Everyone has these stories, which aren't captivating individually but which in their totality limn an ugly and too rarely painted picture. Each time we buy another gizmo, we're not only committed to hours of tremblingly assembling its delicate snap-together plastic bits, loading its software and learning its often demanding technical protocols, but we're prospectively surrendering yet more hours of aggravation when despite our dutiful decoding of mockingly sparse instructions it fails to function properly. Thus all these dazzling inventions are far more costly than their price tags suggest. Why don't I have a mobile, much less an iPhone or a BlackBerry? While I can afford the mere economic expense of the accessory, I cannot afford the temporal and emotional expense when it doesn't work.

The more gadgets promise to do for us, the more complex they grow, and thus the more fragile and the more likely to fail. Given the frequency with which whole businesses are paralysed due to some obscure IT crash, the Malfunction Tax surely costs Western economies billions per year. So maybe they should print warnings on digital packaging, just as on ciggies: "Do not purchase unless able to spare time and hair-tear when device craps out."

All this newfangled junk costs us in spiritual terms, too, if only because we don't understand it. I don't mean we don't know how to "right click" to retrieve a menu, I mean we don't understand it. A passage in my new novel addresses this very regression: "Collectively, the human race was growing ever more authoritative about the mechanics of the universe. Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension." So gadgets aren't cheap. Unless you're a microchip whiz, every new digital doohickey in your life taunts you with its humiliating inscrutability. You've bequeathed to one more modern magic lantern the capacity to make you feel stupid. Since every new thingamajig may capriciously go on the fritz but only after having insinuated itself as indispensable, you've just handed another inanimate chunk of plastic the power to make you cry.