Losing our souls to technology's trinkets

What is the point of all this innovation other than to make money for the designers, the manufacturers, and the retailers? By Vincent Browne.

Not since the age of five have I been given a present as good as the one I got for a recent birthday. Santa brought me a toy jeep back then.

I don’t recall why I was into SUVs at the time but it was great fun, aside from the trouble I had preventing my brothers from taking it. Happily, both of my brothers are tech-illiterate and there will be no competition from them for my recent acquisition - an iPad.

A wi-fi and 3G 64-gigabyte iPad, costing almost €900.

You can watch TV on this iPad, and videos and films.

You can listen to radio from anywhere in the world.

You can read The Sunday Business Post on the iPad and any other newspaper in the world. Several magazines have devised special editions for iPads - and they are something else.

There are 150,000 applications for iPads, among them ones that tell you how you slept, how many paces you walked, what you could do today, what you didn’t do yesterday, and what the lead story is in the South China Morning Post.

You can read books on the iPad, like The Art Of War by Sun Tzu - that one’s free.

You can load every piece of music you ever bought onto the iPad and play it all day, like Abba, Bridie Gallagher, Tina Turner and Twink (I think you can get Twink on an iPad). It will tell you what the weather is going to be in Paramaribo over the next few days and it will tell you, via Wikipedia, that Paramaribo is the capital of Surinam. Some people don’t know that.

The iPad will manage your time, your life, your health, what you eat, what you drink - that is, if you have any time to do anything at all after you’ve figured out how to operate it.

Maybe, in a few years, someone will give me a 3D TV with special glasses.

That’s after I get HD TV, which costs just €2,599. Apparently, Sky is launching its dedicated 3D channel in the autumn, and there is talk of as many as 30 3D Blu-ray titles being available by the end of the year.

By the way, Blu-ray is an optical disk storage medium designed to supersede the standard DVD format, and it is used for storing high-definition video and PlayStation games. (I didn’t know either until I looked this up just now on my iPad, via Wikipedia.)

But am I any happier, having got an iPhone and now an iPad?

Have they enhanced my life, even marginally, in any way that matters?

Are the people of Africa any worse off for not having an iPad just yet?

What is the point of all this industry, this innovation, this cleverality, other than to make money for the designers, the manufacturers, and the retailers?

And isn’t a great deal of this enterprise thing, very much (certainly not all) about making products that people don’t really need and then convincing people that they do need them?

Of course, I am not arguing that all innovation is useless.

Computers have certainly made our lives easier. Mobile phones have made us more connectable. Aeroplanes also have made our lives very much more interesting - the ability to travel in a few hours to many of the most picturesque places in Europe, for instance, relatively cheaply and effortlessly, has been a great enrichment.

Radio and TV have also been great innovations - being able to watch the World Cup live, for instance, played on the other side of the world, was fantastic, even if the football wasn’t exactly up to much. Also, a great deal of innovation in medicine is great and in so many other areas innovation has brought great benefits.

But much of the consumer stuff, the stuff we buy when we have surplus cash (or when we don’t have surplus cash but buy it anyway), is another matter.

I came across a guy recently who owned a Ferrari. It had cost him several hundred thousand euro. He said he had the mad car disease - and he must have had. How do guys (women generally don’t do this) spend fortunes buying super motors, knowing that whatever thrill they get from driving them will evaporate after the first month, if not before?

Nobody can think about what car they are driving when they are going about their business, full of their own thoughts that have nothing at all to do with cars.

So what is the point?

Why is all this industry and marketing producing things that don’t make any appreciable difference to the quality of our lives?

Why do we think that a society built around such pointless industry and effort is the only rational form of society that we can devise?

And the most spectacular achievement of this system is that it itself has the power to convince us that there is no rational alternative, short of communist dictatorship.