TELL ME, DO YOU INTEND TO FUCK IT?

This was unexpected – because phones are such deeply tactile things. I pick up my iPhone X forty-five times a day, Apple Screen Time informs me: no wonder irreverent UK tech site The Register has christened phones ‘fondle slabs’. Our phones are not simply media devices or transparent conduits for the vast amount and variety of information that pass... See more

Nonetheless, smartphones remain intensely skin-like on a metaphorical level: we stroke, and they are minutely responsive. Our fingertips enjoy the ultra-smoothness of their Gorilla Glass screens, velvety like a youthful cheek. Silicone cases add a body-equivalent degree of friction.‘From the classical (and even the cybernetic) viewpoint, technology... See more

It’s curious to want to call an advert ‘objectifying’, because of course it is: its function is to promote an object. Yet this nonetheless feels like the right word, not only in reference to the object of the ad’s intentions, but the kind of gaze that is filming it. The camera, the eye, is fixated on the phone’s ‘thing-ness’: not what it can do, bu... See more

While the iPhone was always sexy as a black mirror, a smooth monolith on its exclusive pedestal, what’s interesting to me is that it’s now developed a kind of intimacy that it didn’t have before that emerges particularly with FaceID and Raise to Wake. I look at it, it looks at me, there is this slight microsecond of lag as it works to recognise me ... See more

Apple launched the iPhone 12 in autumn 2020 to rapturous feedback on Twitter that it is ‘sexy af’. And everyone seems to know what they mean. So I want to take this statement seriously. What might the intensity and eroticism of this desire for an inanimate device reveal about us, and what we want from technology?

And as Apple’s marketing material demonstrates, this is no accident. iPhone adverts are strange: they make the phone a body. They borrow a visual language less from sci-fi or action movies than from erotica. Devices are shot in extreme close-up, almost always dimly lit. A beam of light traces across a surface so smooth that it occupies a space some... See more

These aluminium and glass contours may be a considerable distance from the organic forms of the human body, but nonetheless there’s shared DNA: Apple is, somehow, more organic than other tech brands. This most abstract of bodily resemblances is part of where its sexiness originates.

The curators asked if ‘a sharp object could be an erotic object – or a square object or something that is not round, or that does not have a smooth texture?’ It seemed that the answer was generally no: curves were essential.

Historically, luxury was expressed in the soaring vaulted ceilings and dazzling stained glass of a cathedral; now, luxury is in a piece of technology so perfect that it seems human hands cannot possibly have created it. Luxury is the market equivalent of feathers on a bird. It’s irrational and sexual, and it easily overwhelms the killjoy, rational ... See more