On: Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit is about who gets to define the post-smartphone era

July 24, 2026

I read today of this lawsuit between Apple and OpenAI, and what strikes me immediately is the framing: it is about who gets to define the next era. The very language treats the future of human interaction with technology as a territory to be claimed, a prize to be won in a corporate dispute. They speak of it as if it were a natural resource, lying in wait for the strongest claimant. But this is not a discovery; it is a construction. The “post-smartphone era” does not exist as a geological fact. It is being actively built, right now, in boardrooms and legal filings, and this lawsuit is one of the tools for its construction.

What is the actual situation for the user in this? They are the object here, the terrain over which this battle is fought. Their future habits, their attention, their very mode of being-in-the-world, are being constituted as a problem of intellectual property. Their freedom to engage with technology will be exercised within the constraints that the victor of this lawsuit solidifies. It is a profound act of Othering: the human subject is reduced to a market to be shaped, a behavior to be designed.

The ambiguity lies in the fact that these corporations present themselves as servants of progress, as mere facilitators of an inevitable technological destiny. But this lawsuit reveals the raw struggle for power beneath that veneer. Who benefits from the naturalization of this process? The entities that get to write the rules of engagement before anyone else has a chance to question them. I feel a familiar complicity, too - the complicity of the consumer who will likely accept whatever interface is handed to them, mistaking a highly curated cage for an open field. The question is not what the post-smartphone era will be, but who has decided, in advance, that we must have one at all.