Christmas and the new year should be done the way they've always been done, so that we can all feel comfortable. Tradition! This is Free Life in February. So: here's hoping that you will all have a Happy last Christmas.

My best millennium night experience was taking, from my own London SW1 front window, with my new Minolta Dimage EX Zoom 1500 Digital Camera, a very blurred photo of Millbank Tower having an orgasm, surely an appropriate image for the whole event. I'm hoping to persuade Our Editor to reproduce it. If so, there it is.

How about that! If not, it was just a firework going off behind the tower's roof. The original photo was full of irrelevances like my curtains, other buildings, trees, etc. But with digital cameras you can feed the picture into your computer and then get to work on it, just as if you are Boots the Chemist, except that you care how it looks the way they only do if they can tell the police it's child porn.

I've been trying for decades to get some Libertarian Alliance comrade to take decent and frequent pictures of all the other Libertarian Alliance comrades, to put on top of Libertarian Alliance pamphlets, both physical and now virtual in the form of Internetted Acrobat files of Libertarian Alliance artwork. Now I'll be doing the pictures myself. It's not that I'm a good photographer. It's that the new camera gives me immediate feedback of what my last photo looks like, and I can delete and delete and delete until I get something usable, at no further cost in paper, trips to Boots, etc.

Also, the camera I got is expensive and has an optical zoom which means I get lots of detail, e.g. of comrades' faces. It feels entirely right to take a fine example of a Twentieth Century Thing with me through the Y2K barrier, into an era that already looks as if it's going to consist not of Things, but of wobbly vibrational effects and Interactive Dispersed Intelligence Fields coming at you from who knows where, with all the mere Things being too small and too cheap to matter.

Any Libertarian Alliance subscribers angered by the thought of me playing with my new camera when they are still owed the last subscriber mailing of 1999 should know that I feel their pain. First it was my photocopier, which was out of serious action for about six weeks, and which actually at one point burst into flames. The thing had taken to sizzling ominously like it was already the next century. Faulty wiring, presumably. The third time it sizzled I opened the top. This turn a very hot non-fire with no oxygen to burn into an actual fire. After three maintenance engineers of ascending rank and determination had looked at it, it was finally got going again, just before Christmas. By which time I had got my new camera (something to while the photocopier was on the blink) and the software for feeding the pictures from the camera to the computer caused Windows 95 to go on the blink. It was all, as they say in America, a learning experience, or as we say here, a shambles.
 

When your computer goes haywire you get to talk computers with all the computer-fluent friends you can assemble to fix it - including Our Editor by the way, who, in among all his loathing of everything that has happened in the world since the coronation of Queen Victoria is a computerisationist of considerable considerableness. Well, listening to all these computerers gibbering away to me and to one another I believe I detected something rather interesting, namely, the forthcoming fall from grace of Microsoft. The computechies are now talking about Windows with the same rage and contempt that I once heard one of them displaying during a similar discussion that occurred in the early-to-mid-80s among computerians about the more expensive sort of IBM hardware, and we all know what happened to IBM. The bloke who assembled my computer for me first time around, and who helped me most to fix it this time around (Dave - thank you Dave), now says: "I'm never going to sell another computer to anyone again. They're too much trouble."

For computing individuals and for the computer industry as a whole, computing proceeds not only in smooth small steps, but also in giant traumatic leaps from one way of doing things to the next. Advance by parachute drop, I call it. You do things the way you do them, year after year and regardless of how bizarrely so long as they work. You add new toys and tweaks, speed it up, get a better printer and an email number, but basically everything remains as it was when you first got the stuff. Eventually your existing kit becomes ridiculous, and you do a radical rekit, which enables you to do amazing new stuff and which keeps you happy for the next twenty years, and quite possibly for the rest of your life. (My last serious switch was when I dumped my Osborne nearly fifteen years ago, and moved to my previous PC but one. By the late eighties I was using Ventura 3 to do DTPing and have been using it ever since. It isn't bust and I haven't fixed it.)

I am approaching my serious point. When you do a parachute drop, your basic approach is not: how do I get my old kit to work better? It is: how do I get my new kit to work well according to its own rules, and how do I then get my new kit to make as much sense as is makeable of the stuff I was doing with my old kit? Windows is approaching this moment. Microsoft is saying: how do we improve Windows? How do we keep the whole show on the road? How do we clean up all the bad Windows decisions we've made over the years and keep all Windows activities semi-rational, and faster, and cleverer, and not crashing that much more than usual, and just as profitable and expensive as ever? How do we persuade the whole world to buy Windows 05 with the same ferocity that it once bought Windows 95? The rest of the world is starting to say: To hell with Windows 05. It's just Windows 95 with a few extra bells and whistles and mess-ups. If Windows didn't exist, how would we now do things? Why don't we do that anyway, and then turn around and rescue what we can from Windowsworld and dump the rest? (This is what Personal Computers did to the IBM of old, and ironically IBM itself made the biggest early move, by setting up its PC operation completely outside the regular IBM set-up.) The popular favourite Windows-killing operating system is now Linux, and Linux could indeed been the Next Big Thing. I don't know. What I do sense is that some new Rough Beast Operating System is even now slouching around in Silicon Valley. Be ready to sell your Microsoft shares, any year now.

The point of all this is: capitalism in general is, like computers in particular, a learning experience stroke shambles, but that it does indeed learn, and progress. Politics means Bill Gates buying Politics and making non-Windows PC software illegal. It means IBM buying Politics and making PCs illegal. It means IBM's cash-register-making predecessors buying Politics and making IBM illegal. Politics means very occasional and very bloody revolutions. Capitalism means mostly bloodless and far less occasional revolutions. It means that each computer "monopoly" has its fifteen years of fame, and then it crumbles away into a regular big company such as IBM is now (IBM's latest miniature storage devices for use in, e.g., digital cameras look fabulous), and such as Microsoft will be in fifteen years time. Politics means politicians organising the occasional firework party, and leaving the serious stuff to regular people like you and me and Bill Gates to sort out amongst ourselves.