Following up on Part 1...
I think technology -- forget all the claims to a new world of participatory democracy, etc. -- has mainly been geared toward bourgeois personal convenience, toward making life as effortless and comfy as possible, so users are always connected to people and things they know.
Their iProducts make them feel safe, confident and powerful -- never far from a friend who can help, never lost, never going where no one else has gone before.
I accidentally deleted an anonymous comment on Part 1 that basically said "Jobs didn't make people zombies; people are free to choose to become zombies or not." And I thought: But didn't Jobs, just like a heroin dealer, make it a whole lot easier for people -- who naturally gravitate to the lowest common denominator -- to become zombies? Didn't he grease the skids to a world where it's considered wonderful that people can watch video as they walk down the sidewalk, and in essence bring their living room with them?
Never mind that the video they watch is the same old crap, and that the buzz they're addicted to is about the same old Pop crap, just updated every few years for a new crop of suckers.
So I think people who say Apple products have made this a better world really mean that the products -- by boosting their ability to be comfortable wherever they go -- have made them feel sleeker and more powerful than they would if disconnected from their Apple product.
They probably don't notice how they constantly consult their device as they walk down the street, seeking its confirmation that they still belong to the shiny world it connects, so it's hard to tell if the device is an appendage, or they're the appendage. And they probably don't notice what pliant consumers they've become, of a corporation that's always sought maximum control of its platforms.
So when you factor in Apple's paranoid approach to leaks and criticism, Jobs' ruthless treatment of underlings, and the near-spiritual devotion of Apple consumers, it's not a stretch to consider the term "cult," even if Apple devotees belong to something a little closer to a cargo cult than a proper one.
[Steve Jobs Was Not God, Gawker]
[What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs, Gawker]
[Defending Life’s Work With Words of a Tyrant, NYT]
[Monologist Mike Daisey On Apple's "Capitalistic Cowardice", Gothamist]
[Let's Get Real About Steve Jobs, Huffington Post]
[Steve Jobs / Apple Cult]
[Steve Jobs / Apple Cult Servant]
Special thanks to Jeremiah Moss for the Gawker, Gothamist, and Huffington Post links...
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4 comments:
glad you put this up. for your links?
http://gothamist.com/2011/10/10/mike_daisey.php
Jeremiah -- Thanks for that link (I'll add it above), the ones from Gawker, and the encouragement.
I noticed Mike Daisey's mention of Foxconn (of worker suicide fame) and manufacturing in China, which I'm familiar with by way of one of my favorite writers, Peter Hessler (my favorites: Oracle Bones and Country Driving).
But I wasn't aware that child labor is also part of the price paid for these products. I was going to buy an iPhone -- just to play Tetris -- but now I feel guilty!
well, since pretty much everything we buy in the US is the product of child labor, or some other oppressed labor, we'd have to feel guilty about everything. it's a bottomless pit of guilt. which i think is why people just say forget it and don't bother to question it at all. there has to be a midway between all and nothing.
anyway, here's another one for you:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-larner/lets-get-real-about-steve_b_1001705.html
i like this para: "The iPad is a powerful work tool for a small group of focused professionals. For the rest of us, it's a brain-rotting entertainment platform. It is one more portal through which a homogenized public culture of images -- many of them generated by the former Jobs venture, Pixar Studios -- can seep; a culture that denigrates text, reading, and discriminating habits of research and analysis."
That's a good link too, thanks.
"The Book of Steve is taught at Apple University" ...yikes!
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