prophets claiming that they had received a revelation. These disturbances ran through until the 1930s when they finally died out. All had a common thread in that they claimed that they proclaimed that a new age of plenty was imminent, and that a special 'cargo' would be delivered by the tribal gods, mythical heroes, or ancestors.

If the cargo were expected by ship or by plane then the cultists would build symbolic wharves or landing strips. In any event, the result was usually the failure to take normal precautions to provide for the future. Crops were not sown, livestock was slaughtered and used for feasting, traditional material resources were abandoned and so on. An associated political agitation claiming that the old (colonialist) order would be over thrown frequently accompanied cargo cults.

At the time they started the cults were a novel phenomena, and people had no idea what the cause was - there were the usual banalities about the irrationality of the heathen mind, and the colonial powers set about repressing the cults.

In fact, the cargo cults were a perfectly rational response to what the tribes saw going on around them. They saw the colonial officials not doing any work but receiving supplies from overseas at regular intervals, and from this they constructed a mythos that was perfectly rational. A myth of gods who provided their people with plenty, even though those people planted no crops and raised no livestock.

From this it was only a small step to the postulation that the tribal gods would themselves soon start sending their own people cargo to support a life of ease. Some went as far as to suggest that the tribal gods were in fact sending the cargo, but that the colonists were intercepting it and keeping for themselves!

I am embarrassed to say that at the time I was studying this, we all thought it was amusing that these savages should make this sort of mistake about the source of the colonist's goods. We were all just out of school, arrogant teenagers who knew it all. People in Western society, we knew, would not be so 'stupid'.

Sometimes I think sociology would be much better served if no one were allowed to study it unless they were over 30...

But if you stop and think about it, the dot com mania of the last few years has all the hallmarks of a cargo cult. There was no shortage of digital prophets proclaiming the dawning of a new era. There was the promise of plenty without having to work for it.

There was the abandonment of prudent provision for the future, with companies eschewing any semblance of 'due diligence' as they scrambled to get onto the dot com gravy train. There was the abandonment of traditional material resources in favour of the new as people double mortgaged their homes to fund the purchase of dot com shares whose PE ratio indicated that it would take hundreds of years to realise the initial investment.

And those involved all had the fervour of a religious cult - the gurus of MIT's Media Lab at the pinnacle, shading down through the seers of the stock broking companies' analysts to the individual members who desperately believed that they were participating in a revolution.

Most of the people involved were basing their beliefs on an ignorance of the basic mechanisms of the market, and an inability to learn from their own history. For, despite all the hype, this was only a re-run of previous stock market frenzies. It has all happened before, go and read up about the South Sea Bubble or the railroad building mania of the mid-19th Century, to name but two instances, if you do not believe me.

And, of course, the ultimate irony of this outbreak of faith in impersonal, off stage, forces is the fact that it is all built around one of the most significant technological advances since the industrial revolution - the Internet!

I can remember a time when getting a new computer was like Christmas and birthday all rolled into one. All the extra power and new, cool applications that you could now run made the whole thing very exciting. You copied the applications on your old machine across to the new one and you were off.

Now a days, getting a new computer has become nearly as stressful as moving house. Microsoft operating systems have become steadily less stable and less usable since Windows 95, and most of the newer applications have become more bloated and run slower, in spite of the increase in raw computing power.

The crucial change was actually the introduction of Windows. The key problem is that you now have to 'install' applications, instead of just being able to copy them over. Of course, a substantial number of programs that you have on your old machine will be small utilities that you no longer have the source for.

Then there is the way the machines themselves (assuming that they come with the operating system you wanted) are not set up the way you want, and the set up utilities are completely different from the ones on the old machine.

Finally, Installation of products is becoming so complex that you have to be an expert just to get a reasonably complex program installed. A lot of companies now have people whose only job is to get new packages running on their employees' machines! What a waste of money.

The net result of all this is a massive drop in productivity for anyone changing to a new machine.

Companies often compound this drop productivity by imposing a corporate 'one size fits all' mentality. 'There will be', so the memo goes, 'a single computer model used by everyone in the corporation. This will allow the MIS department to significantly enhance it's support profile.'

The net result is that a lot of people get massively over specified computers. Someone who just needs to send internal email and look at the company's intranet web site gets a machine fully capable of clogging up the company's Internet link with massive porn downloads and the opportunity to fill their hard drive full of all the latest viruses.

At the other end of the spectrum, the people who really need computing power end up with a woefully under specified machine which seriously damages their productivity. They spend most of their paid time waiting for the computer to finish processing their spreadsheet of whatever.

In the middle is the single person who dreamed up the idea, who has a machine that exactly meets his (yes, it is usually a male) needs.

It was my intention to have the second part of the maps coding stuff in this issue, but a combination of dead computers and the agro of setting up new one, plus the problems of setting up Linux on a Toshiba laptop have conspired to prevent me from properly testing the code, so I am going to have to hold that over until the next issue, I'm afraid.

Mea culpa - I should have know that it would take a loooooong time to get anything out of the ordinary running on a laptop.

Have fun programming.