Where do you want to wander aimlessly today?

2003-09-28 - 11:15 a.m.

All right now everyone, go download Skype so we can phone y'all.

This is the latest offering from the minds behind Kazaa -- a voice-over internet-protocol peer-to-peer service that is meant to replace the telephone. The Kazaa boys are finished with helping the music-distribution revolution; now they're on to telephony. When that's finished, they'll brush off their list of nonsense words and create a new company to revolutionize the food-services industry with DSIP technology. You watch. It's coming.

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom want Skype to take off to the point that the old phone system vanishes and we all laugh our Skypey laughs while dancing on Ma Bell's grave. It's a lovely thought, but I doubt we'll have much success convincing thugs who have broken into our homes to wait patiently while we boot up our computers to phone 911.

Perhaps we shouldn't assign our computers every job currently held by devices in our homes after all. We are too tickled by our Because We Can impulse; by gathering all technological functions in home computers, we are converting them into life-support systems. And this isn't necessarily a great idea -- I don't know about you lot, but I can't remember the last time my telephone performed an illegal operation. I'm quite sure I'd remember if my refrigerator had gotten low on system resources and lost some of my food.

The truth is, I don't like or respect computers enough to give them this much work to do. They crash, they overheat, they're noisy, they're slow, but we seem not to notice or care. You can connect your phone line to a modem and install answering-machine software, run Skype as your telephone, use Winamp as your stereo, watch downloaded movies on your computer from Kazaa, get rid of all your printed books and just read downloaded e-books, throw away all your clocks and just run a screen-saver that displays the time, forego mailing letters and calling people up in favour of email and instant messaging... and then when your computer isn't working, you can just, well, sit in your apartment and look out the window. Unless you'd had them boarded up after you installed e-LookOutWindow 6.2 -- in which case you're screwed.

(Semi-related anecdote: in the last months of 1999, during the pre-Y2K frenzy, when many people were hoarding food in their basements and polishing up their shotguns for the coming riots, I was working in a call-center for the appliance-repair department of a major retailer. The Y2K-paranoia calls we received were priceless. One fellow called to ask if his garage door opener would stop functioning in 2000, trapping his car in the garage. I had to calmly explain that not only would the device work fine as it contained no date-sensitive computer, but that that cord dangling down from the apparatus was a manual release that would allow him to lift the door without the device. No, he wasn't going to be trapped. I also remember a call about a refrigerator possibly not working after the mighty collapse of western society -- and had to explain that the refrigerator didn't care what date it was either. I realized something about the increasingly technologized world we live in: people who know absolutely nothing about computers and people who know much about computers both live calmly, but people who know just a very little bit about computers live in a state of panicked dread.)