5th April 2013

“Hey, come on” he says, “you want thissss, you need thisss, you will love thissss” as he slides down the tree trunk and settles on the ground. “Pleasssse, buy ALL of thesssse productssss, they will make your life eassssier, better, nicer, smarter…I promisssse”. And so, Eve takes a bite from the Apple Inc., innocent, curious, and more than a little tempted by its beautiful design. After all, it’s shiny and juicy and so bright and colorful, what harm could it do? And with that, she is cast out of the garden; a place where information is free and totally accessible and devices are controlled by users. And cast into the tech apocalypse; a place where information is controlled by a select few, where it is not free, often inaccessible and littered with devices that control the user.

Look, I get it, Apple make nice looking things. Their hardware is solid, their designs are innovative. But what Applebots fail to notice is that Apple doesn’t play well with others, nor does it REALLY want to play with you. It sets the rules, it brings the toys, it chooses the game. So once it has you in its ecosystem, you can never leave. A bit like the Hotel California. What a lovely place indeed. The problem is, as a consequence, the device that is supposed to make your life easier, has a nasty underbelly, carefully hidden beneath the shiny; it loves loves loves to control and dominate you, the user. Annoyingly, the ‘one stop shop’ ecosystem that Apple invented is being adapted by the competition. So, even though I have an Android tablet, it still tries to tie me into its own Google ecosystem and my device is as difficult to access, control and alter to my needs as the IPAD is. The thing is, this doesn’t have to be the case. You can have good hardware, with good open source software. You can have ease of use with freedom, but the snake continues to convince us otherwise, and more and more people are listening to the snake….

As such, the future looks bleak. Pretty soon, your device will broadcast your location, your preferences, your shopping lists, your ex-lovers, your bad photos, your everything to every single person in the world, with, or without your consent. And because you can no longer control your device or your information, you will be powerless. Welcome to the apocalypse. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.