I’m really pissed off at Apple these days - so much so that I might refuse to develop things for their hardware unless they quit it with all the fascism. There’s been a bunch of blah-blah about how the iPad sucks because it doesn’t have flash or whatever. And, yeah, that represents a serious oversight in the iPad’s product design. But that’s not the issue. A lot of things that people sell don’t have features I want. They don’t sell Dark Chocolate Covered Chili-Spiced Dried Mangoes at Trader Joe’s anymore - they just sell dried mangoes and I have to dip them in chocolate myself. Exactly what comes with the things you buy is not the problem. The problem with the iPad is that it is a support and a strengthening of the idea that people can be cleaved into two sets - the people that create things, and the biomass that they sell sell things to - the whales of media production, and the krill they sift and sum for nutrients.
Speculative discussion about the iPad follows a fairly standard arc:
- How about that new Apple thingie?
- I hear it doesn’t have flash and can’t multitask. Yes, I heard that too.
- I don’t think I would find it useful. Oh, no, nor I.
- But, see, it’s not for people like you and me. That’s the revolutionary part. You know who it’s for? It’s for my mother.
Just what the fuck kind of an dimwit do you think my mother is? Do you think that she somehow doesn’t “need” a device which enables creativity? Like the only creative act that woman is capable of is using her womb, and after menopause she becomes useless. I’ll tell you about my mother. She’s the founder and president of the wildly successful Snohomish Knitter’s Guild. She builds yarn spinning and dying equipment in her garage. She has been know to fill entire amtrak trains with knitters on cross-country yarn treks. Oh you know what would be perfect for a person like that? A touch screen tee vee.
Having to hear my mother belittled isn’t the main problem, though. It’s just a symptom of the disturbing world-view that the iPad embodies - that some people have use for creative tools, and other people “don’t need them”. This world-view had a strong hold over western civilization throughout most of the 20th century. The broadcast model of television, or the mass-production of identical suburban homes assumed the utility of a single-producer, many-consumer model. It is a deeply heartening aspect of computers that they resist this production model. Unlike a television, every computer is naturally just as much a producer as it is a consumer. And as the computer has continued to invade the niches originally occupied by broadcast technologies - newspaper, books, radio, and television - it is eroding the capacity of the strong to influence and control the weak.
These changes couldn’t come at a better time - the world is in an extremely perilous state, and it will require the active participation of every person alive to forge a path towards a future where our grandchildren aren’t elbow-deep in the ecological interest of the decisions made by their grandparents. This will be a hard time. It’s all hands on deck for this one.
And it is in the context - given the tremendous capacity for computing machinery to enable creativity and the tremendous need for creativity at this time in our civilization, that Apple has released that has been specifically engineered to prevent creativity. No - they’ve done something worse. They took a machine which is, by default, predisposed to enabling creativity, and actually applied the efforts of smart people to removing this ability. They have made a thing that clearly belies a world-view that some of us are creative, but most of us are not, and a media-consumption devices is all that those people will ever need.
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This philosophy is doomed and flawed for a much more practical reason than “people need to be creative”. Let’s accept for a minute that most people are non-creative consumers, and they will replace their computers with iPads and never produce anything in their life more creative than a MySpace photo taken at a sharp downward angle for their MySpace page. The iPad costs between $500 and $850, so these painfully uncreative people are apparently somehow making money. At something painfully uncreative. But the sorts of jobs that require absolutely no creativity are the sorts of jobs that are extremely easy to automate and replace with machines. “So what are we expected to do with all these people, who are sifted of their value, and then fired from their jobs?” I asked a friend. “Eat them,” he replied. So there you go. If you buy an Apple iPad, you will eventually be eaten.
