This Is, As Always, Sent With Love From My iPhone

a review of Dying for an iPhone by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden and Pun Ngai

The year is 2134. The climate apocalypse came and went, and now there are like 70 people left and I’m still working in technology product marketing. My new project? Go back in time and explain the iPhone to medieval people. The instructions? Move fast, break things, start-up culture girl boss! My slack message says “Looking forward to getting started!” but my heart says I don’t want to go back to a time where people didn’t shower or eat vegetables year round. It probably smells really bad and I don’t like game meats. I step into a LA Tan tanning bed that has been repurposed into a time machine and I’m in York, England.

I push the town crier off his haystack and grab his bell and I’m like “hear ye, hear ye: in 500 years there will be a $1000 piece of glass you will carry in your pocket. It will bring you much joy, and then, very little joy at all, yet you will still be prodding at its cracked face with sanitized fingertips, imploring it… Please one more image of a Washington DC panda (Mei Xang) frolicking in the freshly fallen snow…” Before I have time to expand upon the value proposition of the iPhone 82XXX, the townspeople burn me at the stake for being a witch which honestly, is their prerogative.

When you’re using 3 or more apple products at a time, you’re in the orchard zone.

The writers of Dying for an iPhone bluntly state “the title has two meanings” because they never learned show vs tell. It’s all horrifying though not really surprising, because of course a big corporation like Apple is prone to malfeasance to increase profit, and it’s annoying that they have cool ads with fun celebrities and good music. I seize up every time I see the word “geopolitical” because it’s a harbinger for something I will not be able to talk about without sounding stupid (filed alongside “tariffs,” “IPO,” “escroe” [sp?]). So I’m not going to explicate the trampling of Chinese labor rights using a stickered Macbook Air, with my iPhone, as it always is, an arm’s length away like a spurned lover. You need to know who makes your dumb products like you need to know who picks your lettuce, makes your clothes, because unless it’s my mom (who grows her own lettuce and makes slightly ill-fitting knitwear) malfeasance is likely.   

This is, as always, sent with love from my iPhone and hope workers of the world unite or whatever.