On Sunday, January 22, 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders defeated the Washington (then) Redskins 38-9 in Super Bowl XVIII. With the exception of a few older Raiders fans, we all remember better that night forty years ago, an ad that set the tone for a techno-optimism that would dominate the 21st century.
The ad showed a room full of zombie-like figures looking at a projection of an elderly leader who resembled the Emperor from 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. A young, athletic woman in red and white (the colors of the flag of Poland, which was involved in a massive workers’ uprising against the Soviet Union-controlled communist state) spins a hammer and throws it through the screen framing the leader’s face, just as armored police rush in to stop her.
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The ad explicitly invoked George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan, then president, launched a re-election campaign based on his boldness in facing the totalitarian Soviet threat while increasing the risk of global nuclear annihilation.
That month, Apple began selling a personal computer that would change the way we think about computer technologies in our lives and channel many of the ideological changes that set the 21st century in motion. In many ways, the long 21st century began forty years ago this week.
Apple has not only grown in fits and starts from a garage startup in Cupertino, California, to what is now the most valuable company in the history of the world, but it has also changed the way we experience culture and each other. While it’s not the only force doing this, if you look at the other dominant forces that made their mark in 1984 – like Reagan – Apple was part of a huge shift in the way we would see ourselves and control. and still influences daily life to a degree that few could have imagined at the time.
Before the debut of the Macintosh, Apple was highly regarded among computer hobbyists for producing high-quality and innovative desktop computers such as the Apple II (1979) that could run programs using a standard operating system of the time, Apple Disc Operating System (which resembled MS-DOS from a then fledgling company called Microsoft) and could be programmed in languages such as Basic.
Although companies like Texas Instruments and Atari had introduced user-friendly home computers before the Macintosh, and IBM and Commodore had produced desktop computers for businesses, the Macintosh promised something different.
The Macintosh created a mass market for useful computers that seemed to be more magic than a machine. By hiding the boards and cables and presenting a sleekly designed box, the Macintosh set the design standards for what would become a closed box like the MacBook or – the most influential and profitable of all Apple’s products – the iPhone, launched in 2007.
The iPhone represents so much of what is appealing and repulsive about life in the 21st century. It is a device that does nothing that other devices and technologies cannot do. It simply offers them all in a controlled, proprietary environment that masks all of the actual technology and the human intervention that created it. There might as well be little elves in there.
Billions of people now use such a device, but almost no one peeks inside or thinks about the people who mined the metal or assembled the parts in dangerous conditions. We now have cars and devices designed to feel like an iPhone: all glass, metal, curves and icons. None of them offer any indication that humans built or maintained them. Everything seems like magic.
This movement towards magic through design has blinded us to the real conditions in which most people in the world work and live. A gated device is similar to a gated community. Furthermore, once the sealed boxes contained ubiquitous cameras and location equipment and were connected via invisible radio signals, they functioned as a global surveillance system that Soviet dictatorships could never have dreamed of. We have also entered a world of soft control beyond Orwell’s imagination.
Gated communities began their rise in popularity in the US during the Reagan era, when they provided the illusion of security against an imagined, but never defined, invading enemy. They also resembled a private state, one with exclusive membership and strict rules of decorum.
Reagan won a landslide re-election in November 1984. His triumph created an almost unwavering commitment to market fundamentalism and technological optimism, which even his critics and successors such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama largely adopted. Outside the US, ostensibly left-wing leaders of the 20th century, such as Greece’s Andreas Papandreou, France’s François Mitterrand, and Britain’s Tony Blair, limited their vision of change to what the growing neoliberal consensus would allow.
At the turn of this century, questioning faith in Apple-imposed techno-optimism or the neoliberalism assured by Reagan’s dominance over the world’s political imagination would seem like a fit of grumpiness or grumpiness. Who could question the democratizing and liberating potential of computer technology or free markets?
Well, a quarter of the way through this century, it’s clear that the only promises kept were to Apple shareholders and Reagan’s political progeny. Democracy is in tatters all over the world. Networked computers suck the fun and humanity out of relationships, communities and societies. Economies are more stratified than ever. Politics is stripped of any positive vision of a better future.
Of course, we can’t blame Apple or Reagan. They merely distilled and harnessed – and sold back to us – what we longed for: a simple story of inevitable progress and liberation. If we had heeded the warnings in Orwell’s book instead of Apple’s advertising, we might have learned that simple stories never have happy endings.