Of all the insidious frustrations of computer use, this morning Kurt Vonnegut enlightened me to the worst. This is not the worst because of its cost to commerce or its direct influence on productivity, but its symbolic significance. It boils down to this:

Why can’t you turn a computer off?

In Vonnegut’s the Sirens of Titan (a must-read, by the way, if you think Douglas Adams was unique and original) the mothership of the first army of mars has a capacity for 2 persons and 500 years’ worth of hamburgers, sporting equipment, and other morale-boosting materials, and only two controls. The button marked ‘ON’ takes you from Mars to a predetermined landing position under full automatic control, and ‘OFF’, which isn’t wired to anything but was fitted because Martian mental health experts held that humans are more comfortable with a machine they think can be switched off.

Vonnegut wrote this in 1959, long before the BBC micro showed up in schools across Britain. Britons of a certain age may remember when prompted that you should never switch off a BBC micro with a disk in the drive, and you should never take a disk out of the drive while the light is on. Either transgression could result in loss of your ‘O’ level computer studies project, or worse, your favourite pirated game.

This was the beginning of a Dark Age in computer use. Don’t get me wrong, it was progress. Before this time, computers were used exclusively by trained scientists and by hardcore geeks whose skills were mathematics and electronics, two skills which were absolutely necessary to own a computer since you had to solder the thing together yourself and program it by waggling switches and trying not to drop too much scurf from your bushy ’70s beard into the circuit board.

The Dark Age was at the same time a Dawning. A dawning because for the first time, users were people whose primary interests were “home accounting”, “getting help with your homework” and most importantly “beaming yourself and your family into the future”. The technology was nascent, and the science of user interface design was neither particularly mature nor perceived as particularly relevant by the manufacturers of these machines. The machines were unique in being both scientific instruments and scientific subjects, and as such enjoyed a special reverence which led the user to tolerate traps such as that above. It was a Dark Age because though the traps were easily explainable and obvious to anyone who had ever built a computer, they were not so clear to anyone who hadn’t, and an easy majority of users fell into this category. Computers became god-like, a rich tradition of rites and suspicions rising up around them. Some school classes were forbidden to touch the science lab’s sole BBC micro, even when switched off, for fear they would do something too clever for the teachers to undo again.

Much later, when the PC undeservedly but unavoidably displaced the BBC micro from the classroom, again it came with a golden rule: do not switch it off without ‘parking the heads’. This was in fact the same technical issue as suffered by the BBC micro. The tiny electromagnets that read and wrote data to the disk could get uppity in the few microseconds after their power was unexpectedly removed. If they were anywhere near the data surface of the disk they might scramble some small piece of data. If that randomly-selected small piece of data were particularly important, you might lose everything stored on the disk.

Nowadays there are many safeguards against data loss. Disk drives get told, milliseconds in advance, when their power is going to be switched off, and they get the hell out of the danger zone before damage can result. Nowadays, even the power switch doesn’t really switch the power off. It sends a message to the computer ‘Hey, the user’s pressing the button on your case. I think he or she wants you to do something’. Here is the key to my objection. The computer is sovereign. The PC gets to say when it shuts down, not the user. To compound the indiginty, to reinforce its superiority, the computer requires us to ask it nicely, through the START menu, to shut down, and then to sit patiently in case it wants to ask us difficult questions: “Do you want to save this?”… “This program doesn’t want to shut down. Do you want to fight it, bearing in mind it has all your projected figures for next quarter?”.

We accept this because we believe two things as a legacy of the Dark Ages: 1) we believe that the computer has at its disposal a practically infinite variety of ways to crush our aspirations through such techniques as catastrophic data loss, costly and mysterious trips to bearded men with screwdrivers, and plain refusal to cooperate; and 2) we believe the rituals imposed by the computer to be necessary, on account of science.

Point (1) is certainly as true today as it ever has been. Though the chances of data loss are today far reduced from those of twenty years ago, the volume and import of data we keep are far greater. Over every PC is a ‘hell of a lot of messing around getting people’s addresses and emails and trying to remember stuff’ of Damocles.

Point (2) however, is pure superstition. There is no technical reason why you can’t hit the ‘ON’ button, wait a moment for various things to orient themselves, send your emails, download your illicit music, shoot some martians, then hit the ‘OFF’ button and walk away. There is no longer any technical reason why sovereignty cannot be handed back to the user.

We owe it to ourselves to demand it.