Chris Titley

SHE claims more headlines than Posh Spice and Cherie Blair combined. Her worth makes their wealth seem as insignificant as the bus fare to Barlby. Everyone wants a piece of her. Her name? Dot Com.

We need to learn more about our Dorothy. Who is she? How has she managed to take over our lives? When will she appear on Parkinson?

All we know is that Dot Com is the ruthless godmother of cyberspace, intent on dominating the world via the web. She will sell you anything from drugs to pornography to Cliff Richard memorabilia. It's that sordid.

Moreover, Dot is a fickle mistress. Her favoured sons are rich beyond greed. Every day we read of the latest techno-twerp to become an Internet squillionaire. A few years ago a man caught fiddling with a mouse in his basement bedsit would have been up before the beak. Today he is up 100 points on the FTSE index.

But those who insist on using the Internet for non-commercial purposes, beware. As we reported yesterday, Trevor Tasker from Carlton, near Selby, met a pretty, thirty-something American girl over the wires. He fell in love and jetted off to claim her for his world wide wife. By the time he arrived in South Carolina, his sweetheart had been replaced with a fat 65-year-old who filed her boss next to the beefburgers in the deep freeze.

Who had undertaken this callous switch? Dot Com's henchmen, of course; either her retarded but violent sidekick, Backward Slasher, or the lightfooted Australian matriarch Waltzing Ma Tilde.

Dot's power is growing. Tony Blair is completely under her spell. Only yesterday he said: "We have to make sure people are not excluded from this revolutionary technology." A programme to get everyone hooked up to the network by 2005 is underway. By then, anyone who fails to complete their statutory two hours surfing the Web will be chased back to their workstation by men with dogs.

Every aspect of our lives will soon be computerised. Children at Huntington School in York can call up their homework via their home computer. Soon all school projects will be done this way. Within a generation the human race will have lost the ability to use a pen. Handwriting analysts will be thrown onto the streets. Calligraphy will be denounced as the work of the devil. Biros will become museum pieces.

The future is a fragmented place. When your teenage daughter plays her music too loudly in her bedroom, you will page her on her mobile phone demanding: 'Turn that down!' She will respond with a virtual tantrum and a mass e-mail campaign informing all her friends that you are a cross-dresser.

Eventually there will be so much information on the Web that a simple Internet search begun shortly after a child's first birthday will be completed some time after his ninetieth. While the world sits stupefied in front of a billion frozen computer screens, Dot Com will seize control.

She will reposition the earth as the dot in an intergalactic Internet address writ across the heavens, hit 'return', and the sky will fall in.

Or am I being paranoid?

THE refusal of the British people to do as their leader says must be beyond Tony Blair's ken. Firstly the Welsh treated his chosen son like a rugby ball and booted him out of office. Now voters are trampling over Frank 'Awight tweacle, some of my best friends are Londoners' Dobson in their rush to elect Ken 'Newt Labour' Livingstone.

Add in Tory candidate Steven 'Nookie' Norris and you know the race for London mayor is going to be one of the nastiest, most personally poisonous political fights in recent times. And it doesn't affect us at all.

So what are we waiting for?

If you have any comments you would like to make, contact Chris Titley directly at chris.titley@ycp.co.uk

08/03/00

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.