Apple ’ s walled garden, as opposed to Facebook ’ s, is utopian in tone, a paradigmatic community unto its own: autoexceptional. Jobs spoke of Apple as “ an Idea, ” wholly unlike the consumer electronics and software companies for which his contempt was always easily forthcoming. The Apple Cloud Polis also rests, then, on the enclave aesthetics of that concept and how it extends into particular choices about the company ’ s relationship to the governance of terra firma. The reader is perhaps familiar with the tale of Jobs ’ s Mercedes SL55, which he leased every few months so that he would never have to affix license plates. Having to do so would have required him to publicly acknowledge, in this small way, that he was personally subject to the general jurisdiction of the state of California and to its administrative control over roads and drivers. This conflation of an ethic of exceptional design work with political exception and exemption is inherent in the Apple model for Cloud Polis and gives wind to the effervescent patriotism among its Users. The ecstasy of revelatory launch events, the hermeneutic interest in the company ’ s history and future product road maps, not to mention hagiographic reverence for founding figures, all mutually strengthen real and imagined bonds between the Apple public and the brand.
As the delamination and re-interweaving of Clouds and contemporary states point toward one possible future of proliferating and overlapping enclaves and exclaves, the Apple totality is a model for an elite sovereign format, walled off from the relative chaos of outside publics. As ever, utopias are closed systems — islands — but where “ Apple ” is finally located is not so clear. Whereas Disney ’ s original plan for EPCOT Center was a utopian community, a real Disney city realized with diminished ambition as Celebration, Florida, the town of Apple, North Carolina, is the home of one of the company ’ s most important data centers, but it is a very unlikely site for residential relocation. Apple ’ s comprehensive attention to the interiority of product experience is well suited to a future featuring nation-sized gated communities wherever they may encircle themselves. For this, the exceptional enclave and the camp work both ways. The dystopian megastructures on which experiential seamlessness depends, like Foxconn ’ s factory cities where Apple objects are assembled, are the necessary mirrored doubles of the Apple polis itself, each cocooned in opposing bubbles yet each interior to the other. While some are drawn into live-work-sleep factory cities, where even suicide is not allowed, others are tucked like happy frequent flyers into a benevolent, tastefully designed compound in the sky (more on this pairing in the City chapter). While the Apple model for Cloud Polis represents a real triumph of expert industrial and interaction design at the level of technological geopolitics, these can ’ t be separated from the cloud enclaves against which they lean.
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Cloud Layer