Take that, you Soulless son of a Bitch!

in the battle against machines, man usually comes up on the short end, but there is a growing number of guerrillas who have managed to deliver some telling blows

Robert Goines is, perhaps, a hero of our times. An ordinary man, he is the manager of a Dance Oil service station in Indianapolis. It is a station stocked with the customary maps and stacks of tires, equipped with the ordinary pumps and lifts. And it was furnished with an ordinary soft-drink machine--which routinely bilked Goines's customers of a couple of bucks a month. It did, that is, until the 29th of December three years ago. On that fateful afternoon, Goines fed it 15 cents and it balked--yielding neither bottle nor change. "I shook that machine," he reported afterward, "then I walked over to the desk drawer, got my .22 revolver and I shot it dead." Watching the fizzing stain spread across the concrete floor, he cried, "That's the last time you're going to cheat anybody."

Goines's machine was not the only one murdered in recent years. Indeed, Americans have lately put a surprising number of rifle slugs into public vending machines, coin changers and pay phones. And those that got away have often been clubbed, hatcheted, burned and, in the case of phone booths on isolated roads, run over. Goines had a fictional model: Keenan Wynn wailed, "Now you'll have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company," after Peter Sellers had forced him to turn his carbine on a Coke machine in Dr. Strangelove way back in 1964. And who can doubt that for every overt act of antimachine violence, there have been untold thousands of spindled IBM cards, washers slipped into gum machines and long-distance calls charged to other people's numbers?

It is more than mindless vandalism. True, hapless toasters and unoffending phones are often clobbered for kicks alone. And cigarette machines and gum vendors knocked over by crooks who would just as willingly steal from people. But in cases too common to ignore, mechanical gadgets have been calmly murdered, quietly uncoupled or coldly abandoned by people who simply hate machines.

The first massive attacks on machinery took place in Nottingham in the early years of the English Industrial Revolution. Called Luddites after their apocryphal leader, Ned Ludd, clandestine bands of English stocking makers and cloth finishers worked havoc with the newfangled gins and mills that were eliminating their jobs.

In some ways we have come full circle. While the Luddites of Robin Hood country feared machines that did what people could not, the Neo-Luddites of America oppose machines that fail to do what people can. The old Luddites hated machines that could knit faster than they could. The Neo-Luddites hate machines that can't say good morning when they sell you a newspaper. And there is an added slight. The Luddites of Nottingham were replaced by mills that made better stockings. Today's computers often give less service than the clerks they replace.

Norman Mailer encountered the malaise right in the heart of technologyland, Cape Kennedy, where Apollo 11 was set to take men to the moon for the first time:

The trailer interior consisted of a set of vending machines for chiliburgers, hamburgers, pastries--all people wanted were cold drinks. So the line crawled, while everyone waited for the same machine. Nobody was about to have machine-vended chiliburgers at half past eight in the morning. Still so many demands on the iced-drink machine caused malfunctions. Soon, two vending-machine workers were helping to service the machine. But it took forever. Coins had to go into their slot, change be made, cups filled, tot of cracked ice be dropped, syrup poured, then soda. Just one machine. It was pure American lunacy. Shoddy technology, the worst kind of American shoddy, was replacing men with machines which did not do the work as well as the men. This crowd of a hundred thirsty reporters could have been handled in three minutes by a couple of countermen at a refreshment stand in a ball park. But there was an insidious desire to replace men everywhere with absurd machines poorly designed and abominably put together; yes this abominable food-vending trailer was the proper opposite number to those smug and complacent VIPs in their stands a half mile away; this was the world they had created, not the spaceship. They knew nothing about the spaceship but its value in the eyes of the world--that was all they had to know. The food-vending trailer was their true product.

After three quarters of a century of unbridled machine worship, a new heresy is abroad in the land. Brought up believing that every electric can opener or hydraulic dam was an unqualified boon to mankind and that when better cars were built Buick would build them, Americans are beginning to lose their technological innocence. They are learning that detergents may be more dangerous than dirt and automobiles more deadly than wars. Appliances, they are told, work better than ever--only they can't be fixed when they finally break down. The supersonic transport is now 100 times as fast as the bus to the airport. "Things fall apart," wrote Yeats in another context. They do, indeed.

