Another Friday morning at Starbucks, and as on any day, a majority of patrons walk in, scarcely looking up from the small iPhone screen held in their hand.  A beverage order has been placed by means of the device, and paid for prior to their arrival at the serving counter.  All that remains is to grab the beverage and go.  Some few linger for a while at a table, scarcely looking up from the hand held screen.

In 1844 upon transmission of the first morse code message, a quotation was adapted from Numbers chapter 23 verse 23, in the Jewish scriptures, “What has God wrought!”  In the original Numbers text, the expressive exclamation refers to the origination, the founding of a distinct people.  A new thing of no small historical significance was attributed to a divine act.

At the height of the industrial age, the age of steel, fire, and steam, —  the quotation was adopted/adapted as harbinger of a momentous new thing. The telegraph meant instant communication, over long distances by wire.

A similar emotion plays within my mind, in reference to the invention and development of the iPhone.

This device and the globalization of which it is the communication node, — is an unambiguous human creation.   The miniaturized circuitry of the solid state device, utilizing the principles of quantum mechanics is a portal to everything on the world wide web.  The circuitry is made possible by rare earth metals sourced from many countries.  The phone contains 75 different elements, — almost three quarters of the periodic table, tantalum from Rwanda, potassium from Belarus, silver from Mexico, tin from Myanmar, and germanium from China.

Apple relentlessly develops Steve Jobs concept, introducing  a series of models, each with more features, and increasingly complex operating systems, to make Apple one of the world’s wealthiest corporations.

The phones are efficiently manufactured by employees of Foxconn, a Taiwanese corporation.  The workers can hardly be said to share in the wealth created by the iPhone.

We have an example of the apotheosis of instrumental rationality, the end result of humankind’s bid to exert final control over the earth, and his fellows.  We have at last derived a maximally efficient option for achieving our desires, with our cold, empirical, calculating mindset: measurement, abstraction, emotion sanitized, monetized, utility maximized.

How many of our day to day relationships are mediated through the phone interface, abstracted, desiccated of the full bandwidth of the other’s story? Others are pixelated images, or lines of text.   We are bereft of the details which inspire empathy, and create bonds of comity.    Immersed in Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube, the megaphone of social media, we become distrustful of others and of societies institutions.  We are slowly dying of loneliness.

What has mankind wrought?

Climate change and the iron rule of financial capitalism await.

Seduced, we do not resist taking that bite of the apple.