The End of the Road.
Many of you have known me as The Technologist. And for good reason, as I have spent the last twenty years of my life as the technology columnist for The Bishkek Daily Steingard. I would like to think that I was good at my job. People would sometimes recognize me on the street, and take a moment to tell me how much my careful wording had helped them when they were looking to buy a new cell phone or personal digital assistant. Products which met my approval usually experienced a spike in sales. I would like to think I had an impact, and that my work mattered.
And yet in twenty years of reviewing technology, it literally never occurred to me that it might matter what I spent the majority of my time doing. It’s only now that I realize I’ve spent the last decade breaking my day down into component tasks more appropriate to software packages than human beings. I eventually got to the point where I no longer approached new situations with an eye towards the people involved, but only which devices would suit me best, which gadgets had the right options and displays to intuit what I wanted to accomplish with a minimum of button-pushing. I envisaged miraculous pods in my head that could do anything, dream machines which could solve all my problems swiftly and elegantly. They preoccupied my fantasy life, offering menu systems yielding no end of helpful configurations, backwards-compatability with all my other devices, endless battery and beautiful form-factors that never lost their polish. These devices were great for networking solutions, for maximizing productivity, for finding directions to highly rated bento lunches. They weren’t so good at reconciling my flagging marriage, or reconstituting my declining health. As I pined after machines, I didn’t even realize I was becoming one. And like a home PC that’s been allowed unfettered access to the internet, I became clogged up with too many extra toolbars, too many viruses and half-uninstalled programs, until finally I crashed.
When I came to I found myself in an airport terminal in Greece, half-way to Turkey and desperate to purge myself of the accoutrements from my former life. I had discontinued my cellular, data and wireless hotspot subscriptions, cast off my dozens of pods, phones, spigots, and cameras to friends and charities. Nothing could be left to chance. I even removed the pockets from my pants and shirts in a fit of withdrawal, a hack job with scissors leaving loose threads and bare hips. I knew that if I had a pocket, it would soon fill again with the articles of my destruction; an iPhone, or some such thing. As such I was stuck holding my wallet, passport and boarding passes at all times, each thing itself provocatively pod-shaped and impotently reminiscent of my former gadgets.
I glared around the airport terminal, luridly judgmental of the other business-traveler types whose ranks I’d once enjoyed, sitting so earnestly and attentively and fully immersed in their mobile platforms. We don’t really talk about our dependance on these devices, because this particular addiction hasn’t yet reached critical mass. It takes at least a generation of tragic error to form the vocabulary for diagnosing these things, and the first-adopters are always the most willing to be swept along with the current. Looking at these guys, I thought about slapping the blackberries from their sweaty grasp, trampling the units beneath my plastic flip-flop. But I didn’t really want to save these men, who I still furiously envied. I yearned for their idle activity, chatting or messaging or wirelessly synching their lives away. I even hated the kids, all glued to gameboys, guiding digital heroes to perilous adventure while prepping themselves for a life of LCD-shaped information. Give me something. An ipod, a GPS unit even. Being unplugged for longer than a couple hours isn’t impossible - I’ve done it plenty of times. But as time passes it becomes a dull ache in the back of the forehead, like sitting in luke warm bath water while a CD skips on the stereo in the other room. A hell of no sleep and day old coffee. This trip was meant to be my liberation but left me sore and miserable from the outset, a former alcoholic forced to sit in the bar clutching a bottle of non-alcholic beer.
That was the nadir of my struggle against the Spigot. It was a hollowness that I felt I deserved, the gnawing withdrawal of an addict reaching rock-bottom. For years I’d known that this was coming; it had been foretold by the shame and guilt that accompanied my lust for pocket gadgetry even as I indulged at every turn. My inclination to tear myself free was healthy and necessary - it had been the last gasp of reason that had beckoned me to reverse the trend before I lost myself completely in the distorted language of pocket computers. My approach, however, was misguided. I learned a short while later, on the streets of Istanbul, that though my devices digitized and amplified my personal problems, they were not in fact the cause.
