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.
“Ideas have consequences,” conservatives admonish one another, pouring more money into think tanks and great-books conferences. Sometimes, however, consequences also have ideas; our behaviors determine how we think. If Marshall McLuhan is right, and “the medium is the message,” what is the message of the smartphone era? It is one that has rendered many basic conservative instincts simply nonsensical, especially concerns about family, morality, and sexuality. In the age of TikTok, the Judeo-Christian tradition is not just becoming discredited, but altogether inaccessible.
If Marshall McLuhan is right, and “the medium is the message,” what is the message of the smartphone era?
The social acid of the smartphone era is dissolving six fundamental pillars of conservatism: Limits, Tradition, Patience, Dependence, Embeddedness, and Embodiment. In stressing these themes for centuries, conservatives have sought to tether human action to the limits of human nature, insisting that individuals and polities alike cultivate the virtues of self-restraint.
