While western governments worry over the threat of Ebola, a more pervasive but far less malign epidemic is spreading through their populations like a winter sniffle: mobile personal technology. The outbreak reached its height at Christmas, when gift-giving was predicted to take worldwide shipments of smartphones to a record 1.3bn units in 2014. The total will rise to 1.4bn in 2015, according to IDC, a market research firm.
The similarity between disease organisms and personal devices is striking. Viruses and other parasites commandeer larger organisms, usurping resources in order to multiply and spread. Smartphones and other gadgets do the same thing, feeding on ever-increasing amounts of human attention and electricity supplied via wire umbilici.
It is tempting to impute a “strategy” to both phages and phablets, neither of which is sentient. Instead, the process is evolutionary, consisting of many random mutations, as experimented with by legions of product designers. This makes it all the more potent.