Steve Jobs named his company “Apple” after a pleasant trip to an apple orchard. The bite mark in the logo was added to give the silhouette a sense of scale, lest someone think it a cherry. Yet that name and that symbol, evoking consumption of the forbidden fruit for which man was expelled from the Garden of Eden, must be inadvertently the most perfect metaphor in corporate history. Our age-old striving to “be as God” has never seemed more achievable than in the age of the iPhone and its accompanying social media ecosystem, which promises not only to put the world at our fingertips, but also to remake our sociality and liberate us from the constraints of time and place. The digitization of our lives is transforming human existence in ways incompatible with conservative conceptions of flourishing.
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