It’s Sunday, so we’re all due for a bit of spiritual unbosoming. So, here goes: my name is (declare your name here) and every time I hear about someone being witch-hunted out of a public place for wearing a precious pair of Google Glass, I snigger. And we imagine the poor guy, holding on (probably hugging) to his precious piece of wearable technology as he runs for his life. And we snigger some more.

Laughing at other people’s mishaps is a spiked, yet delicious, nectar. Especially when we perceive that they are fully deserving of their misfortune. Like Nick Starr, who was kicked out of the Lost Lake Cafe in Seattle, the US, for taking his pair of Google Glass out to lunch.

I mean, how dare he take his rare beast of technology out in the wild? It’s almost as if he’s taunting us, taking us down a peg or six just for not having what he has. So yes, it serves him right. Him and anyone who indulges in the deadly sin of pride through technology.

We have invented a new technology called multi-touch, which is phenomenal. It works like magic- Steve Jobs

But then, all forms of technology are, as American author Jonathan Franzen says in his essay Pain Won’t Kill You (Farther Away: Fourth Estate, 2013) “an enabler of narcissism”. So every time we take out our new smartphone or tablet (even just to use them), we are guilty of what Dante, in the first canto of the Inferno, called “love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one’s neighbour”. We’re proud of our new technology. And we’re guilty.

But away with all this. It’s the attitude of unbelievers. Let’s go back in time and consider how that pinching and spreading your fingers thing that you do on your tablet would have looked, to people a couple of centuries ago, like magic. And the voice-controlled app on our phone? Evil chanting.

And you know what they would have done to us? Well, two possible outcomes: burn us at the stake, either to a medium-rare or to a crispy well done. But then, if new forms of technology don’t challenge old ones, at the risk of appearing self-glorifying, then technology, and consequently humankind, wouldn’t advance.

The moral of the story: if you see someone flaunting a new piece of technology, it’s not necessarily their pride that’s eating our inner Gilbert Grape. It could be that other deadly sin: our envy.

techeditor@timesofmalta.com