Steve Jobs named his company after he found inspiration in an orchard: Apple. It was a brilliant and cynical conceit, because the computer age is not an orchard, but the opposite. Apple is super factories in China, smartphone-drugged and sleepless children, and manic, raging adults.

It didn’t have to be this way, at least not theoretically. But it is. Jobs was good at making people disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes. At its launch, Jobs made the Apple Mackintosh say that he [Jobs] was “like a father to me”. Computers don’t have familial relationships, but the name Apple works as metaphor at least: the instrument of the fall of man.

According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs revolutionised six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, smartphones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. I want to focus on one element that broke the world, and thus Britain: the iPhone, which is deadening, havoc-making, and lovely. It is changing our brain chemistry in ways we do not fully understand yet, though we are all aware of it. Briefly put, it is driving us crazy, in our political and personal lives. It is atomising us and making us vulnerable to extremism.

Jobs did not invent the smartphone – that was IBM, in 1994 – but he made it beautiful. More than any man, he brought the computer from the office to the living room to your hand. By understanding aesthetics, he created things that people who do not care about technology wanted – people........

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