Apple is now valued at more than a trillion dollars on the New York stock exchange. It is not the first company to be so huge if inflation is taken into account; but it is the first that is not in the oil business. The other ground-breaking fact about its wealth is that it employs only about a quarter as many people as PetroChina, which is probably the world’s largest company. These two facts taken together suggest the direction of the digitalised economy: fewer people are going to make more money. It is still too early to see the ultimate destination, just as it would have been impossible to foresee all the effects of the oil economy in 1918. Transport was obviously going to be revolutionised then but who at the time could have foreseen the world transformed by plastics?

The oil revolution accelerated the shrinkage of the physical world that coal-powered transport – steamships and railways – had started in the 19th century. Air travel and motor transport transformed peacetime economies and the means of waging war. They changed the way we understood the physical world, since distance on its own now no longer meant that anywhere was hard to reach. The digitalisation revolution seems to have abolished social distance in a similar way. But social distance has not been replaced by social closeness. Instead, we have an abrasive and anxious proximity with strangers around the world. In the world of social media we are all up in one another’s faces.

Apple has profited from this revolution in two rather contradictory ways. It was the company that invented the smartphone. Without the smartphone and its ravenous screen it is very hard to imagine the modern social media scene. So Apple bears some responsibility for our present state of constant distraction and confused excitability in which everything is sensational but nothing really matters. But in recent years it has also started to sell the ability to cut oneself off from the online world, at least in bursts. The Silicon Valley elite have long distrusted the effects of smartphones on their own children, however much they wanted to sell them to the rest of the world. So Apple’s phones now offer to limit the time you spend on any particular website while its web browser makes ad blocking easier.

Both these can be understood as ways to strike against rival tech giants that make their money from advertisements, primarily Facebook and Google. But they are also examples of Apple’s focus on user experience, which has been one of the foundations of its fortune. Sometimes this corresponds to nothing visible to the outside world. Just as cars are sold as an expression of the buyer’s personality, Apple products have been sold as a story about the user: one who thinks differently – and spends rather more. But it has also often reflected a real elegance and ease of use difficult to imitate elsewhere. In the end, one reason why Apple is so immensely profitable is that it makes things people really want to buy, and to go on buying.

Apple has more in common with other digital companies than divides them. All use remarkably few workers to generate their enormous profits. All operate an internal class system, which concentrates power in very few hands. None have any unions worth speaking of. All rely on the unglamorous work being done far from California, usually by subcontractors. All shuffle their profits around the world in an endless game of “Find the lady” with national tax authorities – a factor that should not be overlooked when it comes to asking why they are so immensely profitable. If this is the model of the company of the future, it will have consequences we have not yet learned how to manage.

The downside of the oil-based economy is now obvious all around us. The symptoms of apparently uncontrollable climate change have become undeniable. Cities are choked with polluting traffic while the seas are choked with plastics made from oil. Whole countries have been devastated by oil riches. The digital revolution seems, so far, much more benign. But the loss of trust that social media both causes and exploits may one day be seen as another form of unforgivable pollution.