In the comments to Apple Halves iPad Production To Supply Chips To iPhone 13 | ZeroHedge, Blotto notes:
1922
‘We have already shown that in our age an enormous amount of mental and spiritual energy is used to provide for the lowest needs; we have shown how the telephone, telegraph, railway, steamboat and other things still to come have absorbed a tremendous amount of spiritual force; they are only used for the mere satisfaction of lower human needs.
Man, however, has only a certain amount of spiritual force. Now consider the following: Man has used an enormous amount of spiritual force in order to invent and construct telephones, railways, steamboats and airships, in order to further external culture. This has to be so. It would have gone badly with humanity if this had not come about. This spiritual power has also been used for many other things. Only consider how all social connections have gradually been spun into an extremely fine intellectual web. What tremendous spiritual force has been expended so that one may now draw a cheque in America and cash it in Japan. An enormous amount of spiritual force has been absorbed in this activity. These forces had once to descend below the line of the physical plane, so to speak, which separates the spiritual kingdom from the abyss.
For in a certain way man has actually already descended into the abyss, and one who studies the age from the standpoint of Spiritual Science can see by the **most mundane phenomena how this goes on from decade to decade**, how a certain point is always reached where the personality can still keep a hold on itself. If at this point it allows itself to sink down, the personality is lost, it is not rescued and lifted into the spiritual worlds.’
Rudolf Steiner – Apocalypse of John Lecture VII – 1922
https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA104/English/APC1958/19080624p01.html
We’ve been messing up the world for a long time.
People quite rightly claim that mobile phones and iPads are dumbing down many children. Robbing them of focus, concentration and creativity. We forget that it’s been a long cycle down.
Great thinkers and great ideas are not in much demand these days. The tabloids clamour for billionaires and naked Instagrammers. Did God create us in his image for this? Or for the atheists among us – is the best we could have done with human existence.
The world will safely survive two million less iPads.