A Can of Worms at Apple?

May 2, 2024

By Jim Towey

You would think by now that a company the size of Apple would fix a minor tech glitch when made aware of it.  My opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal last week revealed how Apple’s iPhone refuses to autocorrect “Gid” with “God.”  Gid bless you?  Really?

A week has passed, and Apple is still stumped by Gid and refuses to do the obvious correction like it regularly does with other obvious fixes.  I am now convinced the glitch is actually a design feature.  The iPhone seems to be programmed with core standards that ignore Judeo-Christian traditional beliefs and images.  You can get a “pregnant man” emoji on your iPhone if you want one, but when you search “nun,” you get none.  And “pope?”  Nope.  The deeper I dug, the more apparent the bias became.

The Unicode Consortium

Some may disagree.  One WSJ commenter, Dave K., took aim at my intelligence.  He wrote, “This is stupid.  Apple does not define or create emoji.  That is done by the Unicode Consortium.”

Oh yes, the all-powerful, California-based Unicode Consortium.  I had never heard of this august body.  Turns out it is the god, the creator of emoji life!  Let there be pregnant man!

Dave goes on, “Unless the consortium [sic] approves an emoji and defines the technical specifications for it, you won’t find it on iPhone or Android.”

So, if I understand his point, he is saying that poor, powerless, $2.6 trillion Apple can’t do anything about the emoji menu it offers customers!

Does anyone in the metaverse actually believe this?  How convenient that the Consortium provides Apple cover as it minimizes Christian and Jewish religious holidays while honoring those of other faiths.  Don’t take my word for it – try this experiment on your iPhone.  Do an emoji search for “Easter” and you’ll find the image of a little chick bursting out of an egg – not exactly the resurrection account from the gospels.  For Christmas, you get Santa images and a decorated tree.  And for Passover?  Well, the engineers couldn’t come up with anything, although if you search “rabbi,” you get two rabbits, and I’m not kidding.

However, with treasured holy days of other faiths, it is a different story.  Enter the Muslim “Ramadan” or Hindu “Diwali” and you get appropriate religious emojis.  Sacred Christian and Jewish holy days are secularized or ignored but those of other faiths are not.  That is fact.

Consider the emoji fate of the simple Catholic rosary that Samsung used to represent with a Latin cross.  Not anymore.  Some years ago, Samsung saw the light.  It now offers for “rosary” the same generic “prayer beads” that Apple does – a string of red beads that is familiar to Buddhists and Muslims.  Apple’s and Samsung’s message to the 1.4 billion Catholics in the world who know what a rosary looks like, is simple: No, you don’t.  That is what you call gaslighting. 

Look who’s behind the curtain

The more I searched emoji searches, the more evident the bias of Apple became.  This led me back to the Unicode Consortium.  Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, when you follow the yellow chip road that leads to it and arrive and pull back the curtain veiling its governance, you discover that it is ruled by, you guessed it, current or former Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other Big Tech types.

Should we be surprised?  Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak admitted that they named the company they founded “Apple, Inc.,” to deliberately reference the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden, and thus, the quest by man to be like God. 

Credit Apple for being honest and transparent about its aspirations.  Its logo recalls the Hebrew and Christian account of Adam and Eve’s original sin: “And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2)

Humans playing God

The Bible doesn’t say whether it was an apple that Adam and Eve tasted or some other type of fruit.  But the effects of rebellion against God haven’t changed any through the ages.  When we claim to be God, we display an invincible hubris, like what Apple and the Big Tech monopoly exhibit now, just as the Unicode Consortium selectivity demonstrates.  When humans play God, humans suffer, particularly the poor, disabled, elderly and those whose lives are minimized when the focus is on efficiency and usefulness and divorced from the true Creator.

This arrogance doesn’t make Apple and the others rotten to the core.  But it does alert us to an agenda, to a thumb on the scale.  Beyond all the smiley faces is a worm hidden inside a shiny Apple.  Byte by byte, beware!

(The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Aging with Dignity and/or its Board of Directors.)