For use: Friday, November 24

Future Shoes: "Stupid people"

by Michael Finley

Computer User Columnist

The other day on the radio I heard a victim of AIDS complain that a bigger problem in her life than AIDS was stupid people.

By stupid people she meant those who, a dozen years into the epidemic, are still hideously misinformed about the disease's infectiousness. They are afraid to drink from the same water fountain as an AIDS victim, afraid to give a hug at a going away party.

Stupidity plays a bigger role in our lives than most of us are willing to admit. When my son was in the 3rd grade, the big put-down was "stupid." All his peers were calling anyone they didn’t like stupid.

I pointed out that calling everyone you don’t like stupid is pretty, well, stupid.

But it isn’t just the 3rd grade. We all do it. We're insecure about the mineral content between our ears, and we project that secret terror onto others. God, are you stupid.

Stupidity evidently thrives in Palm Beach County. Second graders shown the infamous butterfly ballot seemed to get it without problem. But somehow, 19,000 Palm Beachians -- 4% of the electorate -- voted for Buchanan and Gore -- with a country's leadership hanging in the balance. That is either a seriously bad ballot, or 19,000 formidably stupid citizens.

I'm old enough to remember when stupid people made their big play for disadvantaged minority status. During the Nixon administration, two slack-jawed nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court -- South Carolinian Clement Haynesworth and Floridian G. Harold Carswell -- were offered up to the Senate on the grounds that "Mediocre people deserve representation, too" (actual quote by Sen. Roman Hruska, R-Neb.).

It soon became apparent that stupidity was our destiny, that we were in the midst of a humongous national dumbing-down. When the movie Superman was released in 1977, I thought, "Imagine, making a movie from a comic book. Well, once can’t hurt -- one thing's for sure, Hollywood won’t spent the next 25 years making endless sequels of children's literature for grownups."

I see my video outlet is taking reservations for The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkel.

I don't mean to sound anti-stupid. Lord knows, I myself am pretty stupid on certain matters, especially those involving hand tools. Or computers.

I often feel, when I am discussing a tech problem with online support, that the real problem very often is that I am, especially when staring at two connectors that appear connected but do not act connected, dumber than a box of rocks.

It is especially hard on the techies who design this stuff, because they must put up with the stupidity of the great unclever mass of users who don’t "get" tech stuff, but just want it to work when we flick the switch.  Techies don’t want to spend their lives idiotproofing cool stuff -- their brilliance is slowed to a crawl by our stupidity.

We are holding them back, clinging to WYSIWYG GUIs, backward compatibility, and a human hand to hold, a voice at the other end of a tollfree call when the LED lights go out.

"We could create a great new world," a software engineer told me once, "if customers had more than one hard little rat-raisin of a neuron rolling around in their brainpans."

Isn’t it odd that, as a culture, our hearts go out automatically to people who are severely mentally retarded, but that as the severity of retardation in others diminishes -- as they become more like us at low tide -- we find ourselves despising them?