The Luddite, Part I
Mr. Harrigan retired as the head of Oak Enterprises, a conglomerate which owned, among other businesses, a chain of cinemas and a telecom company. Despite his business acumen in making billions off these technological advancements, Harrigan is himself a neo-Luddite who personally eschews technology. He owns no television or computer. The ultimate irony is that the man who headed up a telecom company has to be taught how to use a cell phone by a kid.
The Luddite, Part II
The book ends with the image of Craig tossing his iPhone into the lake. The kid who taught the old Luddite how to use an iPhone which he continued using any from the grave, has made the decision to reverse time. Ironically, he seems firmly settled on a future for himself which no longer utilizes cell phone technology as he declares that he is sure he could get by just fine with nothing but an old-fashioned landline telephone.
Text Talk
An ironic reverse takes place once Mr. Harrigan has died and is sending text messages from the grave. Whereas Craig must teach the old everything about how to use a cell phone, including the peculiarities of text messaging unique vocabulary, it is Craig who is flummoxed in his attempt to decode text shorthand sent by the dead Mr. Harrigan. The dead old man’s obscure messages after death like “C C C aa” are as indecipherable to the kid as most text shorthand by kids are to their elderly relative in real life.
Robin Hood in Reverse
Mr. Harrigan’s wealth is such that nobody else is really quite sure how much he’s worth. Despite this, when Craig wins $3,000 with a lottery scratch-off ticket he actually uses part of it to buy an iPhone for the billionaire. The ironic disconnect here steeped in the gullibility of the economically disenfranchised buying gifts for people who can afford to buy the company that makes the gift leads one to wonder if one day in the future Craig will be eagerly responding to an e-mail sent by an ex-President claiming to be a billionaire but begging for a donation from his minimum wage-earning core foundation of supporters.
Instant Obsolescence
Craig relates stories from his father about the nature of evolving technology with stories about shared party-line phones which existed for decades before they became outdated. This leads an ironic observation how the nature of obsolescence relative to modern innovations in communications technology when he refers to the iPhone he received as a Christmas present in 2007—just a few years earlier—as an “antique” that came with only sixteen apps.