It isn't necessarily when machines break down, but when they work, that many find them distressing. Not only do they multiply at an alarming rate but their evolutionary patterns would stump a Darwin. In the face of all logic, perfectly sensible machines sprout chrome-plated knobs and plastic fins; they merge with one another to form freakish combinations; and they spawn endless and more expensive progeny. We are learning that mechanical progress is not without cost, that like the blob from outer space, technologies seem to prosper at the expense of living things, and that they appear to have no natural enemies.

Most disturbing, machines are beginning to make people mechanical. Laborsaving devices alter the nature of labor. The evidence can be found on any production line. And computers, even where they make no mistakes, can allow no exceptions to the rules. Progress has its own refugees. Unwilling to be mechanized, constitutionally opposed to vandalism, a number of people simply abandon machines altogether. Bicycles are appearing where there were once only cars and trucks. People walk where they once rode. After a century of trying to go as fast as possible, men are standing still, and after 5000 years of trying to overcome the vagaries of wind and tide and weather, people are returning to farms. Who would (continued on page 146)Take That(continued from page 131) have thought, 20 years ago, that men would boast of owning no television, that they would be thought daring for living without a telephone?

As with the original Luddites, however, the machines usually win. Bob Goines was convicted of drawing a deadly weapon, shooting a gun inside city limits and disorderly conduct. He was sentenced to 60 days in jail (50 suspended) and fined $160 plus costs. The masses, though, were with him. More than 150 strangers wrote, offering aid. Several lawyers, a policeman and a judge were among those who helped pay his fine. Other Indianapolis lawyers offered to handle an appeal, and an organ player was willing to serve part of his sentence. (Still, how Nottingham has changed! Neo-Luddite Goines is a new Robin Hood who no longer steals from the rich to give to the poor but, rather, can do no more than put sugar in the sheriff's gas tank.)

The Neo-Luddites, to be sure, have other champions. Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko, for example, last year wrote a column on "How to Kick a Machine." Royko reported watching a man lose a dime in a coffee machine, then prepare to walk away. "If he had gone in a bar," Royko ruminated, "and ordered a beer, and if the bartender had taken his money but not given him a beer, he'd do something. He'd yell or fight or call the police. But he let a machine cow him."

"Kick it," Royko called to him. "But not like that. You are going to kick it with your toe, but you can hurt yourself that way." "I stepped back," he continued, "and showed him the best way. You use the bottom of your foot, as if you're kicking in a bedroom door." Another spectator disagreed. "I prefer pounding on it. I'll show you." "But why just one fist?" queried yet another bystander. "I always use two."

But there is little point in clobbering your own dishwasher when it leaks. It just increases the repair bill. And it is equally self-defeating to poke holes in the fuselage of a plane because it is still circling Washington when it should be in Boston. Pent-up hostilities, though, generally find outlets, and it seems likely that much of the violence aimed at public pay phones and gum machines was meant for private toasters and vacuum cleaners--or the adding machine at work. What would appear mindless vandalism may in fact be sublimated Luddism, for if one's own expensive machines are off limits, someone else's may be fair game. "The answer," wrote Royko, "is to kick and punch them." "If you are old, lame or female," he added, "bring a hammer to work with you, or an ax."

Some people do. William Lynch, the general manager of New York City's Interborough News Company, is in the unenviable position of viewing Neo-Luddites as the machines see them, and he knows all about hatchets and crowbars. For Interborough owns (and Lynch is responsible for) the 6666 gum, candy, mint, ice-cream, potato-chip, lipstick, comb, novelty, shoeshine and weight machines in the city's subway stations.

Lynch's machines are constantly assaulted by Neo-Luddites, vandals and crooks. The problem, he says, is that no one can tell who did what--or when. A gum machine may have been ripped to shreds by a gang of thieves, an irate gum-chewer stripped of his last penny or a tired commuter furious with his car. What's more, the machine may have kept the penny because of poor maintenance or perhaps because of an earlier attempt to rob it.

Whatever the cause, there is growing evidence public machines don't work as well as they used to. According to a survey recently undertaken by New York's Department of Consumer Affairs, the number of subway machines in some way defective jumped from 36 percent to 62 percent in the past two years, while the number producing neither product nor returned coin rose from 23 percent to 38 percent. Most blood boiling was the 11 percent to 57 percent increase in the number of machines that gave no clue as to whom to write or phone for refunds. That kind of hauteur creates people willing to invest considerable time and ingenuity for the simple pleasure of fooling a machine.

