I’m not usually one to get involved in political discussions or to post about my views in public. Politics have become such a vicious arena, with one candidate or party doing whatever they can to discount the other. However, I’ve had these thoughts on my mind for a while, and think it’s time to put them out there for everyone, whether they agree or disagree.

As you can probably gather from the title, I feel that as an American today, my freedoms are slowly disappearing. It’s not a recent occurrence, it seems to have been happening for many years. I think back to before I was even born when prayer was banished from schools. Or more recently when the actions of one sick individual cause many Americans to try and infringe on a person’s right to own a gun either for recreational use or for protection. Or when a pastor is asked to close an inauguration ceremony, yet has to decline because his views differ from those in power. Americans cry for diversity, yet shun those who hold beliefs or morals different than their own. Tolerance, they say, but only for people who hold to the same liberal views we do.

I don’t know how we’ve gotten to this point, or frankly how we can make progress away from it, but it just seems that we’re no longer the “land of the free.”

I imagine more posts will come from this, but I just had to get this out there. Feel free to discuss with me, you can find me on Twitter.

Before the iPhone’s release in 2007, our conception and expectations from our smartphones was very different than it is today. The “dumb phone” was the predominant device that nearly every cell phone user had. We didn’t expect much from our phones, only phone calls and occassionally text messages. There were those few people who did have the smarthphones of the day, but even then, tasks were limited to email, and perhaps some light web browsing.

Now think back to June 29, 2007. I think nearly everyone can agree that this date changed cell phones and the entire mobile computing industry forever and sent it in a very different direction. With the release of the first iPhone, everything changed. Gone were the days of flip phones, large physical keyboards, and crappy touchscreens. The iPhone set a new standard that others were soon trying to catch up to.

Fast forward to today. The iPhone gets revised every year or so, with cool new features. It seems that there’s nothing it can’t do, though some will disagree. Other manufacturers are building similar phones, but I haven’t found any with the build quality and beauty of an iPhone. The thing that bothers me about all this is the demand consumers have for new features that will amaze them the same way they were amazed back in 2007 when the iPhone is announced. That was an absolutely revolutionary moment, but that took years of planning and development. We can’t expect Apple to do this every year or even every few years. They still amaze us, albeit not quite as dramatically as before.

The demand now is for ever thinner phones with long-lasting batteries, blazing fast processors, and screens so good you can’t even see their pixels. When you step back to think about these things, and realize what kind of engineering went into them, it’s almost unbelievable. Yet we still demand more, and are unsatisfied and often overlook what it really takes to build something like the iPhone. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, but I do think it’s a very interesting view on how technology progresses and how the demand for innovation is always increasing.

What do you think? Hit me up on Twitter – @ChaseLivingston