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Wednesday, January 5, 2000

I am not a Luddite.

I'm not one of those people who wanted to smash all of the technology because it was getting us further away from God. I don't think that we're going to lose our humanity because we surf the Internet and send gobs of e-mail.

However, I must say that I'm a little disappointed at the lack of success by the Y2K bug.

Oh, c'mon, you know you were perched on your chair in the early hours of December 31, 1999. Waiting for Sydney, Austrailia to go dark. Hoping for South Korea to plunge into the dark ages. Wishing that Moscow would send a couple of non-compliant nuclear missiles to a country no one has ever heard of.

Today, people are questioning all of the pre-Y2K hysteria, calling the whole multi-national effort a waste of time, money, and adrenaline. You've got to be kidding me.

Had the geek emeriti of the world not risen up to smite ol' Buggie back in 1996, would you even be reading this column today? Would you be able to send e-mail to your buddies taunting them about Green Bay's early exit from the football season? Would you be able to use your new American Express Blue card to by that online Hustler subscription? Probably not.

And, that's not necessarily a good thing. Wondering whether or not your technology works -- and why -- is a healthy thing. Leaning on it like a crutch in a windstorm is not.

There's a flurry of Internet Service Providers advertising on TV and radio, saying "We make getting on the Internet easy!" Should it be that damned easy? My girlfriend's mother is a textbook example of why some people shouldn't be on the Internet. She opens every attachment, runs every executable program, turns her computer off straight every time it crashes -- and can not understand why her computer doesn't work the way she wants it to.

She didn't really understand all of the Y2K bug fuss last month. "Well, if it breaks, we'll just go back to doing it the way we did before computers, right?"

Can you truly imagine working without the technology we've popularized in the last 10 years? If my company didn't have e-mail, no one would ever communicate. Forget online banking -- banking-by-phone didn't become feasible until databases became sophisticated enough to handle the phone load, and that was in the last 15 years.

So, January 1, 2000 came and went, and we're still standing on our silicon island. The sharks didn't come this time. Next time, we may not be so lucky.

--Devin Pike