On an average day, New Yorkers slip 250 slugs (mostly washers), 100 filed-down pennies (good as dimes) and upwards of 150 foreign coins into the gullible mouths of Interborough's vendors. In one three-day period, Lynch found coins from 55 nations, including Iceland, Surinam, Ceylon and the Netherlands Antilles--as well as four tokens for the Delaware River Bridge and one for the Toronto subways. Leading the list, for some reason, were 263 Trinidad pennies. Lynch sells the foreign coins to dealers, returns the filed pennies to the mint, keeps the usable washers for his repair shop and dumps the remaining slugs and buttons into Long Island Sound.

• • •

America's largest corporation (and, indeed, the world's) is, to no one's surprise, the favorite target of this country's Neo-Luddites. But while it is hardly news that there are those who steal from Ma Bell, it is remarkable how little of the damage comes from the simple theft of cash. Of the $23,000,000 A. T. & T. lost to thieves last year, only $750,000 was taken from pay phones. And of the $11,000,000 Bell suffered last year in property damage, only $1,250,000 was connected with larceny. The vast bulk of the company's losses--$22,200,000 last year and $28,300,000 the year before--came from thefts of service: calls that were billed to other people's phones and credit cards. And the overwhelming majority of service thieves were neither professional criminals nor very heavy phone users. Not all who filched service, to be sure, were Neo-Luddites, nor were all the vandals who ripped up A. T. & T. property. But it seems safe to assume that a great many people harbor some hostility toward the phone company, since it is, after all, the largest machine in America. And telephones are handy and faceless. A shoplifter has to face, or at least consider, the human being from whom he is stealing, while a service thief is knocking over an innocuous black-plastic box--taking money no one will try to collect until next month.

Some addicted Neo-Luddites also argue that the war against A. T. & T. is just--fought for the humanist cause. Filled with unanswerable recorded remarks, linked to ranks of computers and forever beeping and buzzing back when spoken to, they feel the telephone is an upstart machine trying to ape its betters. Cheating it, beating it down and showing it to be no more than a dumb collection of plastic blobs and wires, they maintain, is a victory for people.

The telephone company has also given the matter some thought. Hank Boettinger, the Bell System's director of management sciences, thought a lot of toll fraud--calls billed to others' credit cards and numbers--might come from a kind of prankish urge to play with machines. In his youth, he recalled, kids used to hang around railroad yards to watch the engines. But people no longer simply gape at mechanical marvels, he continued. "What happens now is that they turn them on." A Boston train was, in fact, recently taken on a short jaunt--off the tracks--by a young man who wanted to see how it ran.

The cultists who call themselves "phone phreaks" also seem to have more fun playing with the phone system than making free telephone calls. Using small electronic devices (called blue boxes, for reasons lost to history), they have learned how to make unlimited, undetectable long-distance calls and they've set up what amounts to a private phone network. What do they discuss? New ways to make free calls.

The story of the phone phreaks illustrates the special vulnerability of the (continued on page 170) Take that continued from page 146) most complicated machines--a weakness Luddites have always been quick to note. The Bell System some years ago allowed a technical journal to print the frequencies of the beeps it uses to route long-distance calls--the notes in the little jingle heard just before a call connects. Before long, private musicians were playing their own little tunes for Bell's switches and relays. Using blue boxes to produce the notes--or, in the case of one young man with perfect pitch, simply whistling--they are able to make calls that not only go for free but also leave no trace. And there is apparently no way to stop them--short of junking a few billion dollars' worth of beepers and electronic ears.

The New Left has also made the phone company its own plaything. The editors of underground newspapers, for example, take great pride in being the first to publish the credit-card numbers of the nation's great corporations--and they have so successfully spread the word that the Dow Chemical Company was reportedly billed for 10,000 bogus calls last year. Credit-card calling, however, requires a bit of acting ability. More commonly, long-distance calls are simply charged to other people's numbers. Or placed on pay phones--with the help of a portable tape recorder and a short tape of dimes, nickels and quarters dropping into coin boxes.

