The politics of the smartphone

Ten years ago, the iPhone kicked off a communications revolution. With a new version emerging Tuesday, DAVID VON DREHLE considers the political changes it brought forth.

As Congress returns from summer recess to a plate heaped with work — President Donald Trump added a gooey serving of immigration reform Tuesday on top of the debt ceiling, the budget, hurricane relief and tax reform — another key institutions is marking 10 years that shook the world.

These simultaneous events have caused a strange picture to form in my mind. I see Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, as the tonsured abbot of a Benedictine monastery in the mid15th century. The abbot’s job is to oversee production of handwritten Bibles by monks in the abbey scriptorium. He and his predecessors have tended this important labor for hundreds of years.

But now a goldsmith named Gutenberg, in a German town called Mainz, has devised a machine that can produce identical Bibles — or any other document, for that matter — quickly and cheaply using movable metal letters and oilbased ink. And the abbot is awakening to the realization that nothing will ever be same.

When Apple unveiled its first smartphone in 2007, the company sparked a communications revolution likely to be as transformative as Gutenberg’s. It’s the nature of such seismic change to shake the institutions of culture and society to the ground.

The explosive essence of the printing press was its ability to transmit information widely across space and time. Laypeople could own and read their own Bibles, and the result was the Reformation. Scientists could record their observations to share with other scientists, and inventors their innovations with other inventors, and the results were the Scientific and Industrial revolutions. Philosophers could spread their ideas to activists, and activists to more activists, and one result was that durable document that begins: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union . . . ”

If all of those changes could flow from oily ink on slugs of alloy, what earthquakes will follow from a technology that gives to nearly every human being the tools of