If you have recently walked through a city of large enough economic importance, you will have seen an ad by Apple announcing the iPhone 15. It is simple in its execution, with two main elements: the phone’s twin-lens camera, and the word Newphoria.

I imagine it is genuinely pleasurable to hold this new thing. With this fresh pair of lenses, you can more finely broadcast your proximate reality–make it global in a way that you could not have done a year ago. Should you take pictures on your old phone, you would be taking samples from a coarser reality, a defunct reality.

This ad will irritate some sensibilities. The consumerist impulse for the next new thing has been attacked on multiple fronts, in leftist and even Christian discourse. On a spiritual level, such an impulse roots the soul in the timely and distracts it from finer, lasting things that should be its purview. On a material level, it is ecologically unsustainable, and contingent on resource extraction from weaker nations. To both ideologies, it is an offensive habit, one that should be stamped out.

But Newphoria, to use Apple’s word, cannot be said to be a natural facet of the brain, always pulling us away from the righteous path. With one notable exception, Ancient Egypt held to a rigid set of proportions for its art and hieroglyphs over its three millenia history. When these proportions slackened, it was only because the central political authority slackened. Classical Chinese aesthetics, for another example, did not prize novelty so much as reinterpretations of known masterworks. The pleasure of the new is then a learned compulsion, or at least one confined to certain realms of thought.

Newness is most closely associated with technology. The most innovative developments in the arts are in a sense endlessly fresh. Not so with technology. In war, a superior system of attack or defense makes defunct that which came before it, in a tautological way. So what then changes, with stronger weapons? Whoever has them can obviously overpower those who don’t. They are now the more advanced society, whose ideas have become authoritative. Their horizon has expanded. Newphoria is nothing, perhaps, but the warm pleasure of power.

For a new phone camera is indeed like a new gun. An iPhone camera is not the finest image capturing device out there, as it can never match the infinitesimal resolution of light bleeding onto film. Likewise, a new gun is not necessarily more powerful, but sleekier, and quicker, perhaps. Your authority expands simply by having it on your hip, ready to shoot at whatever is worth capturing—whatever is worth making still. It can then be hung on a wall of kills, as a token of marksmanship. 

To decline newphoria–to be able to afford it and say no–is thus an act of nonviolence. But like all forms of extricating oneself from the world, this abstinence is not without its sacrifices. You become an object of curiosity, standing apart from the dance of the now.