Tell me you’re joking. * It’s not your device. * Ok, What does it mean to own something? To hold it? To be able to destroy it? To use the services it provides? Maybe the receipt makes you the owner? If that’s your definition, in a very limited sense, you own it. But you don’t control it, because you can’t understand it fully, because you didn’t design it. In fact no one person designed it, it’s the product of the group, and advanced technological products like the iPhone serve the interests of the group, first. It just so happens in most cases the interests of the group align and benefit the user. After all we are very similar to one another and so this is a mutually beneficial arrangement. You want to buy, they want to sell. You need a service, they want to serve and so on.

With a product like the iPhone you’re purchasing access to an iteration of a design. Delivering that to you in a white shrink wrapped box is a clever marketing illusion. You can’t see the many huge factories full of calibrated robotic pick and place machines or the lithography setup used to create the chips or the lines of workers that assembled the phone one tiny piece at a time. You don’t see the endless cell towers on the horizon and all the engineers that maintain them. And we haven’t even begun to discuss the human labor that forged the design. There’s easily 500 straight years of skilled engineering labor in the modern iPhone. Perhaps even double that.

Here’s my point already. There’s some brain damaged, mentally ill, psychotic people who like to rape children, take photos of it and share it with their friends. Then what happens is those kids go kill themselves. This problem is happening at scale and it’s not in the interests of the group to let it continue. If the group believes it’s interests and your own diverge, you’ll quickly discover who really owns that device. They control the product they designed and manufactured and they can do whatever they want via signed software update, and you can do exactly nothing about it. That’s a fact.

A $1200 iPhone might be the best deal ever offered to a human being in recorded history. But you’re buying a service, leasing a disposable product. You’re a guest. That’s the truth.

It’s a really ugly image I have of the simple type of person who’s having a hard time choosing between email privacy and stopping a child predator.