The iPhone is the greatest invention of the 21st Century
Why would I say something so controversial yet brave? This argument comes in two parts: First, justifying that the iPhone is the greatest invention of the new millennium thus far, and secondly, why this bothers me.
“Greatest invention” is difficult to objectively quantify because of the numbered interpretations each of the two words can have. Greatest how so? Representing the largest technological leap? Largest impact on people’s lives? Impact on the largest number of people’s lives? What exactly constitutes an invention? Do they have to be tangible? Do ideas and concepts count? What about better iterations of previous inventions?
Obviously, the iPhone does not represent a technological leap, and only combines existing technologies with sleek design and great marketing. Cell phones have existed since the late twentieth-century, and multi-functional phones were present just before the turn of the century. It wasn’t until Steve Jobs’ presentation on January 2007 that the smartphone went from being a tool for the absentee businessman to a basic necessity for the contemporary everyman. The iPhone, and by extension the touchscreen smartphone, fulfills all the other definitions of greatest invention: largest impact on the largest number of lives. 45% of people in the world have smartphones, and its impact cannot be overstated. In a 2012 survey, 37% of adult respondents said that they were addicted to their smartphones, and 60% of teenage respondents said the same thing. In 2020, total smartphone shipments are expected to outnumber computer shipments four to one.
More than companies, it can be argued that the entire consumer technology economic ecosystem revolves around the mobile phone market. In many developing nations, phones have long supplanted the personal computer as the primary method of internet access. In China, the mobile phone has enabled a cashless economy, skipping through credit cards into the future.
The future is here, a future where people carry around computers in their pocket with more processing power than all of NASA in 1969. People use them to look at pictures of cats on Facebook and share protests against Wall Street greed. That statistic was from 2010, and Moore’s Law would conclude that smartphone processing power has improved thirty-two fold since then.
But where are our flying cars? Our weather controlling machines? Our Neuralink? Our scientifically prescribed mate? Our hospitals in space? Our dragon-winged flying machines? Instead we got mobile homes, automated trains, and television, all from the twentieth century. What have we made in the last twenty years? Anything of note? The events of the last year really helped these two along.
There are arguments to be made about the ramp-up time required to deliver on the innovation of a certain technology, and that the iPhone was simply capitalization on technologies of the last century. But the twentieth century gave us the movies, the television, the computer, and the internet. We got solar and nuclear power. We went to the moon. We created LSD, ecstasy, the pill, and the little blue pill. In the first twenty years alone, we got the radio, the plane, and air conditioning.
Where did this momentum go? Where were the eerie futures predicted in Bladerunner and The Matrix? What non-mobile technologies do we have, electric cars, robotic vacuums, and internet coins? I’ll admit, 3D printing and drones were definitely beyond our science fiction fantasies, and medical technologies have discreetly changed countless lives, but why do I have Siri instead of a robot manservant?
This peeves me to no end, that our society’s resources are being funneled towards the business of targeted advertisements and digitizing preexisting technologies. Capitalism has given us a plethora of choice, but the choices are identical. In many of my circles, I see human capital being redirected towards this nefarious end. All my high school friends who went to college for engineering are now code monkeys in the Valley. All of my college friends who trained to be slide monkeys alongside me are looking to continue monkeying around in the Valley.
“Hardware is hard,” they’ll say, or “Gotta stick to high margin industries.” But who will till the soil? What are we on, if not an economic and hedonistic hamster wheel, reaching for a scalable buck and consistent cashflows? Can any sort of meaningful non-software development occur if it doesn’t make money? In a way, that’s why Elon Musk is admirable, amidst his deficiencies. But maybe he’s breaking down because hardware is too hard.
It’s too easy to blame Silicon Valley for this, to say that the tech giants have trapped us by creating applications that are as addictive as drugs. It’s too easy to blame capitalism for this, to say that the rich are only looking for ways to increase their wealth at the lowest risk. No, the problem lies with everyone else, who are handing over their time and information to the new tastemakers, and in some cases, kingmakers.
Though the problem lies with the people, the fault does not reside there. It’s simply the path of least resistance, the balance of weighted probabilities that will give them the most satisfaction. And gratification now is always better than fulfillment later.
So instead of asking what we can do, perhaps I should be asking if we need to. Everyone is happy in this brave new world. If we are satisfied with the little comforts brought to us by food delivery, ridesharing, online shopping and mobile payments at the cost of flying cars and lunar colonies, then so be it. Who am I to say that the market, the will of the people, is wrong? If the slaves who till the soil can be happy tilling the soil, then they can’t be the vanguard of a revolution. Maybe I just need to drink the Kool-Aid, take the soma, and buy the newest iteration of the greatest invention of my lifetime.
