Kamisaka Sekka
A Walk Around the Paddy Fields,
from the series “A World of Things (Momoyogusa)”
(1909/10)

"…another snake satisfyingly gnawing on its own tail."

Prosperity attracts an ever-increasing number of so-called smart stuff. Smart® being a designation rather than a definition. So-called Smart® stuff sure seems stupid sometimes, in the same way that Artificial Intelligence intends to be interpreted with the emphasis on the Artificial part. What passes for Artificial Intelligence® barely registers as clever in practice, but the shady art of branding demands that capabilities always be inflated. Smart® cars were just tiny. Smart® phones weren’t really phones at all. Smart (no ®) people just seem self-aggrandizing, for they sure seem just as stupid as the rest of us put together in practice. So it always was and, as near as I can tell, so it will probably always be.

Our new Smart® irrigation system controller, trademarked “Irrigreen”, failed us during our recent absence. As The Gods well understand, such failures can only ever believably occur if they happen at a truly Least Convenient Time®. One can always safely rely upon any technology to be all umbrellas unless and until it starts raining. It’s certain to fail only during a hurricane situation when nobody even thinks of looking, or when The Muse breaks both ankles and is held hostage in a hospital in Wenatchee during a record-shattering heat wave. The least she should have to be concerned about should be the so-called Smart® or SuperIntelligent® irrigation controller. We had no clue that its innate smartness had intruded until we returned to find the plants in the cold frame and along the front walk desiccated.

Investigating, which is usually The Muse’s job since she apparently signed the NonAggression Treaty with technology in our house, I found only a cryptic message on the control unit’s screen: Device Update. The controller had not been controlling, but displaying a message nobody could have read. Of course, the system also includes an app accessible via Smart® phone, but my copy of that app had been crashing for weeks. Since The Muse was the human interface with this system, I’d let investigating that condition slide. Later, after speaking with the installer and also after not calling the manufacturer’s troubleshooting phone number [Note: the very worst thing anyone can ever do is a) read the instructions or b) call the manufacturer’s troubleshooting number. I’ll explain in greater detail later.], I stumbled upon a cure for my smart® phone app’s difficulty and learned that the company had released a firmware update on or about the date of our system’s failure. The update, the announcement proudly explained, would allow more granular assessment of how much water the system uses, an easy question to answer if the update enabling the new feature automagically disables the system for ya.

This sort of failure is referred to as PitchingCodes. It invariably includes some innocent oversight by some technician who doubtless doesn’t see the universe from their customer’s perspective. They typically inhabit a universe circumscribed by their system, of which they are intimately knowledgeable. The points of interface with the rest of the universe can sometimes prove troublesome, but these do not always penetrate the expert technician’s candy shell, which often proves practicably impenetrable. Later that night, The Muse asked me to go down in the basement and reset the furnace control unit. She patiently explained its location (the deepest, darkest corner) and where I might find its always cleverly concealed reset button. Five excursions and back later, including two where I swore on a stack of Bibles that no such reset button existed and I had Smart® phone pictures to prove it, I pushed the remarkably well-disguised reset button, thereby restoring our air conditioning while we were housebound during a record-setting heat wave. Another code had been pitched.

No practical fix exists for avoiding these technological glitches. The first few decades of my existence never once featured any such searches, for my Prosperity then brought me into no proximity with anything capable of PitchingCodes. But as technology marched on, it sometimes managed to march itself into this common ditch. There could be no fix for this condition, for codes inevitably get pitched. Who could afford to update their technology in some central factory? Who would even submit to hosting a traveling technologist there to update a part of the technology nobody had ever heard of or proven capable of caring about, at least until some pitched code rendered that savior stupid. After losing my prized bean crop to technology-induced drought, I feel more convinced that my technology isn’t really smarter than anybody. My Prosperity, and yours, seems utterly dependent upon such stupidities. There is no technology yet in existence that doesn’t prove itself to be sometimes just this stupid in practice. We are wise to despise it and clever to never completely trust it. Attempts to improve it usually prove to be the reason it fails, another snake satisfyingly gnawing on its own tail.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz