The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 128 页

1. Apple

Apple has assumed a mantle from Disney for preeminence in mass-scale, closed-loop experience design. ⁵⁶ By comparison with the extractive micromanagement style of Facebook, Apple ’ s closed world is ruled with luxury carrots more than with behaviorist sticks. Inside, its public expects total design into which (or onto which) Users can invest individual desires for creative self-idealization. Apple ’ s origin story is now as deeply ingrained in the American myth of the prodigal hero-entrepreneur as that of Peter Parker bitten by a radioactive spider. While the company ’ s roots extend back into mid-1970s Northern California hippie hacker culture, in important ways the Apple weltanschauung was not crystallized until the airing of Lee Clow and Ridley Scott ’ s Superbowl TV ad in and of the year 1984. ⁵⁷ Here the driving theologic dichotomy of the brand is established, cleaving the line between Apple (individual, color, youth, cool, iconoclast) and IBM (mass, monochrome, old, awkward, hierarchical), a creed equally appealing to 1960s counterculture and its boomer aftermath, as it is to the John Wayne wing of the American Right. An LSD-eating Buddhist and his gentle programmer pal set in motion what would become Rush Limbaugh ’ s favorite company. ⁵⁸ The story of the company and its brand have provided privileged archetypes to postindustrial capitalism: a populist concept, rejection by the old guard, a near-death experience, the return of the True Idea, blockbuster appliances, an actual death and hagiographic reverence, the passing of the doctrine, and so on.

Apple has also done more than any other company to make the rhetorics (and sometimes reality) of design into a central problematic for digital culture, far beyond the relentless cognitive utilitarianism of a traditional human-computer interaction (HCI) seeking to annihilate all ambiguity. The company turned computation into a mass medium of self-articulation: a main ingredient for any socially and economically sustainable Cloud Polis. Beyond the Cloud (or computing even), Apple also exemplified the power of brand as a core competency for publicly traded companies. It turned brand into content, encouraging customers to speculate on the brand experience in the third person, not only as something they themselves experience but such that their performative discussions about the brand experience are a core aspect of the experience. For Apple, this is founded on the idea that Apple uniquely “ gets it, ” and if you get Apple, then you are perceptive enough to get it, too. This conspiracy of the illuminated first drew its fundamental distinction against corporate cybernetics in that 1984 ad, and then against Microsoft and the (supposedly) crass, artless boredom of corporate IT departments and the malignant malevolence of Bill Gates. But today the terms of Apple ’ s Manichean doctrine are less clear and less confident. Apple ’ s light is now cast in contrast with what darkness? Is it Apple versus Google or Samsung, or what? The space is too fragmented; others are doing newer, more colorful and imaginative things. The software experience is now best recommended for its seamlessness, tastefulness, and predictability. These are hardly the watchwords of revolution. To paraphrase and invert the referent of the 1984 ad, the Apple model for Cloud Polis may be a walled “ garden of pure ideology, ” but it is backed up by inscrutable attention to physical detail in the design and manufacture of its hardware lines that allow its User to touch a tactile cloud.

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Cloud Layer