Blog — SJ Jennnings

I’m having an identity crisis. The new iPhone X is out and my feeling is ‘meh’. Sure, it looks beautiful and my good friend Avinash tweeted about how great the screen is. Then he showed me the device. I got it, the form factor is phenomenal. It is every bit as beautiful as he claimed. Apple have done a wonderful job, but still, my feeling is ‘meh’.

Don't get me wrong, I am an Apple fan. I am typing this on a 15” 2013 Macbook Pro, bought when my even older MacBook Pro finally bit the dust. I have an iPhone 6, like my laptop, it too is about three years old, I got it when my last phone (a 5s) was pick-pocketed in Barcelona. Like all Apple devices, it’s served me well. My only regret regarding my current phone, is that I inflicted IOS 11 on the thing. Since that fateful day it has become a tiny bit more sluggish, huffing and puffing as it tries to open the new TV App (new to Canada at least). A technical reminiscence of the geriatric dog we had in my youth. I remember Sweep, a Black Lab, Border Collie cross, struggling up the stairs; always wagging his tail defiantly, but definitely slower and a little breathless. The cliché about old dogs and new tricks is a cliché for a reason. My phone is a little like that, the spirit is willing, but... Well, we didn’t put Sweep to sleep at that point, and that is how I feel about my faithful digital companion too.

Did anyone ask for the iPhone X, or the iPhone 8 or the 7… the new versions of Windows 10? Do we feel a mass sense of ennui by the non-arrival of the iPad 5 Mini? Were there Occupy! style demonstrations demanding Cortana, or an improved Siri, or multiple desktops or a return of the Windows Start Button… actually wait, that last one did probably provoke a demo or two.

The technology industry, like so much of our current economic model, relies on an almost constant frenzy of new consumption. The need for sharks to keep swimming is the tired metaphor that comes to mind. That consumption is spurred by little tweaks and minor mods. And, like all consumption (such a friendlier word than exploitation), can have real human suffering behind it. The recent Los Angeles Times article on the analysis of the iPhone is fascinating reading. Fascinating, but not necessarily disturbing, for two reasons: One, Apple appears to be a responsible company and is doing a lot to make sure its raw materials are produced from ethical sources in compliance with governmental asks. And two, well, deep in our hearts, we know.

We know that what our consumption in the west can and does have major impacts across the planet from a resource exploitation perspective, and a subsequent effect on geo-politics. A friend of mine tweeted about the rise of the middle class in China, it’s on a lot of people’s minds. Rising prosperity is great for all of us. The movement of people out of poverty, wonderful. I want to see more of it, much more. Let poverty wilt across China, India, the countries of Asia, Africa, South and Central America and at home too. Only, let it wilt in a way that vastly reduces the impact on our collective home. We only have one planet and the resources we are exploiting are mostly finite (including air and water).

A rising middle class across the world will demand greater consumption. I think a correct response in the west is not to deny that consumption or attempt to lessen it, but to be more mindful of what we use in Europe and North America, Australia and New Zealand. How we all exploit the resources of the planet. That is what I am trying to do. I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I do try and take my personal consumption into consideration. This year, like the last one, I will be manfully resisting all Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals that are currently bombarding my inbox. I will not be queuing to get the best or the latest, and yes, until my phone actually breaks, I will say “Thanks, but no thanks” to the iPhone X.

Now, if only someone would invent clean aircraft…

World War I ended ninety-nine years ago today. Exactly a week before, almost to the hour, a young man, twenty-five years old, died, along with hundreds of his comrades, at the Battle of Sambre. That young man was the war poet Wilfred Owen. His poems: Anthem for Doomed Youth, and especially Dolce et Decorum Est moved me immeasurably through my teens and early twenties. Like those of his friend and mentor Sassoon, Owen’s poetry spoke much more to me than the romantic patriotism of Rupert Brooke. Brooke captured the Edwardian propriety of Kipling, the Empire, the stiff upper lip. Owen gave me the visceral intensity I thought of as modern. Those poems sat next to Plath’s Daddy and Guernica in my formative exposure to culture. Of course, the fate for both War Poets, as decreed by Brooke, was the same: to rest in some corner of a foreign field. Wilfred Owen in France, killed in one of the last battles of the war. Brooke in Greece; dying from sepsis on the way to Gallipoli.

Both my grandfathers served in the British army during World War I. They both survived, fighting, in Northern France. I never met my mother’s father, he came home from the war having been gassed, he never fully recovered and died a decade before I was born. My dad’s father, I do recall, but of the days and the horrors he saw in The Great War, he remained silent.

We live in an age of the transience of information. We are told there is more data than ever. Of course, data captured today could be unreadable or unplayable in as little as a decade. Technology changes and media evolves. Films converted to digital in the eighties exist as data on magnetic tapes, the players long forgotten. My wife just handed me a CD to play for my daughter, it came in one of her music books. I had to think long and hard about where we might have such a device: CD players having been banished from computers in the ongoing struggle for thinness, as I have banished grilled cheese sandwiches and beer from my diet, for similar reasons. Thankfully it was easier to find a player than the necessary ingredients for my indulgences. As with CD’s, so with so much of the day to day data of our lives. Tweets that were once hundred and forty characters are now two hundred and eighty. Thankfully the US President does not seem to have noticed. HAPPY. In ten years-time, of course, they may not exist at all, outside the quiet solemnity of the Trump Presidential Library (Only $200 dollars to visit, children half price, free diploma for every guest). The server farms of Twitter may have been decommissioned, the company folded, replaced by something newer, shinier. Such is the nature of information transience.

Our forefathers did not have the ability to tweet, or blog, or emote with emojis. They carved names on war memorials. An act of permanence. I grew up in Britain, in a typical English village. At its centre, the church, built in the fifteenth century. Flint faced and now idyllic. Historically a dual symbol, one of peace and love (the original Christian message), and one of power and dominance (the aftermath of the English reformation). Cenotaphs and war memorials sprung in the grounds of these churches in the years immediately after November 11th, 1918. They are still used today, recording the sacrifices of village men, and now women, who fought. Recording the solemnity of sacrifice, while not succumbing to the credence of the old lie of Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. It is sweet and proper to die for your country.