On Sunday, January 22, 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders defeated the Washington (then) Redskins 38-9 in Super Bowl XVIII. What we all remember better from that evening 40 years ago, except for a few aging Raiders fans, was an ad that set the tone for the techno-optimism that would dominate the 21st century.
The ad showed an auditorium filled with zombie-like figures watching a projection of an elderly leader resembling the Emperor from the 1980s film The Empire Strikes Back. A young, athletic woman in red and white (the colors of the flag of Poland, which participated in a massive workers’ uprising against the Soviet-controlled communist state), twirles her hammer and throws it at the screen framing the leader’s face. While armored police tried to stop him.
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The ad was clearly a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Meanwhile, then-president Ronald Reagan was launching a reelection campaign based on the courage to confront 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 the computing technologies in our lives and drive many of the ideological changes driving the 21st century. In many ways, the long 21st century began 40 years ago this week.
Along with Apple’s haphazard rise from a garage-based startup in Cupertino, California, to what is now the most valuable company in world history, it has also changed culture and the way we experience each other. While it wasn’t the only power to do this, if you look at the other dominant forces that made their mark in 1984 (like Reagan), Apple was part of a major shift in how we would view and govern ourselves over the next 40 years. This phenomenon, which has been around for years, affects daily life to a degree that few people could have imagined at the time.
Prior to the introduction of the Macintosh, Apple was popular among computer enthusiasts for producing high-quality and innovative desktop computers, such as the Apple II (1979), that ran programs that used the standard operating system of the time, the Apple Disk Operating System (similar to the Apple Disk Operating System). It was quite respectable. MS-DOS came from a small startup company called Microsoft at the time) and could be programmed in languages such as Basic.
Although companies such as Texas Instruments and Atari had brought user-friendly computers into homes 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 usable computers that looked more magical than machines. By hiding boards and cables and offering a stylishly designed box, the Macintosh set the design standards for what would become a closed box like the MacBook or the iPhone, the most effective and profitable of all Apple products released in 2007.
The iPhone represents much of what is attractive and repulsive about life in the 21st century. It is a device that does nothing that other devices and technologies cannot do. It delivers all this in a controlled, private environment that masks all real technology and the human agency that created it. There may also be little elves inside.
Billions of people currently use such a device, but almost no one looks inside or thinks about the people removing metal or assembling parts in dangerous conditions. We now have cars and devices designed to feel like an iPhone; all glass, metal, swirls and symbols. None of them offer any clue that humans built or maintained them. Everything seems like magic.
This shift to magic by design has blinded us to the real conditions of most people who work and live in the world. A gated device is similar to a gated community. Beyond that, the sealed boxes function as a global surveillance system that Soviet dictators could never have imagined, as they contain ubiquitous cameras and location devices and are connected via invisible radio signals. We also bought into a world of soft control beyond Orwell’s imagination.
Gated communities began to gain popularity in the United States during the Reagan era because they offered the illusion of security against an invading enemy that was imagined but never identified. They also resembled a private state with exclusive membership and strict etiquette.
Reagan won reelection overwhelmingly in November 1984. His victory ensured an almost unwavering commitment to market fundamentalism and technological optimism; Even his critics and successors such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama largely embraced it. Beyond the United States, ostensibly leftist 20th-century leaders such as Greece’s Andreas Papandreou, France’s François Mitterrand, and the United Kingdom’s Tony Blair limited their visions of change to the extent permitted by the growing neoliberal consensus.
In the early part of this century, questioning faith in the techno-optimism imposed by Apple or the neoliberalism enabled by Reagan’s dominance of the world’s political imagination might seem like a fit of petulance or petulance. Who could question the democratizing and liberating potential of computer technology or the free market?
By a quarter of this century, it was clear that the only promises kept were promises made to Apple’s shareholders and Reagan’s political progeny. Democracy is being shaken all over the world. Networked computers are draining the pleasure and humanity from relationships, communities, and societies. Economies are more stratified than ever before. Politics has been stripped of any positive vision of a better future.
Of course, we can’t blame Apple or Reagan. They have simply distilled and sold back to us what we desire: a simple story of inevitable progress and liberation. If we had heeded the warnings of Orwell’s book instead of Apple’s advertisement, we might have learned that simple stories never have happy endings.