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This month, Apple introduced via press conference that it's latest iPad is 20 percent more slender than the last iPad (thinner than a pencil), operates on a faster processor with a better camera, and harbors a finger print security feature Apple is calling, Touch ID.

The San Francisco chronicle adds Apple's new product introduction falls in line with it's strategy holding an event every October to push the company's newest products before the holiday shopping season.  


This month, people all over the world in discrete conferences with their hearts finally introduced the notion that maybe, just perhaps, the latest feelings he or she has been harboring towards that "special someone" is, in fact, love.


It's hard to tell, where the Touch ID feature came from or why the feature is here, or where Apple is going with it. We have always had 4 number or 4 patterned security features on our Apple devices. Now we have a security brief that trades our fingerprint for entry inside. We have Apple introducing Touch ID to us this October. We have our holiday shopping season to measure whether this feature and/or the others keep Apple's oligarchy steady climbing the commercial ranks. 

One thing to consider, when it comes to the heart, who climes the ranks? Other than our own, how can we establish features that allow fingerprints, touch, and identities to gain access to the most valuable parts of ourselves? In the land of silicon valley, in the city of San Francisco, in homes expected to fill with Touch ID security, how do we keep investing in our insecurities, armor-less-ness, and raw, wild, open hearts?

Technology like Apple's products are user friendly. Love, like many human "products" are not user friendly in the sense that no two humans operate in-love the same way. We can approach an Apple product with some ease because we know the general interfaces, the short-cuts, the rules, the aesthetics- will be constant. We cannot, on the other hand, approach each other with the same brand of ease that Apple has offered us. Human to human touch, lasting love, relationship, pleasure, orgasm, conversation, compassion, understanding- requires a certain depth and insight, which is achieved by investing the most precious things we have: our time, our love, our labor, and our willingness to learn.

These things are not simple like the action of pressing my own fingerprint to open the virtual insides of my beloved iPads. These things are complicated, it's about the fingerprints of my beloved, not my own.



Technology keeps us moving forward ("evolving"), yet instead of moving forward through time (centuries, millennia, epochs) we move forward with the conceptualization, production, and popularization of fascinating innovations that seem to offer us infinite versions of infinite spaces, in infinite solutions. We categorize Apple products into generations and systems. There is an order to what came before, what is now, and what may come to be. Operating on Snow Leopard was ten years ago. Operating on Yosemite is today. Where are you? Are you evolving or are you left behind?  

Two nights ago I watched a documentary called, "The Unbelievers", which profiles two great scientists in modern times, Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss as they make public appearances and speeches on various international platforms. It was fascinating to watch them think together, travel together, and confront religion, science, and other topics. Dawkins is an evolutionary scientist. Krauss, a physicist. Together they inspire masses of people around the world to understand reality, where we came from and where were going, and to behold the preciousness of life from a scientific point of view. Understanding and beholden to nature and evolution, we are able to assume a moral and actual responsibility to our race, societies, and planet, that comes not out of fear, ignorance, or manipulation as does in religion, but from a place of actual knowledge and inspiration to do better.

After watching the Unbelievers, reading about Apple's steady continuation of technologies I am beginning to wonder: how far have we gone with technological product and how far do we need to go? If we are as Dawkins and Krauss say- insignificant today in the spectrum of evolutionary change, but significant enough to make changes that directly effect our future as a race- then, who's driving the evolutionary choices we are making today and how do we make assuming responsibility about our future as a planet and as a race, COOL? 

In California, It's COOL that soon my fingerprint can unlock my iPad. It's COOL that soon my iPad will be skinnier than my last. It's not become COOL to talk about the fact that California is in a drought and we are confronting a water shortage. It is COOL to use dating Apps in San Francisco to meet potential mates. It is not COOL to talk about the fact that the majority of young San Franciscans are using dating Apps such as Tinder to have sex, never call afterwards, complain about that reality, and sign back on for more, and that's COOL. 


I wonder if Apple plays God, or we let Apple play God. Or, if god isn't your cup of tea, does Apple play the evolution card? Every October during the new apple launch, do we let Apple dictate a speedy, shiny, thin, and remarkably expensive evolution that we can control, see, and hear within our life times? Perhaps it gives some of us solace to cozy up next to our latest Apple gadget this Christmas, knowing tenderly that at least some of us had the means to evolve. 

Since when was evolution marketable, measurable, taxable, deliverable? Could technology be the white rabbit pulled out of the black hat of our darkest fears around not knowing our own evolution? To paraphrase Dawkins in The Unbelievers: We can't possibly understand a century of time gone by, nor a millennia, we are disconnected to our evolution as a race, which is so subtle over so much time.      




I connected with a friend of mine in recent weeks, after years of being apart. Our reconnection was wonderful and it makes my heart flutter in the direction of what I suppose feels like love. No App can measure for me what love is, where it comes from, or where it goes. I think we have to be willing to "go there", to invest the most precious parts of ourself for an unknown time. There are so many unknowns. I know when my iPAD unlocks, I do this. I do not know when my heart unlocks. I don't do this. You don't do this. This does this, the heart opens, and then your afraid and fearless at the same time. 

The security features that protect our products are advanced. Are the security features that protect our hearts as advanced? I hope that we keep somethings the old fashioned way. Not every feature of the heart plays by our rules, or the rules written by someone else's version of love. Not every October-December marks a speedy evolution for the must-haves. Not every lover is skinnier than the last. Our own fingerprint is not always more valuable than another's. What is valuable is thinking and feeling combined. Navigating the market and navigating the heart.