Bdbusinessdaily.com – Near Tisgaon in India, an eighteen-year-old young man leapt from Khavdya Dongar after his parents declined to purchase him a new iPhone. In the desperate attempt to pull him back from the fall, both his mother and father lost their own lives. Three members of a single household, extinguished in one afternoon over a disagreement about a piece of technology. The Times of India carried the story, and it landed with the weight of a parable: what had become of a world in which a gadget could outweigh flesh and blood?

Only days earlier, a parallel horror unfolded in Patuakhali, Bangladesh, where a father reportedly handed over his one-and-a-half-year-old child for roughly Tk100,000 so he could walk out of a store with the latest Apple phone in hand. The two events, separated by geography and circumstance, share a common architecture: the gravitational pull of a branded object bending…