I don’t have an official date to provide for exactly when this was created, but it was definitely around the time that the iPhone was still in its 3rd generation. I know this since that’s the phone I used in the image when I designed it. Most likely it was about 10 years ago, or mid-2009. This was when the market for smartphones really began to explode, even though Apple’s iPhone had already been on the market for over two years.
During this time, it was nearly every week that you’d hear or see news about an amazing new app and all the cool things it could do - edit photos, record telephone calls; there was even a scale app that allowed you to use the screen to weigh small items - probably most popular among people looking to weigh cocaine or weed.
People were obsessed, but I was indifferent. Sure, the technology was awesome but I felt it had potentially bad implications for our future. People were literally obsessing over their phones, and something about it reminded me of Skynet from the old Terminator films.
As a graphic artist, I decided to do something about it. I wanted to create a parody, and see how people responded to it. My intentions were societal and semi-political, yet I wasn’t proposing anything specific or taking sides. I just wanted to see how far I could take this technology, hypothetically speaking. Then one day it popped into my head, something like “next thing you know they’ll have an app for abortions”, and so that’s where the idea for this piece came from.
I don’t necesarrily have an opinion on abortion. I feel freedom should allow for choice, yet there’s a fine line in determining the moral validity. I choose not to make a choice in the argument. I think the state should not be involved in the decision, and rather that people should be more involved in the state. The state are proven murderers, and there’s no doubt about it. Rather than argue if a fetus counts as being alive, we should probably be arguing as a whole against the state, about the morality of tax dollars used to purchase bullets which are then put in the heads of foreign women and children.
The main message I was creating here was “What’s Next?” If the iPhone makes life so much better and convenient, we can use it for everything, regardless of the morality. But it wasn’t really about morals, it’s about convenience with a twist. How far are we willing to go? Can politics and technology combined take us to unimagined realms of backwardness in society? I think the answer is already clear, just 10 years later.
While you might not be able to abort an unborn fetus with the click of a button, you can surely ruin a life with a smartphone, including your own life. With our heads tilted down and our hands cramped around a tool that has access to all the information in the world, how many are using it to better themselves? Are we using this technology to become better people, or are we just aborting our lives and minds in favor of some sort of techtopia which provides a total disconnection from reality?