Wacky

John C. Dvorak… One of the things that makes computer pundit John Dvorak a classic read is that he is willing to believe anything he hears.  Dvorak has been surrounded by the latest in consumer technology for twenty years yet has managed to preserve the clueless innocence of someone who has just seen a computer for the first time.  He does not manage this trick by writing down to his audience.  His thought process is too flawlessly unaware to be an act.

Dvorak's PC Magazine columns, I confess, are something of a camp treasure for me, especially Inside Track, in which he is reliably wrong about several different subjects every two weeks.  Anyone can be wrong once in awhile, some can even do so frequently, but Dvorak is wrong on command, with the robotic precision of a Japanese auto factory.  In just one recent column he absurdly overstated the licensing implications of the GPL, complicated a discussion of wireless standards, excitedly promoted a product that had been on the market for over a year, and concluded that Microsoft Photo Editor can only open files under 2.4 MB.  This in addition to pushing readers to buy a shareware app while acknowledging that they could get basically the same features by changing a Windows registry setting.  The guy is a human dynamo of stupidity.

Whereas other technology writers would be considered merely asinine for making such claims (for example the possibly mentally retarded Nick Petreley), Dvorak manages to do so without giving irritation by writing in a curiously entertaining idiom that is a combination of muffled excitement and misinformed cynicism.

Of his attractions there is his unpredictability – an ignorant mind is an open mind, and Dvorak's is as open as the great outdoors.  His attention flickers constantly and he maintains his views no longer than is absolutely necessary, usually 500 words or less.  When you turn to a Dvorak column you will not have the faintest idea what it will be about, only that it will be dumb.  Note that this changefulness does not connote freshness.  While reading Dvorak you might glance up at the dateline more than once because the stale tripe you are reading could have been written years ago, scavenged from some Wordstar file he absent-mindedly forwarded to his editors.

Another attraction is that he reminds you what it was like when you first started using computers.  The possibilities seemed endless back when you had no idea what you were doing.  The soap opera of industry personalities and platform ideologies enlivened the predictable and meticulously planned technological advances and explained the unfathomable market shifts.  Something new and impressive was always just around the corner, and even the disappointments seemed waiting to be discovered, like election night at Al Gore's house.

And then you woke up.  Apart from a few Lunix and Mac hobbyists striving to invest the same grinding, masturbatory motions with that old magic, most technically-inclined people mature out of their hype-receptive techno-honeymoon.  Not Dvorak.  Every press release is a manifesto, every idea misheard from a Comdex speech is an axiom for the ages, every rumored process improvement is the birth of computing revolution.

Yes, there are some who, insecure in their sophomoric expertise, regard Dvorak as a mere numbskull.  The more educated may find him too trivial or random.  But I think of him as a throwback to the pre-Internet days, when the received wisdom dribbled through columns much like his.  I don't yearn for that era, but it is occasionally fun to see it brought to life by one of its still-kicking avatars.