It was only once I had explored both extremes - technological gluttony and starvation, that I realized the truth of the matter. The Pods are not the problem or the solution - they are merely the terrain; the turf on which the spiritual struggles of the twenty-first century will be fought and won. I had been rutting around in idleness, as many of us are, and I had been reviewing technology, using it, fondling and playing with it, but I had not really been *watching* it. As I had dutifully tracked its growth in my career, I had at the same time become completely blind to what it had become. And so, having emptied myself of all hope in an airport terminal somewhere in the middle of the world, I was reborn by the realization, as so many addicts are, that the answer was not in abstinence or oblivion, but in transcendence.
Perhaps my newfound self-awareness awoke an energy inside me, because as I traveled, first through eastern Europe and then across most of the world, I was drawn towards countless other people whose stories were not unlike my own. In many cases, they were much worse. Their insights bolstered mine, and as we laughed and cried and healed together, I began to wonder whether the essential problem might be solved just by having these conversations. At any rate, I thought it was worth a shot. [ed note: and he still owed the Bishkek Daily Steingard two years of contractual column-writing]
These are the stories of my self discovery. They are my tales, but they are also theirs, and all of ours. They are the tales of the Untold Spigot.
(Hover near Their Story to view the second half of this article.)
The Untold Spigot.
I am not the first to write about the myth of the Untold Spigot. In recent years it has appeared in many different forms in various locations around the world, becoming something of modern lore. The most common iteration features a sea captain of some kind, a sailor, nautical enthusiast, etc., whose compass (acting on its own behalf, of course) leads him on an expedition of spiritual discovery. A recent version printed in an American newspaper tells of an Arizona man whose spigot took the form of an electric razor, leading him to uncover some long sought after missing-link type fossil in the desert hills surrounding Tucson. In compiling the stories for this column, I have devised a kind of formula, identifying three features which I believe link the many manifestations of this “secret spigot” myth. These are the characteristics which I find most significant in its constant retelling.
The protagonists tend to be unmarried middle-aged men, although there are notable exceptions, such as the Danish nurse who discovers the cure for cancer coded into a patient's pacemaker. The heroes also tend to be somewhat isolated figures, facing the existential prospect of an empty life and perennial loneliness. As a symbol, the spigot becomes the herald of decline and eventual death, forcing a reexamination of one's life and a final confrontation with purpose and mortality. These myths then are really a series of third acts, where the beginning of the story, much like the history of the world, is left to the vague impressions of the reader's own cultural literacy.
The second feature of these tales is also the most obviously compelling: the mystery surrounding the spigot's disguised identity, and the almost prophetic nature of its discovery. The designated purpose of the spigot is rarely evident to the hero until perhaps the very end, adding a decidedly spiritual dimension to what really amounts to nothing more than technical gadgetry. The impact this myth has already had on popular culture can be glimpsed from the seemingly endless reports in the media of spigots with unknown or impossible origins. Certain newspapers, including the formerly reputable London Sun, have made such “discoveries” a daily feature. Having examined the issue in depth, I can report that most of these cases are spurious or can be explained by Spigot Technologies' many subsidiary companies and global chain of distribution. Over the years, Spigot's catalogue has included limited-run products with amazingly improbably form factors, including a Qu'ran model for the Muslim world and a “Little Red Book” spigot catered specifically to the Chinese government. Having said that, the number of seemingly legitimate instances of this phenomenon is still boggling. The unlikely case of Mr. Sam Pilott provides a recent high-profile example. Of course, all the iterations of this myth that I will share are true; they are stories I heard first hand from the either people they happened to or their loved ones.
The final feature of the “secret spigot” myth is of course the eventual death of the protagonist, usually at the hand of the gadget which was presumably meant to save them. The nautical captain is finally led to the waiting tentacles of the giant squid he'd been hunting for fifty years. The avalanche which buries the Arizona man in the desert hills is triggered by the conspiratorial rumbling of his razor. The nurse contracts a deranged new form of cancer from the same device which had cured her comparatively innocuous previous strain. The spigot of myth, with its masked origins and mystical properties, seems primarily concerned with dispensing ironic justice. In this way, as a literary icon, the spigot amounts to nothing more than a trickster figure, a twenty-first century pocket-sized Puck.
But perhaps this is an oversimplification, and of course, the myth does allow for the rare happy ending. I must believe that this will be the case in my own story. To believe otherwise would be foolish. It is always important to believe you're moving forward, especially when you've reached the end of the road.
(Hover near My Story to view the second half of this article.)