LONDON -- I think I've discovered a new neurosis of the 21st century. It involves frustration, guilt, shame and outbursts of destructive violence. The neurosis lurks wherever there are personal computers. (Business computers, and the work and commercial systems they create, produce similar feelings, but these are more obviously political and erupt in violent demonstrations against, say, McDonald's or the World Trade Organization.)
People operate personal computers in the privacy of their own rooms, driven by their personal hopes and desires. These may be mundane -- some people are attracted to personal computers because they offer a neat system of storage and typing wrapped up in one little box. Very tidy and convenient. But for others, the personal computer is like a magic box in a children's fairy tale; they imagine this bland little box will connect their puny selves with a vast and limitless world and thus offer immediate access to vast and limitless desires and powers. Or at least the ability to order a book, transmit an article or arrange a holiday without shifting from their chairs, as though in a dream. This hope is so preposterous that hubris is inevitable.
The 21st-century neurosis created by personal computers is exactly the discovery of this hubris. Far from being propelled into a world of unlimited desires, which can be accessed with unimaginable ease, more and more of us spend our days experiencing newly horrible degrees of frustration, guilt, shame and outbursts of violence. I am writing this on my new personal computer, which has consistently failed to do even the simple little tasks I have set it, like connecting me to the Internet, since I acquired it a few weeks ago. I haven't yet wrecked it (too much guilt) but my poor cat is looking a little worse for wear as I shriek and hurl things around the room.