Ignominious Defeat

July 23rd, 2009Blog2 comments

When an animal dies in nature, that death serves a purpose. A gazelle is tackled by a cheetah so that its body can serve as food for a beautiful, noble animal: The pinnacle of the evolution of a land-based predator.

In turn that beautiful, noble animal will someday collapse, be eaten by insects and worms which will fuel the grasses of the savannah. The cycle of life continues its purpose.

But we humans have crafted a society in which people die in ignominious, pointless ways. For instance, Gizmodo gets it absolutely right with its article titled Perspective on the iPhone Suicide: Guy Died Over a Fucking Phone:

“Let’s step back from the iPhone leak suicide for a minute and just think about the basics of what happened. A phone was lost. A guy was tortured. A guy killed himself or something. Over a fucking phone.”

You should read the article but I’ll give you the gist for now: A worker for Foxconn (the Chinese manufacturers of iPhones) lost one of the prototypes. Or it was stolen. No one knows. Anyway, the security folks at the company decided to interrogate/torture/toss his apartment looking for it. This drove the guy to jump off a building.

Over a phone.

What good came out of this guy’s death? Not much. But the more complex our society becomes, and the more stupid, inane crap we get ourselves into, the more often these ignominious deaths will occur.

I’m thinking of the poor guy that got trampled to death at Walmart so that people could get cheap DVD players. The guy who died falling into a vat of molten chocolate. The teenage girl who killed herself over MySpace.

It’s bizarre to look at a Walmart, a giant vat of chocolate, or a social networking site and think, “This is where somebody’s life will end.” But there it is.

Hey, I don’t mean to be a downer. It’s important to recognize that people also die in noble ways. Men died so we could go to the moon. People are up to great adventures, and sometimes those adventures end tragically.

But the question is, do we really need phones and cheap DVD players that badly?