iCrazy: Is Technology Taking Over?

Whether it’s incessantly chatting on a cell phone or listening to an MP3 player, or chatting on a cell phone that’s also an MP3 player, or taking a picture of your MP3 player with a cell phone that also has an MP3 player, it’s undeniable that modern technological gadgets facilitate our universal drive to pamper ourselves. Without them, we’d be relatively non-functional and pretty irritable. 

And someday … they will destroy us all!

I’m kidding.

But seriously, could our fate resemble the apocalyptical scenario in the film Terminator 2—when computers and machines and small electronic devices rise up and wage war against mankind? Creepy to think about, yes … but could it already be happening … on an iPod scale?

Obviously modern day iPods and their accompanying devices aren’t taking over our sprawling civilizations in a physically destructive sense, but they certainly have infiltrated our everyday lives by making it possible to listen to Barry Manilow’s entire catalog on the go and still have enough available memory for a few Sanford and Son reruns downloaded from iTunes.

Okay, let’s get serious again … Could this be a future Apple press release?

“On February 10, 2031, Apple will unveil their new iPoo—a fully functional, individually priced, completely portable lavatory module. The days of waiting in long, sweaty Port-a-potty lines are officially over. It’s time to drop it where you stop it. Drip it where you grip it. Splash it where you stash it. And that’s definitely not all! Be entertained by the 21,003 audio books and over 500 gigs of music from the 1970s and 80s played directly from the built-in and newly released ihaveallmedia-pod. Watch every television show and film ever made. Make business calls through an onboard iPhone—using the hands-free wireless earpiece feature, of course! Enjoy all-organic iChow fed to you by the robotic iHand from the built-in convection iOven that extracts food from the attached iFridge. And guess what? It does it all while you poo! Hell, you can spend all day on the iPoo! Tell your friends! It’s cool. It’s really in style and trendy and everyone will join in. And don’t worry—we all won’t look like some crazed cult of publicly defecating, well-dressed hobos with freakishly large, teethy smiles on their incredible well-groomed faces and bodies that got that way by using, you guessed it, the iHygeine!”

In other words: I think our obsession with rather expensive convenience gadgets is bordering on ridiculous. And I’m not talking about the long line of appliances that cut workloads and wait time into tiny, manageable fractions (washers, dryers, cars, microwave, food processors, dish washers, ovens, stoves, etc., etc., etc.).

No, I’m talking about the iPods with 20,000 songs.