Applegarchy

[alarimer]

I think this post at the Marginal Utilities blog of PopMatters sums up my feelings about Apple/Steve Jobs quite well.
I am definitely going against the current here, with all the Apple worship going on right now but it has to be said. There is a lot to like about Apple products but the whole corporation and its policies (and the lionization of Steve Jobs) leave a very bad taste in my mouth. He was a marketer, not an inventor like Edison. The whole approach by Apple (and now by every other tech company is to accelerate consumption in order to stay current. That is most definitely not a good thing.

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/149640-/

What I see when instructed to appreciate the awesomeness of the world that Jobs helped created is a world full of atomized consumers enthralled by gadgets that promise to augment their lives but just as often compress them, reify them, codify them into quantified data. I see a superficial aesthetic anchored in fastidious fonts and hermetic product design that I am supposed to receive as a special consolation, a privilege of my era as wonderful as electricity or refrigeration. I see commercial products specifically designed to repel curiosity and DIY modification championed as harbingers of the triumph of the “personal.” I see gadgets design to accelerate consumption and subsume more of everyday live to the anxieties of mediation represented as great enablers of productive self-expression. Apple under Jobs put a sleek, brushed-aluminum case on the ideology of consumerism and convinced us it had sparked some sort of revolution.

I have no special complaints about the functionality of Apple’s products, though they are relatively overpriced. Their vaunted ease of use has only occasionally disappointed me, though I have never understood why I was supposed to be so grateful for it. Praising products for merely working seems to speak of our undue tolerance for broken, shabby things, not a generalized elevation of expectations. And outside of fast fashion, perhaps no company exemplifies the commitment to obsolescence more rigorously than Apple. No other company has been more successful in leveraging the media to make its perfectly functional products seem useless and outdated on a regular schedule. All hail “innovation”!

Still, my problem has always been more with the cult of Apple and of Jobs himself. To me, Jobs represented the tyranny of design, the soft command of seductive interfaces, the covert control through cleverly marketed convenience, the triumph of closed, hierarchical systems over open-source ones, commercial protocols and the ethos of the gated community over the commons. More than any other corporate executive, he commoditized creativity and sold it as a fungible status symbol. Apple is supposed to serve as proof that good design can drive capitalist expansion, that market competition will ultimately produce only things that are held by consensus to be not only utilitarian but beautiful. But one could also see this as a demonstration of capitalist ideology’s advance—it no longer needs appeals to utility and rationality to justify itself, but can presume its subjects will regard exchange itself is beautiful, that its logic can only but yield pleasure. Apple thus betokens a growing dependence on the market in order to experience pleasure. We must buy things to entitle ourselves to an aesthetic feeling.

[LAGC]

1. Thanks for posting this.

The orgy of Steve Jobs worship around here and in the MSM is disgusting.

[snagglepuss]

4. +1 !!!!!

[MisterP]

2. the giddy praise, the cultishness, come from Jobs's true genius

he was the king of sellers, and this floor seller can respect him for that--and selling requires high sales, high profits, and high turnover, so of course you're going to want the customers emotionally invested in your brand, to have people come to you as the "first (and hence only) stop" (Amazon has the same deal going: they're just the go-to online book store for the tens of millions of Americans who don't have the time and/or skill to "shop competitively"), to buy a whole new device once it's out of fashion; you don't have to be the first or the best, you just have to sell the most. Of course Apple will have more worth than Exxon when it does THAT!
Plus, there's techno-utopianism, though you find that in Gates and George Glider and Nick Negroponte and Wired--even in some neocon hopes for cooptation of WikiLeaks to bring about their long-awaited ecstasy-fueled twentysomthing secularist revolution in Iran...

[Warpy]

3. I always resented Jobs for one reason: he didn't allow clones

and therefore priced too many of us out of ever learning his software.

It's still a big problem. Oh, I know it's great hardwear that hangs together forever, blah blah blah. The fact is that it remained largely an elitist toy instead of blowing the Crash-o-matic early Windows efforts out of the water like it should have done.

Other than that, Jobs was a genius, always coming up with just the thing a gadgethead never knew he needed.