Even truck drivers subvert the phone company, as Bell discovered some years ago. Drivers, it found, were carrying peculiar code books that connected messages like "Proceeding Pittsburgh on schedule" or "Tied up for repairs in Newark" with lists of ordinary names. Drivers on the road would place person-to-person collect calls to their home offices and the offices, equipped with their own copies of the code book, would know what was the matter from the name requested. The calls, of course, were not accepted, giving the truckers their own free communications system.

As Boettinger points out, the Neo-Luddites simply inflict the cost of their attacks on the public at large. This argument, however, does not exactly ring. The enraged misanthrope who takes his ax to the phone whose recorded voice insists the Pentagon's main number has been temporarily disconnected is not likely to be deterred by the thought he has added $.000000046 to the bill of every phone user in Virginia. What's more, the pass-through of increased expenses is a notion that, rightly or wrongly, angers many Americans. If A. T. & T. cannot pay its bills, then, goddamn it, some officer should sell his yacht. The public image of most large American corporations, laments Boettinger, is not what it could be.

If the image of the corporation is slipping, that of its most conscientious servant, the data-processing computer, has dropped out of sight. Americans today fold, spindle and mutilate with complete abandon. There may have been a time (in the early Fifties, perhaps) when people took the punched cards in their electric bills as a bright omen, but those days are long gone. Too many years of blackening little boxes, copying 19-digit identification numbers on checks and writing irate letters have reduced romance to drudgery. We have learned that computer programs are designed to make people compatible with machines, not the other way around.

Everyone is eventually billed for last year's paid-for merchandise or someone else's extravagant clothes hamper. Now and then, someone receives nine bills and four threatening letters about an outstanding debt of "$00.00." Writer Rex Reed was computered in a fashion that may, however, be unusual. Shopping in a New York department store, Reed was briefly put under arrest for using a stolen credit card. Upon producing identification, he was informed that Rex Reed was dead. Finally, persuaded Reed was alive, store authorities destroyed his card, explaining that their computer's conclusions could not be altered.

Neo-Luddite reaction to computerized billing has been mild up to now, according to utility spokesmen. Some people rip their punched billing cards into little pieces before they send them back, while others simply write obscene remarks on them. A few refuse to pay postage and return their checks in unstamped envelopes (the same people, perhaps, who always return the prepaid-postage envelopes that come in junk mail).

More subversive voices, however, are being heard. Most persuasive, doubtless, is that of ex-Communist Harvey Matusow, an American living in London who is the founder and main mover of the International Society for the Abolition of Data Processing Machines and the author of an anticomputer text called The Beast of Business. Admitting computers are of value in science, Matusow claims their commercial applications sacrifice individual freedom to simple cost efficiency. What to do? Subtlety, argues Matusow, is the rule. A ripped or obviously vandalized card is easy to spot before it enters the machine. "The object," as one young programmer put it, "is to shove it as far down the computer's throat as possible." Matusow's suggestion is what he calls "computer-card roulette." Tape your bill to a drafting board and carefully cut in a few extra holes. Then sit back and see what happens. Several extra holes in a magazine-subscription card, Matusow reports, produced 23 copies a week, along with a nice note thanking him for using the weekly in his current-events class. Three holes in his electric bill, he adds, yielded six months' free service. Matusow also recommends over- or underpaying utility bills by a few cents--which tends to persuade oversensitive computer programs they are making errors--and running a strong electromagnet over the magnetized coding numbers on checks, which makes them unfit for automatic sorters. "Someone at the bank," he says, "will have to handle them personally. But, after all, it's your money and it should get the loving care it deserves."

That may be satisfying, but it doesn't really get to the root of the problem. There is, in truth, no way to really cripple a computer through the mail. Even in the flesh, data-processing machines are not all that easy to dismantle. In the uproar that followed Kent State and Cambodia, a band of New York University students seized a $3,500,000 computer the Atomic Energy Commission had thoughtlessly left on their campus. No money, they threatened, and the machine would be "offed." The students' first crisis occurred shortly after they had barricaded themselves in the computer's air-conditioned quarters: No one, it seems, had brought a screwdriver. When police arrived the next day, the killers were already defeated--no amount of bashing, bumping or, as a last resort, burning appeared to faze the machine, which went on happily buzzing and clicking throughout its ordeal.

