After finishing an uneventful shipping trip at a local grocery store, a Kirkland, Washington woman on the way home was prompted by her smartphone alerting her that an Apple Airtag device was traveling along for the ride in the vehicle. Except that she did not own the latest generation of a tracking gadget produced by the tech giant. After pulling into nearby parking lot, she thoroughly searched the outside of the car and made the chilling discovery that someone had affixed the Airtag in one of the wheel wells, deliberately attempting to conceal the unit’s location. The woman then drove to the local police station, made an official report, and relinquished the device to authorities.
Other people in the area and on a national scale have not been as fortunate, as opportunistic criminals are utilizing the affordable and powerful technology to effectively track the exact location of unsuspecting individuals, and processing the information to invade and rob homes and businesses with the least amount of resistance or trace. As Apple originally developed the Airtag as a tool to provide a viable solution to consumers prone to losing valuable items, the ability of crooks to adopt a simple hack for a lucrative score is just another example of how embracing overengineering over time-tested and simple analog methods has plagued modern society. It is within environment of perpetual connectivity, that redundancy has been cast to the ambiguous domain of purgatory, and bringing with it, the modernization of non-violent crime. Combined with prosecutors establishing an unsettling precedent in failing to criminalize theft and destruction of property through the abolitionist experiment of apologist non-enforcement of codification, the last thing the nation needs is the scandal of innovative hardware acting as a utensil for stalking and thievery.
With the application of next-gen technology supporting illegal acts, the tech hierarchy should be accountable in failing to protect devices through redundancy, however, thanks to the ambiguous “terms and conditions” surrounding products and software platforms, accountability is as unfeasible as the separation between politics and life. Within this tumultuous microclimate, sanity was abandoned in 2010, when the smartphone overtook the conscience, as the decision making mechanism for individuality, which has been forced into a brusque and forced extinction. Buyer’s remorse aside, the inability of corporations to atone for their inventory egregiously employed for tasks unrecognized in the original phase, is simply a forgettable bi-product of the information age.
While the Airtag is not the first or last instance of the entire “nothing can go wrong here”, the sketchy track record of releasing a seeming smart machine too soon without properly weighing the ramifications boasts an impressive track record with the self-driving vehicle and the toxic battery leading the pack. Live testing on active roadways of the cars and trucks with embryonic sentient brains has led to preventable fatalities as both the human and AI have failed in processing the surrounding variables. Amazon’s brief interlude facilitating a trial program in the UK where delivery personnel were given access to customer’s residence represents a blatant failure of not thinking a concept through, but giving crooks a subtle loophole to exploit through a tiny device is equally as careless rfrom an engineering and logical standpoint.
From unregulated delivery drones buzzing through the air, to smart homes at the whim of hackers and digital dissidents orchestrating a chaotic ecosystem catering the rogue, the unregulated universe of the information age is simply conducive to the novel idea which encapsulates everything that is overengineering, the face of which is cryptocurrency.
As the 15-second attention span caves into individuals unsettling oblivious to the rigors and obligations of everyday life, technology which should act as supplement in ushering modernity, remains a hindrance as visions of grandeur convolute progress. The unfortunate ideology of prodigious tech stumbling through hypocritical nuclear winter of leftist dogma, the absence of common sense is the driving force to cultural stagnation. But priced at $29.99 what consumer can resist compromising privacy and security of the sake of twinkling and shing convenience. Amazon and other retailers bank on the diminishing of critical thinking skills in society.