I didn’t think I’d get to write anything about the iPhone5 and, as that initial announcement got further and further away from my limited writing time, it seemed even less likely. Especially after Holographic Steve Jobs dropped the mic on us last week. I have very little to add in the way of tech analysis. An extra inch of screen is just a place to put banner ads (make them relevant, stable and allow me to close them and I’ll be fine with it, Apple) and the new port will only become annoying once I actually own the new iPhone (you know, in 2014 or some shit).
All the vitriol and the bang and the bust just seems silly. It’s just a phone after all. Right? No. No it isn’t.
There’s this belief I’ve encountered repeatedly that a shift toward greater consciousness somehow makes a person more special; better; more unique. What’s interesting about that is that the result of true self-awareness is usually the complete opposite. Instead of suddenly waking up as The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, there’s the gradual realization that everything’s pretty mundane, and of how functional pretty much all of existence is. From the hobos to the wars, everything has a larger symbolic value than it does a tangible one.
“Game Blouses”
The physical stuff – the things most people consider “real” – is usually just the shit we make to keep carrying those symbols forward.
Take the iPhone for example. A slim black box you carry around to hold the stuff your brain can’t be fucked with. It’s not the technological goose that will lay the US economy golden eggs (well, if you follow that story to its logical ending, then I guess it is) but it’s new port and inch of extra screen also won’t be the death of humanity by consumerism. The world would have you believe it’s one or the other, but it’s really something else entirely.
It’s just another new way to be normal.
Bear with me: The generations before us were taught that, unless you had wealth (read: stuff), you were considered worthless. This is an idea that perpetuated itself beyond its petty origins in the lumbering psychological development of our species from back when you either had literally nothing or you had so much you could afford to make people who had fuck-all build giant lions with people’s faces on them.
For fun!
These previous generations were easy to sell shit to. Just tell them the new toothpaste is better than the old one and they’d at least be willing to check it out. I mean, who doesn’t want supernaturally white teeth, right? Doesn’t that make you a better person than the next guy somehow?
With the younger folk though, we’ve been raised to believe that we are special. That message is right there in the opening lines of a Whitney Houston song and it was all over the place when we were growing up.
It got so I started to wonder why my school friends weren’t shooting beams out their faces and knives out their fists to save the world from old people in funny helmets.
Seriously, why aren’t these my friends?
If you define a generation by one thing too much though, that same generation tends to rebel against that idea pretty strongly. So 20-something years into this most special of generations and our only superpowers are finding music before anyone else has heard it and manipulating images of cats to make people laugh.
Mostly the pursuit of our generation has been “normality”: we spend as much time as possible trying to be the same as all our peers. Our parents dressed the same to stand out, and we do it to look as similar as possible.
From a consumer standpoint what this means is that we like things to be unified. We enjoy systematically designed products. We enjoy knowing we’ll all have the same apps that take the same photographs. That way we can stop feeling all the supposed pressure of being so fucking special all the time. What this means is that the iPhone 5 is, in most ways, the perfect consumer-friendly phone. It’s not trying to be anything too astonishing or change the way we look at phones. It’s not bragging too much about its hardware or shaking up its design unnecessarily and making us feel all shaky and uncertain about whether we should get one or not. Hell, if you got one, most people probably wouldn’t notice until they got up close and realized it was starting an occupy movement on one more inch of your enormous gorilla palm.
If you get one, get your hair cut just right, tighten up that collar button and roll your pants up just right, you’ll probably get away with the people around you not suspecting you have any amazing skills at all. That way they’ll be cool with hanging out with you, and maybe even sponsoring your next drink at the bar.
So when people get really upset about it existing and not being all that different from the previous version of the iPhone, I like to note how, symbolically, that’s because it shouldn’t be. It’s the phone that gives people an excuse to feel like they’re part of something boring, mundane and essentially worthless. It’s the phone that allows them to contradict the message they’ve been sold all their lives: that they aren’t normal.