You Got An iPhone, Now Think Of 'Envy Imperialism'

Typing this essay on a MacBook Air, tethered to an iPhone Pro (not the latest model) for accessing the internet, reeks of hypocrisy. Yet, certain issues need to be highlighted using all resources at hand. The news cycle around the sale of iPhone 16 across India is yet another reminder of how the industrially produced concoction of glamour, envy, and cultural imperialism continues to define most markets in the Global South.

Economics perceives envy-an essentially negative emotion - as a powerful driver for economic growth. It is said to positively impact "consumers' achievement motivation and raising their purchasing and spending rates". The more you envy, the more you intend to earn and spend. Owning an iPhone has been an envy-induced and inducing activity for many consumers ever since its launch in 2007. The sleek iPhone was the new Onida television, minus the devil hissing "neighbour's envy, owner's pride".

Simulation As Be-All And End-All

The iPhone is a curious gadget - it is both a product and a platform in the industrial production of glamour. Was it always intended to be so? Let's go to what experts were saying about the telecom revolution and the advent of the smartphone at the beginning of the 21st century. Thomas Elsaesser's 2005 observation is worth quoting in some detail:

"Will it be the sheer everyday usefulness, the universal popularity, and - lest we forget - the ruinous sums telecom firms have invested in licenses for "third-generation" cellphones that win the day, or kids playing computer-games that simulate ever more sophisticated parallel worlds? Whatever redefines the function of sound-and-images combinations in our culture, the entrepreneurial risks and the profitable stakes are equally high."

A quarter of a century later, the answer is clear. Simulation has squarely trumped any and all utility functions. Smartphone has become the space where people curate worlds for influence and clout.

The World Of Influencers And Aspirations

Most discussions around social media obsession focus on the behaviour of the weak and the vulnerable: children/adolescents or the economically marginalised. How social media fuels aspirations, how the world of influencers prey on these aspirations, how children and other vulnerable groups see social media as empowering with all its possibilities, and such. What needs to be examined more, however, is how the adult 'haves' of society are vitiating it for the 'have-nots' by getting on an envy-horse and indulging in a reckless production of a sense of fascination. Posing with a high-end luxury shopping bag - even if it's empty-is not necessarily directed at the slum-dwellers. It's purely for the peers to consume and, hopefully, be envious of. The slum dwellers are mere collaterals of this glamour.

Kiran V Bhatia, while assessing children's digital experiences in Indian slums, notes that digitally produced glamour "allows users to compensate for the "lack" in their lives resulting from the socio-economic and cultural constraints they face". The slum children, for example, gain "liminal access to experiences they aspire to participate in" through social media images. Bhatia notes that this access and participation seldom result in actual upward mobility in class. This makes one thing clear: Though impacted perhaps the most, these children are not the intended audience for the garden variety glamour posters. Yes, they are important as "followers"-data.

'Curation' Is The Keyword

It must be added here that not all glamour is created around expensive commodities and experiences. There is enough pontificating about a new book - because one wants to signal intellectual moorings without possessing any. Or long posts around a newly acquired cultural signifier like wine because, finally, one has arrived. Curation is the keyword.

This curation, unbeknownst to the curator, is the first step towards iSlavery that scholars like Jack Linchuan Qiu want to be acknowledged and, consequently, abolished. Qiu argues, "Digital objects such as smartphones have not only failed to deliver their emancipatory promise, but have created instead new conditions of enslavement". The impact of this digital enslavement is for everyone to see: brain imaging has revealed that screen obsession is causing neurological disorders in children and adolescents, medical science research has established. What it is doing to adults is perhaps even more dangerous-adults are choosing to be enslaved to their life on the screen, unlike the children. They are the 'ultimate slaves', borrowing Orlando Patterson's phrase. Seemingly empowered, wealthy, controllers of narratives, but utterly vulnerable. Standing in a queue for more than twenty hours to buy the latest iPhone, or the inability to be one's authentic self, unless it's for another hey-look-at-me-this-is-the-real-me social media post - if this is not the vulnerability of the ultimate slaves, what is?

The cultural imperialism of the United States of America hinges on this digital ultimate slavery. Apple's iPhone's rapid global penetration of the global mobile sector is incumbent mainly not so much on the end users marvelling at its technological leaps but on their ability to flaunt it as a possession. The possession that allows them to flaunt other possessions. Slavery exploits the body, whole or parts, in an abnormal labour-capital transaction, as Christian Fuchs puts it. What is being exploited in this case is the human brain-the site of ideas, emotions, and more.

And one day, it is bound to lead to anomie-nothingness.

(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based author and academic.)