Matusow suggests a subtler way of irritating the machine, a method with the added charm of requiring no overt violence. The idea, he says, is to have the computer visited by a number of ravishing women doused with the strongest, cheapest perfume they can buy. Computers, it appears, are allergy prone, and tiny perfume droplets in the air may make some sensitive internal parts unhappy.

• • •

The original followers of Ned Ludd, of course, worked in the factories they attacked--a thought that has given more than one executive a sleepless night. In-house Luddism, in fact, is more common than supposed. Like GIs who retaliate against unpopular officers, printers often edit their editors' copy. At one Pennsylvania newspaper, a longstanding feud between a sportswriter named Wilson--whose copy was always late--and his overworked printers led to an occasional extra subhead in his column. One such read, "Ed Wilson Eats Shit." Time-Life writers commiserate about the "phantom diddler" who alters their stories somewhere between closing in New York and printing in Chicago. And there is also the case of the mechanic who pasted the mailing labels on several million Time covers right across Spiro Agnew's mouth.

In-house computer sabotage is still in the theoretical stage. The best way, the experts agree, would be to tinker with the program in a manner both difficult to detect and slowly but cumulatively damaging. A billing system, for example, should be altered to subtract a small but random amount from every customer's bill. By the time the errors were discovered, the loss would be vast; and, since the deductions followed no pattern, they would be difficult to trace and almost impossible to collect. Any program could be mildly boggled by simply reversing one of its many steps--though an expert, of course, would know which steps would cause the greatest confusion.

The billing systems used by Bell, according to Boettinger's associate Harvey McMains, use standardized and easily replaced programs. The company's experimental and research programs, on the other hand, could be reduced to gibberish--for a few weeks, at least--by a knowledgeable Neo-Luddite working from within. Another danger is the notion of stealing computer time. Time-sharing systems, which, in effect, rent the use of a computer for a given time, are growing increasingly popular. And while the Bell System is not heavily involved in time sharing, it has had its difficulties. One laboratory employee, for example, completed his doctoral dissertation during his free evenings on one of Bell's computers. By the time the loss was noticed, $15,000 in computer time had irretrievably vanished into the past. Most perplexing was the fact the student didn't know he was stealing.

Nor is the Bell System itself incapable of a bit of playful tinkering. While buying time on a computer owned by General Electric, Bell engineers began playing with the clock that measured the hours they were purchasing. In time, McMains relates, they learned how to make it run backward. The Bell people eventually owned up--much to the embarrassment of G. E.; but who is to say the next company will be so honest?

So far, no radical Neo-Luddite has offered a computer in the people's interest. But there is a story current about a young man who built his company's payroll program around his own employee number. The whole system, it is said, would self-destruct if his number were absent--in the event, for example, that he was fired. IBM's systems designers go a step further. In their "doomsday program," IBM machines that are leased for several years are taught to keep track of the date. When the lease expires, the machine kills itself--so effectively, in fact, that no one but an IBM engineer has ever been able to resurrect one.

While few admit murdering a program, there are many who allow they could. A scientist at one of the nation's major research laboratories is fond of saying he could "get into any system in the country and wipe it out." Another in California claims there is a project at MIT he could close down over the telephone if he wished.

But most systems designers are curiously neutral toward their computers. Like photographers' cameras, they see computers as essential but largely sexless tools. In contrast to pleasurable machines like sailboats, which are always "she," frequently "difficult" or at times "forgiving," computers are mostly "its." "I would never," said a young scientist, "think of a computer as doing me a favor."

Neo-Luddites have always come from the ranks of the processed, not the processors. Vending repairmen rarely hate machines; subway riders do. It is startling, nonetheless, to see a man destroy his own machinery. On the last day of August 1971, Eddie Campos, 48, of Los Angeles, California, became the first man to commit public carocide. According to United Press International, he drove his 1970 Continental Mark III up onto the front lawn of the Ford Motor Company assembly plant and burned it to ashes. "I had saved up for five years to buy that car and it turned out to be a lemon," said Campos. "I had towed it in for repairs 10,000 times and everybody just laughed at me--the dealers I took it to, the Ford people. I couldn't get any satisfaction." The local sheriff described Campos after the fire: "He was perfectly sober, perfectly rational and completely disgusted."